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Charles C.W. Cooke's 'Conservatarian Manifesto' Now on Sale

March 10, 2015

I wanted to take a moment to highlight a new book by my friend Charles C.W. Cooke. It's called The Conservatarian Manifesto, and it's quite good. I believe there will be an official Free Beacon review at some point in the near future, but I wanted to exert my executive editor privilege to state my support for Charles' work ahead of time.

One thing I'd like to ever-so-briefly highlight is the way in which Charles suggests conservatives can flip the script with regard to appealing to millennials. As he puts it,

This, ultimately, is a generation of nonconformists—one that is more comfortable with Uber than with the taxi commission; with Airbnb than with Hilton; and with Facebook than with Healthcare.gov. In a better world, conservatives would be their natural allies, defending the integrity of private institutions against the homogenizing Leviathan and playing Silicon Valley to the Left's DMV

If they play their cards well, conservatives can begin to establish that the Left represents the man, the state, and the establishment—moderating and censoring the culture, and serving as the speech police, the arbiters of taste, and the purveyors of mandates.

I think—well, I hope, which I guess isn't quite the same thing*—that Charles is right. It's one of the reasons I spend so much time tracking the ways in which the modern leftist has transmogrified into the modern day scold, the schoolmarm in the front of the classroom telling you to think the right things and enjoy the right entertainments. (Trust me, there's no shortage of such folks.) The resurgent PC left is now best understood as Marge the Squirrel, screeching "don't do that!" to a nation of people just looking to have a good time.

Can conservatives appeal to the folks who are tired of the shrillest voices telling them what to watch and how to live their lives? Probably not, if pols like Mike Huckabee have their way. But if the future belongs to the Charles C.W. Cookes of the world? Well, then maybe we have a shot.

*Charles' book appeals to me quite a bit insofar as I agree with it. Which, honestly, throws up a bit of a critical blinder. Of course I believe conservatives and the Republican Party would be better off if they thought more like me, deftly melding conservative and libertarian principles! My opinions are the best opinions.