Last week, two young liberals asked for help finding a job in the ideas industry. And I didn’t have a great answer.
It made sense that they were asking: We were at a conference for liberals, dedicated to building a version of the doctrine that works in the 21st century. They were interested in studying ideas professionally, and I was there to moderate a panel about political philosophy.
Yet I found myself struggling to give good advice. Sure, they could try for an internship at a liberal publication or think tank, but those are fiercely competitive and don’t pay much. They could apply for a PhD program, but teaching jobs were scarce even before President Donald Trump took a hammer to American academia.
What’s really missing are programs of a specific kind — ones that help college students and recent grads engage with Big Ideas and connect with Important People.
If my young acquaintances were right-wing, I might have told them to apply for National Review’s Buckley and Rhodes journalism fellowships — multi-year paid opportunities to write for a national audience straight out of college. For a lesser commitment, they could have tried for the Claremont Institute’s Publius Fellowship — a three-week program where you receive $1,500, a $700 travel stipend, free housing, paid meals, and an opportunity to study with some of the most influential (and radical) figures of the Trump era.
Those are two examples of numerous well-funded programs explicitly designed to usher as many bright young people into the institutional conservative world as possible. If you’re an ambitious young college grad, and anywhere on the spectrum from libertarian to hardcore Trumpist, you’ve got tons of options to get into the ideas game.
My young acquaintances really wanted a liberal version of such a thing. But as far as I can tell, it doesn’t seem to exist. Where there should be a talent pipeline from universities to liberal public intellectualism, there is a giant sucking sound instead.
And, increasingly, it’s giving the right a leg up in winning the future.
The right’s winning formula for training youth
It is true, as conservatives have long alleged, that America’s intellectual institutions are pretty left-leaning places. They often overstate the case — professors are more likely to be Elizabeth Warren Dems than "globalize the intifada” socialist revolutionaries — but data confirms that liberals outnumber conservatives in academia and the media by pretty significant margins.
This is, of course, not at all new. One of the founding texts of the postwar conservative movement, William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, is all about how academia is full of socialists who are chipping away at the eternal truths of capitalism and Christianity. Buckley founded National Review as an antidote to what he saw as the liberal tilt of the mainstream American press.
The legacy of Buckley-style thinking is the rise of a conservative ideas industry. A young person nowadays could attend college at right-wing Hillsdale, build their law school life around membership in the Federalist Society, and then get a job writing right-wing papers for the Heritage Foundation — all while getting their news from Fox News and Mark Levin’s radio show.
At the same time, the right also invested in the kinds of “pipeline” programs our young liberals are desperate for. These aren’t designed to replace traditional education or media institutions, but rather to identify young people interested in ideas and expose them to the right-wing alternatives.
These work, in large part, by being intellectually exciting. It’s not just that you get to go on all-expenses-paid trips with nice meals; it’s that you are put in an environment where you’re reading and debating classic works of political thought and literature with other people who share those interests. If you’re the kind of nerd who wants to debate the finer points of Locke and Hamilton during undergrad summers, you’re the kind of nerd who might one day be someone who matters in US politics — and the right’s fellowships are there to help make sure you’re mattering on their side.
The people these young people are meeting are important and famous (well, DC famous).
In a 2021 episode of the Know Your Enemy podcast, Nate Hochman — a radical young conservative writer who later staffed both Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Eric Schmitt — talks at length about “the masterful things the conservative movement institutionally has done in terms of mentorship.” Hochman, who was raised in a liberal household and moved to the right in college, describes how the movement’s fellowship programs brought him in direct and meaningful contact with conservatism’s leading lights.
“All of a sudden, you’re at dinner with people you’ve looked up to for years, staying up until 1 am drinking wine with them and asking them questions and getting to talk to them. And they’re taking you seriously,” Hochman says.
As part of these pipeline programs, older right-wingers get to know young up-and-comers as people, and thus develop a personal stake in their success. When you stay up late drinking with someone, talking about shared ideas, you come to care about them in a way you don’t if they sent you a cold email. When they come looking for help getting a job writing about conservative ideas, you’ll work that much harder to place them in one.
And the right has built its institutions to ensure that such positions are available. Right-wing publications and think tanks are much more open to debating big-picture questions — say, what kind of a nation is America? — than their left-wing peers (more on that in a second). Claremont, for example, was founded by students of conservative political philosopher Harry Jaffa, and it shows in the kind of work they put out (even when it strikes me as substantively ridiculous).
Liberals are suffering from success
There is no parallel culture in American liberalism — a function, in part, of liberalism’s longtime intellectual dominance. There wasn’t much of a need for liberal donors to create programs to cultivate liberal thought, as people interested could simply go get a PhD or an entry-level reporting job.
However, these institutions were not avowedly liberal in character. They styled themselves as politically neutral, focused more on quality research and reporting, than as contributing to a particular ideological cause. This means that while liberals in such fields were in left-leaning environments, many were trained to see themselves primarily as professionals working a craft. So while there are plenty of internships available to young liberals, they’re mostly focused on professional training (or coffee-fetching) rather than staying up late swapping ideas with big names.
More broadly, the liberal professional approach also produced a kind of intellectual siloing. If you were a young liberal interested in political philosophy, odds are that you end up going to a PhD program and pursuing a career in academia. If you’re interested in policy, odds are that you ended up studying a set of applied skills (like law or economics) that prepared you for very specific policy discussions in your area of expertise.
But the conservative intellectual model bridges the philosophy-policy gap. It trains young people in the big-picture ideas, like conservative visions of political morality and religion, and teaches them to connect those things to everyday policy discussions. You aren’t learning about abstract ideas or concrete policy, but rather learning a comprehensive worldview that treats policy issues as downstream of specific values.
You are, in short, learning an ideology.
Liberalism has plenty of brilliant theorists who work at a largely abstract level, and policy wonks who work on the most applied issues. But in the middle area of ideology, one bridging the gap between principle and policy, they’ve basically ceded the field to conservatism. The pipeline problem for young people is a symptom of the movement’s blind spot: Liberals, as a collective, don’t care to cultivate a youth ideological cadre.
This might not have been a problem in the past — and maybe even a benefit. Ideological thinking tends to produce rigidity, an unwillingness to adjust one’s policy thinking based on new evidence. The right’s longtime insistence that tax cuts can reduce deficits, or addiction to proposing military solutions to foreign policy problems, are two examples of curdled ideology.
But we’re at a moment where liberalism is in a particular kind of crisis: under threat from new ideologies that challenge not specific liberal policy ideas, but the basic premises of a liberal political system. Liberals need a new and compelling vision: one that explains why our ideas are not merely a defense of an unpopular status quo, but a broader politics that can be used to address cardinal problems of the 21st century.
At this moment, liberals lack the personnel to articulate such a vision — while the right’s radical thinkers, at places like Claremont, seize the field.
