Popularity

I've never really had a constructive relationship with Popularity--I've always given it sidelong glances, and I've occasionally treated it with undisguised contempt. Maybe that makes me maladjusted, but I prefer to tell myself that there's often a disconnect between what people like and what they need. Sometimes people need to be told how awful they are. And then sometimes they like being told exactly that (can you think of another reason why Al Gore's film was so popular?). But this doesn't mean that popularity amounts to need or vice versa.

Sometimes the winds of popularity shift dramatically. It shouldn't be surprising, but it almost always is. Leaders find themselves walking at the head of a rag tag band of hangers-on where once a large crowd had frolicked happily. When the astonishment wears off, it often leaves self-doubt.

There are a few who think it's actually quite interesting to be saying unpopular things--at least there's the consolation of knowing that one is correct, that those who need to hear what one is saying will somehow hear it... But that's really quite an odd way to go about preserving what is good in the world. Incidentally, that's exactly how Albert Jay Nock thought--and he was odd in his own ways. His ideal type is expressed in this 1936 essay: Isaiah's Job.

(As an aside, Nock's reflections on the prophet's role of speaking to the "Remnant" while being completely ignorant of who they are strikes me as remarkably similar to what blogging is in practice.)

Nock's apparent contentment with failure is insupportable, but there's a less fatalistic lesson to learn from the whims of popularity: what is needed and what is popular are sometimes the same. From a conservative point of view, that is a good way to describe the Reagan Revolution. It's not as simple as that, exactly, but it's close. Reagan and co. had to make their arguments over and over and over again, but the people to whom they spoke also had to be willing to be persuaded.

Now, I'd like to apply this to the Republican Party just now. It could produce a hundred really good candidates tomorrow, complete with a steadfast commitment to conservative principles, but it would not guarantee either popularity or victory. Goldberg says essentially the same thing today (We Need a Hero), but I think he doesn't make adequate space for the peculiar and hard-to-predict movement of a people's willingness to be persuaded.

Nevertheless, his and my takeaway is the same: sometimes it's just not your day. It doesn't mean you're wrong or that America is doomed. It means that you're going to have to wait until the fickle properties of popularity shift favorably. It doesn't mean waiting idly for an election landslide to fall in your lap, but neither does it mean an existential crisis.

So my recommendation for Conservatives is the old stiff-upper-lip. Popularity or the lack thereof is no cause for confidence in the rightness of a cause, but in a democratic republic like ours, some measure of popularity is a necessary precondition for the power to move the cause forward. Until such time as popularity swings again, just do the best you can with what you've got. And don't go running headlong after Popularity. It is a fickle beast and nearly impossible to predict. Those who follow it (rather than waiting for it) wind up looking silly.

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