Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” That line—written by Frank Wilhoit—has become a popular aphorism to sum up the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of the modern Republican Party.
Who’s Frank Wilhoit? Many people who cite the quote assume it comes from Francis “Frank” Wilhoit, an American political scientist whose 1973 book The Politics of Massive Resistance chronicled Southern segregationists’ efforts to resist Civil Rights–era court rulings.
That would make a whole lot of sense. But in fact it’s the work of another Frank Wilhoit, this one not a professional scholar of American politics but a 63-year-old classical music composer in Ohio, who wrote the adage as part of a longer point in the comments section of the political science blog Crooked Timber. Since then, it has taken on a life of its own, recirculating on Twitter or Reddit every few months, most recently in reference to certain Free Speech Defenders’ aggressive posture on libel and defamation laws. A handful of sleuths have cracked the case before—Francis Wilhoit died in 2010; Frank Wilhoit posted his remark in 2018—but the confusion lingers, for obvious reasons.
This week, I reached out to Wilhoit the younger to discuss the long half-life of his observation. He explained what he thinks of conservatism, which piece of his music he likes most, and why he can’t stand this case of mistaken identity.
Henry Grabar: You wrote this in March 2018, which was a pretty banal month by Trump administration standards. Do you remember what you were thinking of specifically?
Frank Wilhoit: I don’t believe there was a topical stimulus. I was responding specifically to that particular posting on Crooked Timber. And the mildly viral quote was just the punchline of a substantially longer posting, which attempted to lay out some of the context. Of course the context could easily be exploded to book length but no one’s got time for that.
The Crooked Timber post, let me see if I can get this right—the post criticizes the historian Sean Wilentz for an essay in Democracy Journal in which he sought to reclaim the New Deal as a “liberal” project, rather than a “socialist” one. Was there a connection between your post and the Wilentz essay, or was it more an argument in the comments? I know that comments sections sometimes can stray from the topic at hand.
When you start throwing around labels, each one of which is a verbal talisman upon which no two people will agree what its exact meaning is, and when you start stacking up more than just a few of those, each upon the next, as if building sandcastles in the air, my patience wears thin rather quickly. And on that occasion, my patience did wear thin. [Editor’s note: Wilhoit’s original post discusses various political ideologies.]
It’s such a pithy formulation. The part that has gone mildly viral, as you put it, must have been an idea that you had thought about before, or maybe even written before.
I do tend to repeat myself in proportion as the audience is listening. The basic idea with the parallel construction, which of course is a syntactic cliche, had occurred to me long before. I think that it is a reasonably commonplace observation and I certainly claim no originality for it.
I do think that what I said back then now appears rather abstract, perhaps even inapplicably abstract because we see a process of devolution all around us which is accelerating now day by day.
Say more about that. When you talk about conservatism, are you thinking about the Republican Party? That’s the way I’ve seen the quote interpreted.
Well, when you take an idea like that, which is expressed fairly abstractly, and you look about for applications of it to real-world circumstances, then that is what you find. The Republican Party flatters itself as a conservative party, and conservatism has long been surrounded by an enormous shimmering halo of pseudo-philosophy.
But as I said a moment ago, we are at this point devolving so rapidly that the appetite and the patience for that kind of pseudo-philosophy, for that kind of propaganda, is waning every day. What remains of the “conservative” strands in the public discourse is a primal scream. Just the other day, for example, people were shaking their head at Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, talking about things being grown in “peach tree dishes,” which is a mondegreen of a familiar kind, and is rather shocking coming from someone who has any educational attainment beyond kindergarten.
When did you become aware that you’d hit a nerve with this comment?
I started seeing references to Wilhoit’s Law, somewhere on the scale of six to 12 months after, I believe.
I guess this must have been around the time you became aware that there is a deceased political scientist who shares your name and could quite plausibly have been the author of such a statement.
Yes. And I was perfectly horrified by that because I had absolutely no right to create that kind of confusion, to pose that kind of insoluble problem for the custodians of his legacy. They will be playing whack-a-mole with that misattribution for all future time. I’m just disheartened to have been the cause of that.
What a generous read on your own bon mot being stolen from you.
It’s not a question of stealing. He was somebody—and that’s what makes the coincidence all the more bizarre—who actually had standing to write what he wrote and to publish what he wrote. He had standing to say such things and I do not, I am a pure amateur. What I have taken advantage of is what so many, many, many, many other people have taken advantage of, which is today the total disintermediation of the public discourse. There is no longer any gatekeeping whatsoever.
There may be a strongly justified feeling that historically, on a scale of centuries, the public discourse was excessively gatekept, but the remedy is not to simply tear down all the gates and let everyone and everything flood in on a presumptively equal footing. It is a revolution equal to those brought about by the invention of the steam engine or the invention of radio—things whose consequences were not perceived at the time. The only reason anybody was able to read and retransmit what I wrote was because of that complete disintermediation.
It sounds like you’re sending out a warning. But at the same time, you obviously are a commenter, and you weren’t trying to impersonate some political scientist, you just happen to share his name.
The game that is being played may not always be the ideal game, and the manner in which it is being played may not always be the ideal manner, but what is is what is, and it may as well be taken advantage of.
You’ve said you’ve tried to correct the record, though.
I get a ping every so often, a few times a year. There is a website called Goodreads, and it got in there and it was attributed to Francis Wilhoit. And I thought, “Oh, my, now the cat’s really out of the bag.” I’m not trying to claim credit for anything. I am a creative artist myself. If Francis Wilhoit had been an amateur composer and his music was being attributed to me? I mean it’s just an endless cascade of nightmares all the way down. So what I did was I contacted Goodreads without any hope that they would be able or willing to resolve the situation, but they did.
There is an additional aspect of the coincidence that may not be immediately apparent. In my comment, at one point I used a portmanteau word, something like unfuckingbelievable [editor’s note: It was whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism], and I thought to myself, How could anyone imagine that this was a quote from published scholarly writing circa 1970? But I’m familiar with the scholarly literature of music theory, and there was actually a brief vogue, right around 1970, for scholarly writing to take on a transgressive pose and to employ some of the techniques of, say, beat poetry.
Let me ask you briefly about what you actually do. You’re a composer, and you have a blog but it’s not mostly political philosophy, it’s mostly erudite musings about classical music. If readers were to listen to one piece of your work, where should they start?
Well, one is always fondest of one’s youngest child. I do think that my most recent large work, my Seventh Symphony, would be a very good starting point. I’m quite proud of it. Here’s the thing as a composer: I’m asking people who listen to my music for their time, which is the most valuable commodity that they possess. And so I must make them a very good bargain for that commodity. The music has to tell them what they’re getting in exchange to that. And I believe that it does that.
That’s a great endorsement. I think we can leave it at that. I don’t have any other questions. Is there anything you want to add before we hang up?
May I request that you also mention that it will be premiered next year, 2023, by the Bryn Athyn Orchestra in Pennsylvania?
Yes! That’s great. Congratulations.
