I want to point y’all to two notes that struck a chord with Your Humble Blogger recently, one of them having been linked to by John Scalzi and the other by Jonathan Bernstein. John Scalzi points (disparagingly) to The Problem of Engagement, by Toni Weisskopf, wherein Ms. Weisskopf ponders the question of how long the inevitable triumphs of fuggheads within fandom can be delayed. The fuggheads being, as far as I can tell, the politically correct, self-appointed guardians of … everything, apparently who cast slurs at Heinlein-readers. Well, OK. I’m not particularly interested in mocking (or even criticizing) Ms. Weisskopf’s essay, but it is worth reading as an example of that kind of thought—and in fact a well-written example devoid of the kind of racism and sexism that one would expect in any essay wherein the term politically correct is used. So there’s that.
But I bring it up because of Noah Berlatsky’s note Conservatism Is a Fandom over at a site called Splice Today. In it, Mr. Berlatsky (who is evidently a comix/movie/etc reviewer rather than a political pundit) suggests that, well, that Conservatism acts more like a fandom than a political party. He is responding to a Paul Waldman note (which Your Humble Blogger briefly mentioned here on this Tohu Bohu) about what Mr. Waldman calls talismans of conservatism. Which was itself inspired by Mitch McConnell coming onto the dais at the Conservative Political Action Committee waving a musket. Or a rifle, I dunno. Some sort of gun-looking thing. Anyway, Mr. Belatsky drew a pretty apt comparison between this sort of thing at CPAC and what goes on in other fandoms. Say, f’r’ex, whipping out a sonic screwdriver at Comic-Con. It’s a way for the speaker to say I am one of you and for the crowd to say you are one of us.
And it’s that group thing that I think was underlying my note on who was inside and who was Outside the Room. At CPAC even more than at the RNCC, I get the sense that the people in the room are identifying themselves, strongly, as the sort of people who are in that room. And of course there is a far larger group outside the room who identify themselves as the sort of people who are in that room, even if they don’t happen to actually be in that room. This is true of Comic-Com as well, yes? And of fandom more generally, particularly con-going fandoms but I think also those fandoms who congregate more virtually. The sort of people who read fanfic; the sort of people who tailgate before The Game; the sort of people who reenact the Battle of Bull Run. The sort of people who vote for Obama, for that matter—the mistake would be in thinking about this tribal business as being specific to geekery or to Conservatism at all.
Two things, though: first of all, as Ms. Weisskopf indicates she is aware, any fandom will go through phases where what distinguishes the trufen from the mundanes is very important and phases where it just isn’t all that important. It seems to me, as an outsider, that particularly in the con-going portion of the spec-fic fan community, this is a particularly nasty phase (going back ten years or more) where norms are changing and the tools of exclusion are being used in a different direction. This is extremely uncomfortable for everybody (the previous phase was quite comfortable for some, but for others far worse than uncomfortable, so from an MFQ point of view, it’s an improvement, but that’s surely hard to see from the trufan catbird seat) and as a result the dividing line between us and them has been sharpened to compensate. This isn’t my own observation, of course, but the result of reading far too much excellent writing about the scene.
Well, and it may well be that the norms of Conservatism are changing as rapidly as those of con-going fandom, and the line between True Conservative and RINO is sharpening to compensate. It’s not clear to me what those lines are, but then it’s probably not clear to most people under what circumstances a chain-mail bikini is controversial or what it means to accuse someone of reading Heinlein. I’m not saying those controversies are trivial, mind you, just that they aren’t very transparent from outside. For the people in the room (or who identify themselves as the sort of people in the room) the lines are probably pretty damned clear.
The other thing is that it’s important to distinguish between Conservatism and the Party. Important for me, but more important for the Party and the fandom. I think that’s something Our Party is doing fairly well at the moment, having a fandom, er, a base that is connected with the Party but not in charge of it. And in my own fandom, well, it’s nice that Peter Capaldi and Stephen Moffatt are fans, and now and then it’s nice when they show up waving the totems of trufen (I particularly like the Radio Times letter from 1974) and speaking the words of power, but we count on them as creators to restrain their fannishness in favor of doing the work, and if necessary to ignore us in order to make it work. Oh, there were surely some of us who railed against the attempt to revive the show, and who complain about some version of selling out, and I’m sure there are some old fogeys who consider the new fellows to be DWINOs. But we fuggheads shouldn’t let them prevent the norms from changing, and the people who get things done shouldn’t let either trufen or mundanes prevent them from actually getting things done. And we don’t—Ms. Weisskopf does, in fact, publish good stuff over at Baen. And people still read it, even while complaining.
So my point—if I do have a point, which is always questionable—is that the observation that CPAC is like a con and that Conservatism is like a fandom is well-taken to some extent, but the real issue is whether the Party is like the writers and publishers and producers and directors who are able to carry on with their work regardless.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.