The Agonies of the Gauchiste
Inspired by a piece my friend wrote.
My thoughts in this post are largely based on the remarks of my good friend and colleague, Jacob Yusufov, who wrote a great perspective on this topic. Jacob writes about the gauchiste, a French word essentially translating to “leftist,” but is probably best characterized in conservative thought by Roger Scruton in his book, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left. Scruton writes:
“The anti-bourgeois sentiment that lies at the root of French left-wing thinking partly explains its rejection of all roles and functions that are not creations of its own. Its main power base has not been the university but the café: for to occupy positions of influence within the ‘structures’ of the bourgeois state was for a long time incompatible with the demands of revolutionary rectitude. Whatever influence the gauchiste enjoys must be acquired through his own intellectual labour, producing words and images that challenge the status quo. The café becomes the symbol of his social position. He observes the passing show, but does not join it. Instead he waits for those who, attracted by his gaze, separate themselves from the crowd and ‘come over’ to his position.”
Though, as Jacob notes in his piece, the Stuyvesant apartment dwelling college student of New York City could never properly live up to the gauchiste by Scruton’s definition. No longer is he a mere observer of the “passing show,” but rather an active participant. And despite the continuing prevalence of yuppie-dominated cafes that serve $7 cups of coffee, still bastions for New York City’s various left-wing cultural scenes (or coffee-shop philosophers, as Russell Kirk would call it), his main powerbase nowadays is indeed the university.
But the many agonies of the gauchiste may be evident not just in New York City itself, but rather the nation’s urban coastal elitism being projected everywhere else. I have found almost every Northeastern liberal’s preconceptions about the South or Midwest to be dead wrong. The vast majority of those who, for example, compare Texas to “Gilead”—the dystopian ultra-Christian theocracy that succeeds the United States in the hit series The Handmaid’s Tale—don’t seem to live in Texas or the South. They dismiss the opinions of the citizens of Texas on the issue of abortion and instead choose to regard Southerners, particularly conservative Southerners, as nothing more than misogynistic, tone-deaf charlatans hell-bent on chaining women to the kitchen stove or relegating them to mere ‘baby factories.’
Having lived in New Jersey almost all my life, becoming a Texas resident has changed my perspective more than I initially anticipated. The vast green pastures between cities, the diverse array of cultures, and more train tracks than I’ve ever seen in my entire life aren’t just novel sight-seeing experiences, they are symbols.
They are symbols of an American Heartland all too often misunderstood, neglected, and snubbed; of a culture wildly different from the one shared by East and West Coast Americans who have committed themselves to the pursuit of the wild utopian schemes originally laid out in the age-old social theories of the left, so much so that the egregious notion of the necessity of black-only schools, per the edicts of anti-racist gurus, aren’t far from mainstream.
The American gauchiste is a coastal creature at its core, the embodiment of coastal elitism. Many Southerners kneel before the altar of Jesus Christ, but the gauchiste kneels only to ideology. In this strange world, the formulation of whole societies is thought to be achieved through the manifestos the gauchiste writes. But with Kirk and his Politics of Prudence, we know the books don’t create societies, it’s the other way around.
As such, the middle of the country moves far slower than the coasts do. It isn’t perfect, but in times of civilizational decadence, it's nice to see that prudence isn’t considered an outdated virtue everywhere.