Reactionary Aesthete
Reactionary Aesthete
A Portrait of a Conservative as an Artist
On October 14, Helen Andrews announced she had been let go as senior editor at The American Conservative, where she had worked since 2020. There was little fuss. Andrews’s tweets suggest the decision had been made above her the previous week, and that the managing editor was taking “the magazine in a different direction.”
To fill the vacuum of explanation, conservatism watchers speculated Andrews’s review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message in Compact, published four days earlier had gotten her fired. I’m not sure the timeline works out. Perhaps it contributed; who knows?
The review had been controversial. The haymaker at its center had been her assessment that Coates’s true animus against Israel had been racial embarrassment.
There you have it. The problem with Israel is that it shames him. How can it be that the Jews carved their Israel out of the desert, and yet no place in Africa, least of all Liberia, remotely resembles Wakanda?
If the review is not the proximate cause of Andrews leaving The American Conservative, it’s nonetheless unfortunate timing, giving the implication she had a sort of John Derbyshire moment. But I do think something like this was coming. Andrews has written noticeably about race before, and increasingly often. I was not surprised at all, for instance, to see Compact had given her Coates’s book. A big part of her beat seems to be puncturing liberal – and left-wing – narratives about decolonization and racial integration in a way that seems unhealthily fixated.
Andrews is a terrific writer. She’s direct and dramatic, and not usually melodramatic. Her style and her judgements are decisive, and her prose reflects her particular conservatism. Her politics are likewise decisive, dramatic, and stylish: she revels in a severe social and fiscal conservatism underpinned by a worldview that claims to be hard-headed and realistic. She is, though, at least as much performative and theatrically constructed. There’s aestheticism to her reactionary politics. Isn’t there always with intellectual types?
In 2010, aged 24, Andrews wrote an essay about her time in Yale’s Party of the Right for a collection of essays by young conservatives. Among the many contributions complaining about feeling outside the liberal mainstream, Andrews posits conservatism as dark academia. She made, I think, one of the more charming conscious cases for traditionalism I have seen, and she did it without exhortation or homiletics. She showed a community, and she described the feeling of loving and living in a tradition. In this case, smoking (as well as Catholicism and conservatism). She showed the contradictions of the right in the affectations of her peers. She intended – and perhaps succeeded in – making her affected outsider politics seem attractive.
Smoking bans bothered us because they gave the modern cult of health the force of law, which was more than we thought it deserved. The little joys of cigarette smoking—a moment of late-night camaraderie, an excuse to talk to an attractive stranger, just the right prop for an emphatic gesture, or simply a moment of relaxation at the end of a long day—these were all more important to us than health. There was something unappealingly technocratic about the state’s attempt to boil the argument down to heart-disease rates. Unlike the libertarians, we thought smokers should have to make a convincing case that the benefits of smoking in bars outweigh the costs. Unlike the Left, we thought unquantifiables like the way good bourbon mixes with a Marlboro should count.
A reactionary Secret History. There would be “no cowardly, classless, un-seductive, or painfully earnest behavior unbecoming a smoker” for them. “You’re smoking a cigarette, so act like it.”
It’s a fun, ironic introduction to the sensualist approach to traditionalism. We see it in Andrews’s politics: “my own traditionalism felt less like resignation and more like falling in love. And her faith: “when confronted by the totality of a beautiful institution, I fell hard.” Andrews is, of course, in the venerable and very Catholic tradition that, like Hans Urs von Balthasar, joins beauty and truth.
It’s probably not fair to rely on an essay written by someone in their mid-twenties to explain them fourteen years later. Although, I think, our politics are probably more formed by the end of college than not. And there are clear through-lines in Andrews’s thinking.
In her review of Yuval Levin’s, The Great Debate on Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, she accuses both the left and reformicon neoconservatism of emotionalism. This would be a run-of-the-mill argument for a conservative to make. Except that Andrews has an avowedly emotional approach to politics (“my own traditionalism felt less like resignation and more like falling in love”). She wants her conservatism to be dramatic. She complains Levin’s version of Burke “does not get the blood moving.” What appeals in Andrews’s vision of Burke is not gradualism or prudence, but the sublime as the basis of society’s institutions (and his put-down of meddling liberal do-gooders, a theme Andrews takes up again and again in her own writing).
You can’t help but feel Andrews would prefer Maistre to Burke, some of the time. At one point in her life, she wrote of Maistre, “I find myself wishing that he could find a place next to Burke in the conservative canon.”
Early in her career, Andrews maintained a voluminous blog. The mosaic of quotes, references and imagery partly account for Andrews’s vivid prose. It also reveals her persistent curative approach to politics. Obviously, performativity is inherent to blogging itself, but mediums attract people for a reason.
No doubt Andrews would argue her political judgements are based on empirical evidence and reasoned assessment. But her analytic frame is clearly shaped by aesthetic choice. “Devotion to style” is something of “deep moral importance,” she wrote in her smoking essay. Her review of Coates’s book mocked him for his inability to land a good writerly anecdote. Andrews’s wrap on liberals (and moderate conservatives) I think is inescapably that they have unstylish, unpleasing views. They are literally gauche. Her politics gain intensity from the way her shocking conclusions jag across the page. The dramatic element of Andrews’s thought creates to a tendency toward self-dramatization, which in turn becomes a desire for suicidally frank contrarianism.
So we come back to race. Andrews is particularly drawn to post-colonial states in which a Black majority gains political power over a white minority. Her narrative is typically: the white supremacist regime was doing the best it could under the circumstances; the Black majority was ill-equipped to sustain the hard-wrought economic, cultural, and political institutions to which it came into possession; things are worse for everyone under the new dispensation. See Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the Reconstruction-era South. Her commitment to the narrative leads her, at least in some cases, to uncritically accept discredited scholarship.
Andrews certainly believes the history of colonialism and slavery is a political cudgel crafted to beat white people into “silence and self-abnegation.” As she writes in an essay about South Africa in the Claremont Review of Books:
It should be obvious to everyone by now that this lack of moral standing is what Black Lives Matter and the 1619 Project have in mind for white Americans. They want to take the same moral certainty with which we condemn Jim Crow and extend it to everything white Americans have ever done until, like white South Africans, we feel grateful just to have our continuing presence tolerated.
The most charitable interpretation of this is that Andrews wants to pierce liberal myths; that a more realistic understanding of historical dynamics is needed to confront persistent social challenges; and that it was cultural factors (overwhelming persistence of clan structure; weddedness to subsistence farming norms; lack of literacy or education) that led to the cultural conditions she points to in order to explain these events. In her defense, she presents the devout institutionalist Toussaint Louverture as a model revolutionary.
In a friendly profile of race-realist Steve Sailer, Andrews concludes a franker conversation about race is necessary to confront the left’s distortion of reality and wielding of racial narratives for political gain.
Then, when reviewing An Army Afire, Beth Bailey’s history of the integration of the US Army, Andrews consistently downplayed white racism and emphasized the crimes of Black servicemen. “One report found 2,984 crimes of violence by black soldiers during a period when white soldiers committed 740.” Is this evidence of institutional racism? No. “Bailey does not consider the possibility that this reflected reality rather than prejudice,” Andrews writes.
The Army’s post-integration history hasn’t been written before, she alleges, because it embarrasses a liberal myth. Now the left is gaining military-like “power over ordinary Americans” in order to stamp out racial tension, Andrews claims. So she inverts Bailey’s work for her own conclusion. “Alas, as the history in Army Afire shows, they may end up with all of the control they hope for but not the success.” Having already exonerated the Army of institutional racism, she focuses blame on the Black sailors rioting aboard the USS Kitty Hawk and the “black soldiers who made German bases such a hell.”
Andrews’s frequent recitation of Black crime and educational statistics in the United States (without offering cultural or structural explanations), her refusal to grant credence to historical oppression as drivers of post-colonial suffering, her hawkishness on immigration, and promotion of Sailer suggests she may have another explanation in mind. “I suffer from an urge to be extremely clear,” Andrews quotes Sailer. Despite her own fascination, on race Andrews’ usually clear prose becomes evasive, even guarded on certain points.
I had thought her interest in post-colonial regimes was new; maybe the working for a new book project. But Andrews first wrote about Zimbabwe in 2017. She had books about Rhodesia on her Amazon Wishlist for readers to purchase her in 2010. In 2012, she described her “recurring nightmare” of “one badly worded argument taken out of context” leading her boss to ask “why there’s a Huffington Post headline that says “‘Racist Editor Thinks Apartheid Was Awesome!’” It’s a part of the worldview she curated for herself.
I wonder what Helen Andrews, reactionary aesthete, will do next.
At some point she became Orthodox, by the way.