What Conservatives Think

[Valin]

NRO:

 

As opposed to what an uninformed liberal thinks we think

Kevin D. Williamson

10/13/12

 

Caroline Fraser knows a great deal about Little House on the Prairie and next to nothing about what conservatives think. This is a problem for her recent L.A. Review of Books essay, which purports to explain to conservatives why they are wrong to embrace Laura Ingalls Wilder and her work.

 

There are three paths by which people on the right arrive at Little House on the Prairie. Libertarians took an interest in the books after a revival of their interest in the works of Wilder’s daughter, the libertarian polemicist Rose Wilder Lane, who exercised a degree of influence on her mother’s work, the extent of which is a matter of some controversy. The second path is through the Little House books themselves, which have long been a magnet to conservatives with an (admittedly romanticized) interest in agrarian self-reliance and family-centered life, and a suspicion of urban cosmopolitanism. The third path is the banal television program adapted very loosely from the books, which has a special place in the hearts of that niche group of conservatives who admire rural life mainly because they never have experienced it.

 

Ms. Fraser’s critique would make sense if one were to take her cartoonish view of who conservatives are and what they think. For example, in her view, people who cherish nature, wildlife, and solitude are by definition something other than conservative. “There is much to offend right-wing thinkers in Wilder’s work,” she writes, “perhaps as much as there is to comfort them. For instance, Wilder repeatedly declared her adoration of the wild and her dismay at its ruin.” She goes on to say that if Wilder had been around today, she would have been understood as a “radical environmentalist.” I know little of Ms. Fraser’s biography save her publishing history and the fact that she resides in Santa Fe, but I wonder if she has ventured as far afield as Idaho, where one is apt to meet right-wingers who make the editors of National Review look like Geraldine Ferraro but who also clearly prefer country to town and cherish the rural solitude in which many of them live. Perhaps she should be introduced to the Conservative Canadian MP Bob Sopuck, who has made a career out of pursuing environmental issues and a live-off-the-land ethic. There is an entire corpus of right-wing fantasy literature dedicated to this kind of thinking, the fullest expression of which is the pop-survivalist novels of the sort written by James Wesley, Rawles, whose post-apocalyptic works have reached the New York Times bestseller list.

 

(Snip)