'The Cool Kid's Philosopher'
It’s easy to laugh, as some of us do, at the phrase “conservative intellectual.” When the most prominent public spokesmen for the right’s ideas include Milo Yiannopoulos, Charles Murray, and Dinesh D’Souza, one might conclude that the movement does not have anything serious to offer beyond “Feminism is cancer,” “Black people are dumb,” and “Democrats are Nazis.” (Those are, as I understand it, the central intellectual contributions of Yiannopoulos, Murray, and D’Souza, respectively.)
But according to the New York Times, it would be a mistake to write off Conservative Thought so hastily. For we would be overlooking one crucial figure: Ben Shapiro. Shapiro, we are told, is “the cool kid’s philosopher, dissecting arguments with a lawyer’s skill and references to Aristotle.” The Times quotes praise of Shapiro as a “brilliant polemicist” and “principled gladiator,” a quick-witted man who “reads books,” and “takes apart arguments in ways that make the conservative conclusion seem utterly logical.” Shapiro is the “destroyer of weak arguments,” he “has been called the voice of the conservative millennial movement.” He is a genuine intellectual, a man who “does not attack unfairly, stoke anger for the sake of it, or mischaracterize his opponents’ positions.” He is principled: he deplores Trump, and cares about Truth. Shapiro’s personal mantra, “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” captures his approach: he’s passionate, but he believes in following reason rather than emotion. Shapiro, then, represents the best in contemporary conservative thinking. And if the cool kids have a philosopher, it is worth examining his philosophy in some depth.
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What dispirited me about Shapiro’s approach is that he’s clearly not actually very interested in Facts at all. The role that race plays in American life is a serious sociological question, one that isn’t answered easily. But Shapiro plucks only the statistics that suggest race doesn’t matter, and pretends the statistics that suggest it does matter don’t exist. Nobody can trust him, because if he comes across a finding showing that incarceration rates more closely follow crime rates than racial demographics, you can bet it will appear in his next speech. But if someone shows that a white man with a criminal record is far more likely to receive a job callback than a black man without a criminal record, you’ll never hear it mentioned. It would be perfectly reasonable for Shapiro to critique these findings; sociologists critique each other all the time. Instead, he selects only the parts of reality that please him. Just look at his reply when he was asked about the black-white wealth gap: “It has nothing to do with race and everything to do with culture.” That’s a strange thing to say, because the wealth gap has existed continuously since the time of slavery: average black net worth has always been lower than white net worth, and there were massive structural obstacles to the black accumulation of wealth well into the 20th century, as we can see in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ writings on the lasting impact of housing policy. Family wealth is passed down intergenerationally, and so it’s hard to conclude that the fact that the average white family has $13 of wealth for every $1 of wealth held by a black family is the sole result of spontaneous contemporary black cultural choices, with no historical component whatsoever. The impact of human decisions on outcomes, and the factors that shape the available range of choices, are difficult topics in social science with no easy answers. But one thing we do know is that, since black people were enslaved for 246 years (and free for 152), and Jim Crow was in operation during the time of people who are still alive (thereby being a core determinant of both their life outcomes and the capital that they were able to pass onto their own children), anyone who says “culture is everything” and “race is irrelevant” is not actually seriously interested in trying to figure out how the world works.
