I don't know what conservatism is, but if you hum a few bars I can fake it...

Wednesday, cigarette #2

The idea that there’s a difference between making a contract with the community (which is what Jonathan Rauch thinks marriage is) and entering into a tradition (which is what Eve Tushnet thinks marriage is) has been making the rounds in the Yale Compulsive Philosophical Discussion Support Group, and this quote from Marijane Meaker's memoir of her lesbian relationship with Patricia Highsmith came up:

That kind of conversation would launch one of my diatribes about how different we were from any other minority group. Unlike blacks, Jews, and other who faced discrimination, we grew up without a peer group. We had no support from our families, either. The church saw us as sinners and the law saw us as illegal.

A lesbian growing up in the homosexual isolation of the 1950's had to relate to her sexuality through books and movies rather than people. Before arriving in New York where lesbian bars actually existed (Meaker's book depicts the 1950's New York scene in detail) Meaker's only contact with lesbianism was through a tradition, not a community.*

The same narrative is true of kids who grew up in North Carolina or Cleveland dreaming of the Ivy League, except that when these precocious rednecks finally replace the imagined tradition of intellectual New England with a flesh-and-blue-blood community of New England intellectuals they experience a disconnect between the two and, more often than not, disappointment.

James Poulos pointed out that Romney's narrative as a conservative is that of a convert, not a dyed-in-the-wool believer, and that's a good thing. It gives him a different relationship to the movement than the Republicans "whose conservatism developed within the sadly lazy, self-congratulatory, decadent, and brittle yet bloated environment of mid-'90s Washington" have, but also different from the relationship one would expect someone who had been an undergraduate member of the Party of the Right to have.

The question of whether someone relates to conservatism (or lesbianism or intellectualism) first as a tradition or first as a community seems like a pretty helpful way to categorize their narrative. The differences between Young Republicans and ex-liberals might make a good study, or the differences between people who came to Ivy League schools from public schools in the middle of nowhere versus those who went to Roxbury Latin. (Hey, don't look at me; I'm not the anthropologist in this house.) I tend to prefer people who had to go out and discover a community based on their beloved tradition — a man who grows up right-wing is like the fish who's the last one to realize he's in water.

*Is this why gay men, according to world-renowned fruit fly Camille Paglia, fixate on cultural trivia?