It’s one thing to oppose “David French-ism” as an unfitting style for the challenges of the day. The National Review writer admittedly doesn’t rely on Trump-style character attacks or revel in some Freudian fantasy of a second civil war as a means of “defeating the enemy” and “enjoying the spoils” of a cultural conflagration.
It’s entirely another to impugn French’s motives, and somehow imply that French, an evangelical social conservative who’s spent decades fighting for religious liberty in the courtroom, is unfit to don the mantle of cultural conservative critic.
That seems to be what First Things editor Matthew Schmitz was doing on Twitter on Sunday morning.
In the same post French actually refers to Game of Thrones (“the Valyrian steel that stops the cultural white walker is pluralism buttressed by classical liberalism”—whatever that means).
— Matthew Schmitz (@matthewschmitz) June 2, 2019
It seems to me that the evangelicals who voted for Trump can offer a stronger defense for their compromise with vulgarity and obscenity than French can for his public celebration of a show that once would have been banned as pornographic.
— Matthew Schmitz (@matthewschmitz) June 2, 2019
Schmitz, unfortunately, deleted a gem of a tweet in this thread.
I Googled the wording in his tweet and apparently the website he was citing was some celebrity nude website called “Mr. Skin” so anyway happy Sunday everyonehttps://t.co/HRsufJ7A3Y pic.twitter.com/ACa37cLPSp
— Jerry Dunleavy (@JerryDunleavy) June 2, 2019
Schmitz’s Sunday morning performance is absurd for a few reasons.
First, a television series that features nudity as a part of its content is not morally equivalent to a magazine which luxuriates in nudity as its core product. The nudity on “Game of Thrones” is gratuitous, sure, but people weren’t throwing “GoT” watch parties to get off, but for the story. But contrary to the well-worn trope, teenage boys weren’t sneaking Playboy in order to read the articles.
But the premise behind even this flawed argument is that French, by engaging in the popular culture, somehow is surrendering in the culture war.
In its final season, “Game of Thrones” came second to just “The Big Bang Theory” and the short-lived revival of “Roseanne” in aggregate viewership. Its comprehensive world-building helped it transcend the usual status of cultural juggernaut into total American ubiquity. Whereas everything from football to late-night comedy fell prey to politically correct wokescolds, “Game of Thrones” maintained its water cooler status. It became a piece of fiction that united Americans of all stripes to lay down arms and simply discuss whether the albino dragon queen should’ve beat the Christ-like prince.
I highly doubt that French, a graduate of Harvard Law School, defaults to “Game of Thrones” as a cultural metaphor for political war because he hasn’t read enough Burke or Cicero or Sun Tzu or Aquinas. Instead, perhaps, using a widely enjoyed television franchise as a cultural linchpin is an intentional strategy of combating political wars with culture itself. After all, President Trump didn’t develop his base with a year of rallies in Iowa and Wisconsin. He did so on hundreds of covers of the New York Post and years on reality shows.
There’s a case to be made that the conservative movement needs more iron fists and fewer velvet gloves in our long-term strategy. We spent eight years of the GOP promising to repeal and replace Obamacare, only to squander two of them with nothing but a line-item removal of the individual mandate. But in the trenches of the fight itself, we won’t win without our fiercest intellectuals embracing and addressing popular culture head-on. Does Schmitz truly believe that French would win over more hearts and minds by adopting the role of the mayor in “Footloose”?
