"Barstool Conservatism" as 90's Liberalism

Or: "Vitalism" as the ideology of tits and beer

I have recently discovered that you can actually use Substack sort of like Twitter and endlessly doomscroll through a feed of Notes. This has changed everything. Now I’m following along closely with multiple lines of interpersonal drama, catty slap-fights, insults traded between competing cliques, the whole nine. I feel like I’m thirteen and I’ve stumbled upon my first Internet forum all over again.

Behind all of the scuttlebutt, there are some actual ideas being discussed. The primary conflict I’ve been following has been between Christian “tradcons” and secular “vitalists.” What is a vitalist? Before this I had no idea, and I’m still pretty unsure, which is one reason I’m writing this post about it. Lots of different people are mixed up in this broader discussion, but I don’t care nearly enough to try and name them all. The central exchange seems to be between Walt Bismarck and Dave Greene, and you can get a window into it in this note, plus a variety of other related posts.

As I watched this play out, I found myself wondering: What is “vitalism?” We know where Christian “tradcons” such as Dave Greene stand, more or less. What sort of ideology is the other side of this conflict actually proposing? The whole affair has led Walt Bismarck to make a post called “The Barstool Right” which seems to be an attempt to answer this question:

The Barstool Right

I read through this essay on the foundations of “Barstool Conservatism” and didn’t find much to object to. There are a few things to object to, which we will get to, but the majority of its content seemed very acceptable to me. Since this is in the context of a Christians vs non-Christians conflict, my primary interest here is in identifying what exactly about “Barstool Conservatism” is incompatible with traditional Christianity. Walt lays out fourteen “Principles” and after going through all fourteen a couple of times, they all seem perfectly compatible with Christianity except for this one:

“(P11) Traditional Degeneracy - Due to the Coolidge Effect you can’t expect most elite men to remain perfectly monogamous, and you need some cohort of highly promiscuous women to absorb their libidinal energy so as to keep normie women sexually reserved for normie men and discourage maladaptive trends like harem-keeping. That can look like hookup culture among elites, prostitution, or mistress-keeping / sugaring / goomahs, but some such accommodation is always necessary to maintain a stable and enjoyable sexual ecology for the average person. Women who choose this lifestyle therefore need to be respected as an essential component of a well-ordered sexual ecology. But it must also be acknowledged this life isn’t remotely scalable to the average woman, and especially in online spaces we need to embrace an esoteric tolerance of promiscuity among elites while exoterically preaching a slower life strategy to the masses. A lot of this will involve simply being a lot more private about these discussions (hence me publishing this on Substack and not on Twitter).”

Obviously, encouraging promiscuity and sexual misbehavior is contrary to traditional Christian norms. I don’t really have to cite Christianity to criticize this, though; I can just cite Walt’s essay itself. This is his tenth principle:

“(P10) Encourage Marriage - Most people are happiest in a stable monogamous relationship, hence the development of marriage as a persistent social technology across many diverse societies. The overall social incentive structure should therefore be calibrated to encourage marriage for most people, and we need to make it easier for the average heterosexual to find a suitable partner for a monogamous union. The modern rate of inceldom is much too high, and measures should be taken to make things easier for middle SMV guys (who are the ones actually suffering under the Tinder paradigm; low SMV guys wouldn’t be successful in any ecology). The average low-mid status woman should likewise be gently pushed into more chaste behavior (though this is already happening, so I don’t think we really need to do anything—if anything it behooves us to somewhat restrain the recent overcorrection).”

These two things are in direct conflict with each other. “Encourage Marriage” (good) and “Traditional Degeneracy” (opposite of marriage and also an oxymoron). Let’s say we run with the idea that 80% of the population are “chuds” who should basically aim for chastity until marriage, only ever have that one sexual partner plus maybe a couple youthful indiscretions, and be content with the 2.5 kids and the white picket fence; but the top 20% of society are “elites” who should be free to snort coke and casually bang each other.

What kind of incentives does this narrative set? You are explicitly saying that being high status means sleeping around. What will then be a signifier of high status? The ability to bang lots of random women. What do you think men will then try to do in order to be perceived as high status? You see where I am going with this. If you tell everyone this 80-20 story, are people going to hear it and just think to themselves “well I’m probably in the 80% so I guess I should just live a tradlife and be fine with that?” Or are they going to want to sort themselves into the 20% somehow? We have already seen how this plays out with the “manosphere” and the pick-up artist culture that came before it. You are just setting up something that we already have, which is hordes of young men following people like Andrew Tate and trying to emulate his values and lifestyle.

Still, putting that little problem aside, 13 out of 14 is pretty good. Let’s say we knock off the “Traditional Degeneracy” thing and make it a round 13 principles, all of which are more or less completely compatible with traditional Christianity. If there is still any incompatibility left at this point, it amounts to minor quibbling. What is there to even fight about, then? It seems like this whole furor is much ado about nothing. But a bit further down, Walt touches on a couple other issues not mentioned in these “fourteen principles,” which I believe are unfortunately serious points of dispute.

The first is when he touches on abortion, saying “Moderation on Abortion Policy - Barstoolers don’t want abortion illegal should we ever knock someone up in a night of Dionysian excess, but we’d also feel really shitty if this was ever necessary.” Looking over this sentence again, I’m a bit shocked that he actually typed this and put it out there. The implication is that abortion is wrong, but if a guy gets drunk and does something stupid, well hey, he needs to have abortion there as a backup form of birth control in order to, what? Protect his carefree lifestyle of getting drunk and having irresponsible sex?

This is an indefensible and incoherent attitude. If we accept that abortion is wrong, we must then ask, why would it be wrong? Because it represents the taking of an innocent human life. That is the obvious and only answer. If we accept that abortion is the taking of an innocent human life, do we then accept that it is permissible for people to engage in it because they got drunk and did something stupid, and they don’t want to be responsible for that mistake? Obviously not. This is abhorrent behavior, and also runs contrary to the promotion of ideals such as marriage, family formation, chivalry (i.e. taking responsibility upon yourself as a man, to care for those weaker than you), etc.

It seems like Walt is thus completely conceding on the abortion issue, although maybe he doesn’t view it that way. He maintains a fervent appeal to political pragmatism, insisting that we must not try to ban first-trimester abortions right now because it is not politically feasible. To which I say, sure, that’s true, and there are probably some hardline pro-lifers who need to hear that. But the flipside of that is, if you’re still supporting abortion and you have no arguments other than political expediency, you need to seriously ask yourself if it’s possible that you might be wrong on the essence of the issue. Appeals to political pragmatism are fine in the short term, but in the long term, they are not a replacement for simply being right. After all, by definition, being a dissident means holding values that are not possible to enact in the immediate political situation, in the hopes of one day making them possible.

The final point of objection comes when Walt addresses The Gays:

“But to do this effectively our prospective coalition needs to figure out ways of moving past intractable conflicts on very spicy topics like gay adoption and surrogacy. And I won’t pretend to have a good answer here.

As I expressed to Alex Kaschuta in my recent discussion with her, I will always stand by the right of exceptional people like Jeff and Trace or my BFF Rajeev Ram to do this, but given the worrying statistics we’ve all seen, I also feel like there should be a higher bar for gay people when it comes to becoming a parent. We can’t pretend that homosexuality and heterosexuality are interchangeable, and exceptions need to be exceptional… but exceptional exceptions are also worth taking a stand for.”

Walt wants to make common cause with “based gays”—good political instinct—but openly admits that there are reasons to be concerned about the practice of “gay adoption” and that he doesn’t have any good solution to the issue. So, in an even more straightforward way than on abortion, he’s basically conceding the essence of the issue in favor of an appeal to political pragmatism. “Sure, some of this gay stuff might be wrong, but if we get more gays on our side, our coalition will be stronger.”

The second part of that narrative is true. Conceding on gay stuff will likely make it easier to accomplish other political goals. Of course, if you take this logic and run with it too far, you end up with such a broad “coalition” that you are no longer distinguishable from your enemies, at which point the entire exercise becomes pointless. So how do you determine when to expand the coalition and when to stand on principle? Well, usually, we do this by having an argument about what is actually right and what is actually wrong.

Once again, appeals to political expediency cannot replace simply being in the right. And you can’t expect that they will, not here. People who don’t care about being right aren’t even here to read any of this crap—they’re mainstream political normies listening to Daily Wire podcasts or something. The essence of being a dissident is that you care more about the truth—about being right—than you do about political convenience. Thus, you have to expect that most people in the dissident space will demand truth, and will not be assuaged by assurances that your position is politically convenient.

I think that if “Barstool Conservatism” is to be taken seriously, these issues need to be addressed up front, not buried further down as afterthoughts. The rest of it is much less important because everyone already agrees on all that other stuff, or at the least, won’t find it nearly as objectionable. These are the things that will be sticking points for other conservatives—casual sex, gay stuff, abortion. These are some of the biggest reasons why many conservatives are on the right to begin with. Restoring sanity to gender relations has already been a conservative priority for a while now, a repackaged version of those talking points isn’t offering much in exchange for the ask to moderate on core values.

Many conservatives also believe, myself included, that acceptance of these things (casual sex, gay marriage, abortion) is inextricably tied up with the overall ruination of gender relations that has taken place since the 60’s. So if you expect us to moderate on them in order to forward your program of fixing the dating and marriage situation, you really need to put up some serious arguments for why they actually aren’t as much of a problem as we think they are. Conceding that we’re right about these things but then saying that fixing them is impractical, or that we should just ignore them and hope they go away, obviously isn’t going to cut it.

At some point in reading all of the dialogue around this, somebody in a note characterized the “vitalists” as “90’s liberals” (sorry, I can’t remember who it was to give credit). After reading through “Barstool Conservatism” I think that this is accurate. Barstool Conservatism, as outlined above, is asking us to just wind liberalism back a few decades, to go back to a time when men could just be men, and to not sweat the tough questions that don’t have any comfortable answers. It reminds me of a post I previously made:

Barstool Conservatism comes across to me as affiliating with the people who think the “conservative women” pin-up calendar is “haha based.” In that post, I described them as having nostalgia for “the America of tits and beer.” The thumbnail image for this post is taken from “The Man Show,” something which aired from 1999 to 2004 on Comedy Central. I’ve never seen it myself, but from what I understand, it embodies this mentality quite well, as I think is clear from the picture of it that I chose. I also think it’s no coincidence that it aired around the time of, y’know, the 90’s, hence “90’s liberalism.”

In summary, I have to conclude that Dave Greene was ultimately right when he characterized Walt Bismarck as simply offering re-packaged neo-con talking points. Walt is charismatic in his writing, but on substance, he’s dodging the real issues. I would challenge him to go it again while completely dropping any support for casual sex, gay marriage, or abortion from his positions, and then see if he and Christian conservatives still have anything left to fight about.

If the answer is “no,” then let’s not pretend there is some kind of grand ideological struggle here, let’s just have those specific debates on those specific things that are actually at issue.