The Death of the Conservative Prestige Economy

The establishment needs right-wing influencers more than they need it

Earlier this week, in a discussion of the recent Heritage Foundation brouhaha over the Tucker Carlson-Nick Fuentes interview, John Ganz wrote that “the Republican Party and the right-wing apparatus in general have become totally dominated by propaganda and propagandists. Important roles that once would go to professionals or at least politicians now go to podcasters and talking heads.” He cited the Trump administration’s elevation of figures like Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel to illustrate the point. His conclusion was that this was the latest indication of the “hollowing out” of the GOP, which increasingly functions as “a career opportunity for agitators and propagandists.” (He also noted a parallel in the Democratic Party’s “spoils system” for “consultants and NGOs.”)

Shortly after reading this, I noticed an announcement that the Manhattan Institute’s magazine City Journal, (full disclosure: I have written a few articles there), will be awarding its annual award to Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro. On one hand, this was clearly a shot fired in the right’s ongoing civil war about Israel, with MI using the prize to make a statement against the Carlson-Fuentes camp. But the thing that struck me about it was that the choice of recipient resembled the former establishment insider Carlson’s strategy of chasing relevance by inviting increasingly lowbrow online influencers onto his show. Shapiro shares the old GOP establishment’s foreign policy preferences, but like Fuentes, he is also a media entrepreneur who hasn’t depended on the conservative establishment for his profile and career. Instead, he has cultivated an audience directly, as a commercially viable player in the attention economy. (The Daily Wire is reportedly profitable to the tune of over $100 million annually.)

Prizes often carry monetary rewards, but they should be understood as tokens in an economy distinct from the real economy, in which the primary currency isn’t money but prestige. This is the subject of James English’s 2008 book, The Economy of Prestige, which explores the history and sociology of literary prizes and awards and the function they serve in the “circulation of cultural capital,” Pierre Bourdieu’s term for the elusive commodity cultural actors accumulate when they achieve higher levels of renown.

A guiding principle of a properly functioning prestige economy is that the optimal awardee must need the awarding institution more than the other way around. With rare and controversial exceptions (Bob Dylan), the Nobel Prize in literature illustrates this point well enough: Its typical and expected function is to consecrate figures of national or regional renown on a global scale, admitting them into a select international pantheon. The MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius” grants, likewise, will occasionally go to individuals with a degree of pre-existing celebrity, but for the most part their effect is to significantly raise the profile of people who might have otherwise toiled in relative obscurity and struggled to make their work viable.

The conservative prize ecosystem slightly varies somewhat from the pattern of major (tacitly liberal) awards because it is part of the alternative career path the right offers to writers and scholars outside liberal-dominated academic and publishing. This is why such prizes historically have often gone to conservative movement intellectuals who are also attached to think tanks in the same ecosystem: people like Charles Murray, Amity Shlaes, and Heather Mac Donald. They are part of the apparatus by which conservatism has maintained a parallel set of incentive structures to compete with the mainstream liberal ones. The movement has thereby built up cadres of friendly “experts” who can provide press comment, advise candidates, etc.

What the conservative prestige economy has in common with the mainstream liberal one is that the awards have typically preserved a similar power differential: the awardee needs the awarding institution more than the other way around. This is why, like the other goodies dispensed by think tanks and foundations, they were helpful in enforcing fusionist orthodoxy. I’m not sure there was ever a risk that figures like Shlaes or Murray would drift away from small-government, free-market dogmas, but the prestige conferral mechanisms ensured that anyone who did would be out in the cold.

When conservative awards go to figures like Shapiro or Chris Rufo (prior recipient of the City Journal award as well as this year’s recipient of the Bradley Prize, the most prestigious award in the conservative ecosystem), something different is going on. Shapiro and Rufo are both skilled attention economy entrepreneurs capable of thriving in the online marketplace of ideas. To be sure, Rufo has been attached to various foundations, including MI, but his large independent online presence and mastery of digital propaganda channels mean that he has never depended on them. Because many, many more people follow and subscribe to Shapiro and Rufo’s content than have heard of City Journal or the Bradley Foundation, their receipt of these prizes will have no meaningful impact on their visibility or financial viability. The awardee-institution power differential is thus reversed: The institutions that believe they are getting something—first and foremost, continued relevance—from being attached to their names, and not vice versa.

The reason these particular figures are being rewarded, of course, has something to do with the civil war within the right over Israel and foreign policy. By elevating intra-right enemies and competitors of Fuentes, Candace Owens, and their ilk, Old Right institutions seek to align themselves with the factions of the online New Right they regard as reliable footsoldiers, and thereby to firm up an operational linkage between the old prestige economy and the new attention economy. The problem, again, is that they need this more than these new actors need them, and that imbalance is likely to become more pronounced. The more institutions try to attach themselves to figures who don’t need them, the weaker and less significant they look. The question roiling Heritage is whether to follow someone like Carlson into the gutter of online rage bait, accepting that is the political future of the right, or to hold out some faint pretense of an autonomous economy of prestige.

Something related but slightly more complicated happened with the more extensive and formidable (again, always tacitly liberal) mainstream prize and award ecosystem in the awokening of the 2010s. The pretense of prestige as an autonomous economy of value largely gave way to a hyperpoliticization whereby prizes were used to reward a specific set of political messages representative of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and to push forward a diversity agenda. This was a different way of chasing continued relevance, not by association with commercially popular figures but by a conflation of cultural prestige with an aspirational moral economy. In a parallel but distinct way, this left the institutions in question reduced and weakened—or accelerated their tendency in that direction—because it undermined their claim to be arbiters of a type of value (cultural and intellectual capital) independent of other (political, economic) value systems.

This week in Compact

• Henry Tonks on Trump, Reagan, and tariffs

• Thomas Fazi on the never-ending Cold War

• Michael Behrent on François Ruffin

• Stephen Adubato on the rise of gay identity

• D.L. Jacobs on Stephen Miran

• David Schaengold on making Penn Station great again