An indictment has been brought. The prosecutor is Elizabeth Corey, professor of political science at Baylor. The defendant is Christopher Rufo, and through him a whole class of conservatives whom the prosecutor calls the “scrappy warriors” of the New Right. Corey makes three charges against them: they are uncivil, they divide the world into friends and enemies after the manner of Carl Schmitt, and they would rather crush their opponents than convert them, preferring to defile the seminar room than save it. They are, in short, mean and essentially unfit for leadership.

Corey is a serious person, and the charges she brings are serious. The court owes her a fair hearing.

Let us hear the case.

Stuck in the Middle

“Only recently did I learn the meaning of the phrase ‘beautiful losers.’” So begins Elizabeth Corey’s essay in Public Discourse, her first written salvo against Rufo and the New Right. “They are reasonable and civil, but losers nevertheless. They would rather be defeated, with grace and dignity intact, than win at the cost of being crass, vulgar, or harsh.” Corey liked the phrase so well that she claimed it in a follow-up op-ed in the Wall Street Journal: “I am a ‘beautiful loser.’” Like a new Cato the Younger, Corey presents herself as the heir of an older and finer thing. She would rather lose well than win badly.

I wonder whether Corey knew when writing her first piece that the “beautiful losers” epithet entered American political discourse as a mocking slur—it is the title of a 1993 book by the paleoconservative Sam Francis. In it, Francis argued that the respectable Right had developed an arrangement with the Left in which they got to sit at the high table with the liberal elite, provided they reliably accomplish nothing. If she did know this, then I suppose her adoption of the phrase is meant to be stunning and brave, an attempt to “reclaim” a slur for yourself so that it loses its power over you.

Corey contrasts her band of beautiful losers with the “scrappy warriors”—the Christopher Rufos and Kevin Robertses of the world who have their hands on actual levers. The warriors see the world in terms of friends and enemies and want to crush their opponents without mercy, Corey claims. Her “beautiful losers,” meanwhile, live in the deep stratum where formation actually happens: in the classroom, at home raising children, and preserving the inheritance of civil society through quiet maintenance.

According to Corey, the American university is where the wholesome culture-preservers find a home. In her WSJ op-ed, she allows that though there are ideological extremists at the far ends of CRT and intersectionality spectrums, she insists these are “a vanishing minority among the huge numbers employed at American universities.” Corey continues: “Anyone who lives and works, year after year, at a university knows that most people fall somewhere in a moderate middle—we’re too busy with our students, teaching and scholarship to be political activists. For me, this moderation is a virtue, not cowardice or weakness.”

The prosecutor is defending something real. The seminar room where students take down Plato in their own hands; the vestry meeting on a Tuesday evening; the friend who is the second chair violinist. A whole world of decent, modest, ordered life, the kind that Rufo, in her telling, would drag into the glare of the public records request and the press release.

And the prosecution has a witness. In invoking theoria and aesthesis, Corey appeals to Aristotle’s judgment that contemplation is superior to action. Aristotle argues in Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics that while virtuous military and political actions are distinguished by their nobility and grandeur, they are nevertheless unleisurely, and therefore are inferior to the life of pure contemplation, which involves thinking divorced from practical considerations. Following Aristotle, Corey sees contemplation as the highest of human activities—and therefore as the purpose, and in many cases the real lived experience, of American collegiate life.

Aristotle Recalled

When the prosecution calls an expert witness, however, the defense gets to question him too.

The Nicomachean Ethics runs nine books on moral and political virtue before arriving at contemplation in Book 10. The ordering is not accidental. Aristotle is patient and careful. He does not want us to mistake the highest life for the only one. He spends time delicately showing us what courage looks like, as well as what magnanimity, justice, and friendship look like, before finally turning to the philosophical life. But in Book 10 he does not say what Corey might want him to say.

Aristotle argues there that the contemplative life is highest, but immediately adds a qualifier: it is highest insofar as we partake of the divine. But we are not gods; we are humans. And humans form political communities that make us subjects or citizens, and therefore, the active life of moral virtue is “happy in a secondary degree.” This means that those who long to live the life of the mind must still consider mundanities like how to feed and clothe themselves. And when someone wants to outlaw the life of the mind, that life will continue only if it is defended. The defense is not itself an aspect of the life of the mind.

Aristotle says that the life of the ivory tower academic, entirely divorced from grubby politics, “would be too high for man,” because it would be acting against his very nature. “Man is by nature a political animal,” he writes in the Politics, and the man who does not need the city is “either a beast or a god.”

Aristotle, in other words, does not teach what the prosecutor said he did. The contemplative life he praises is a life lived inside the polis, defended by the polis, made possible by the polis. The seminar room is downstream of politics and depends on politics. Politics then comes first chronologically, even if the seminar exists as a proper end toward which our political life is ordered.

On Righteous Anger

But Corey is concerned about more than just the distinction between contemplation and action. She places greater weight, in any case, on the problem of tone, restraint, and moderation.

She asks,

What if the framework of games and battles were rejected altogether? We would then confront the challenge of expressing our thoughts not dogmatically but in graduated terms, with sobriety, discrimination, and patience. When faced with people who differ from us, our response wouldn’t be to condemn or incite, but to persuade, understand, and mollify…. This, I think, is where the beautiful loser succeeds brilliantly: he appreciates and even celebrates the complexity of the world and of human personality. Although he has strong views, he is allergic to partisanship.

This is good advice for the seminar room, but bad advice for politics. Aristotle has better counsel in Book 4 of the Ethics. There you will find a passage on the virtue of πραότης, often translated as “gentleness” or “good temper,” a passage Corey’s tradition either does not know or refuses to read.

Amidst a discussion of anger, Aristotle argues that the man who fails to get angry at the things he ought to get angry at, in the way he ought, at the right people, for the right length of time, is not a meek soul achieving some higher virtue. He is instead ἄνανδρος—unmanly. He is a fool. Aristotle says this plainly: such a man “appears to feel nothing and to suffer nothing, and, since he is not angry, to be unable to defend himself; and to suffer oneself to be insulted, or to look on while one’s friends are insulted, is slavish.” Consider the word he uses: slavish.

This is the Aristotle whom the dispositional conservatives have somehow elided. There is a virtue of right anger, and there is also a vice of failing to feel it. Christ overturning the tables in the temple was not a lapse in the contemplative life. He was demonstrating something Aristotle would have recognized and that Augustine, who was hardly a warrior, defended in his treatises against the Donatists: there are things in the world that a virtuous man hates, and his hatred is part of his virtue, not a falling off from it.

Rufo himself understands this unmanly vice:

Actually cultivating sufficient thumos to fight and win against those who would destroy your civilization is good for the soul. Shrinking, backbiting, enabling, and rationalizing one’s own cowardice as the mark of the ‘beautiful loser’ does immense damage to soul and society.

That is the Nicomachean Ethics Book 4 in 21st-century dress. Thumos, the spirited part of the soul Plato discussed in the Republic, is not a defect to be tamped down and quashed into invisibility. It is part of a well-ordered soul. A man without anger is not a contemplative. He is an incarnate man trying (and failing) to be a disembodied spirit, hardly a man at all.

In the American tradition, this teaching is summarized well by John Adams:

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

I hope, as John Adams did and as I’m sure Chris Rufo does, that calmer and more peaceful days are ahead, where our sons can study the liberal and fine arts. But this is not the times we live in.

Considering the Prosecutor

Corey’s posture of measured reasonableness while slipping the dagger in is her central strategy, one Adrian Vermeule diagnosed with a precision the other side has not matched. The polite conservative academics, he writes, “have carved out a minor niche within the liberal university by serving as a police force against the growth of any substantive views to their right.” The polite Right’s function inside the captured university is to assure liberal colleagues that there is a kind of conservative who is safe to keep around, because he will reliably bark louder at anyone further to the Right than himself than at the Left.

This bargain has been excellent for the careers of those who have taken it—but it has been catastrophic for the institutions they were supposed to preserve and the students they were supposed to guide.

The prosecutor’s case has, on this reading, a curious feature. Corey says she does not want to “divide people into friends and enemies” nor “crush” her opponents “completely and without mercy.” She offers these claims, however, in a column whose entire purpose is to single out one conservative, identify him as outside her camp, and discredit him before the largest opinion readership in the English-speaking world. She is doing the very thing she condemns, and in the more cowardly direction: against a man whose work has materially improved the conditions inside the institution she works in. On its own terms, her Wall Street Journal piece is a friend-enemy operation: Corey’s friends are the dispositional conservatives and even the liberals who support DEI, and her enemy is Rufo and anyone who takes his side.

The vast bulk of her colleagues, she tells us, fall in a “moderate middle.” The ideological extremes are a “vanishing minority.” As someone who has spent the last decade and a half teaching at St. Mary’s College of California, and has also run the Davenant Institute and co-founded Davenant Hall, I know what life is like inside a university. So let me ask the question that Corey’s “moderate middle” thesis cannot answer: Where was the moderate middle when the DEI offices were being set up? When mandatory bias trainings were being scheduled? When diversity statements were being added to the requirements for hiring and promotion? When entire fields were being quietly reorganized around political doctrine?

I will tell you: the moderate middle was attending the trainings. They were signing the statements. They were sitting on the hiring committees. Many of them were hoping to get deanships and vice presidencies so they could run the Office of Diversity and Inclusion.

The “vanishing minority” of true believers Corey refers to successfully installed the present regime, because the moderate middle declined to make trouble. This is the standard mechanism by which institutions are captured. A small cadre of ideologues pushes, a large cushion of moderates declines to push back, and within a decade the institution has been transformed. The moderates did not vote for any of this. But they did not resist any of it either. Their moderation was the soil in which the ideology grew.

Corey’s word for this is “moderation.” It is a kind word. Rufo, replying on X to a post lamenting “60 years of continuous losses in the institutions and culture wars,” chose the less kind one. “The reality is that the ‘beautiful losers’ approach is a self-serving lie,” he wrote, “and in most cases, these ‘true conservatives’ do not maintain their ‘moral and intellectual purity,’ but, in fact, have compromised it away and need to signal against those who have not in order to rationalize their own moral and intellectual cowardice.”

Moderation relative to virtue is always vice. Virtue itself is an extreme of activity.

Ivory Tower Idiolatry

A university is in some real sense a sacred place. It is ordered to truth, to the contemplative life, and to the formation of souls. It is the kind of place a serious civilization does not pick a fight in if it can avoid one. In just war thinking, there are certain places—temples, schools, and hospitals—that are not legitimate military objectives. To make them targets is to violate the rules of war. Corey’s instinct that the university should not be a battlefield is the right instinct, which I share.

But that is not the situation we are in. The whole structure of just war reasoning, going back to Augustine and developed by Aquinas and the Spanish scholastics, presupposes that wars are sometimes forced upon us against our will. The question is not whether one prefers peace. Of course one does. The question is what one is morally permitted to do—and what one is morally obligated to do—when peace has been broken by another party.

Sacred ground remains sacred only when both sides honor it as such. The moment one side decides that the strategic prize is too valuable to refuse and begins installing commissars, demanding confessional statements, and reorganizing the criteria of advancement around its political doctrine, then the moral situation has changed. The contested ground is not what it was an hour before. To continue refusing the fight is not piety. It is unilateral disarmament dressed in the costume of piety.

A man who would rather lose his country gracefully than save it ungracefully has revealed his order of loves. The salvation of his country is less important than his own image of himself as a respectable man. The old word for this is not piety—it is idolatry. The thing one will not stoop to defend is the thing one has stopped really loving.

The Closing Argument

I want to be fair to the strongest version of Corey’s position, because there is a version of it I respect. It is the version several commentators offered to broker as a synthesis. It says that you need both scrappy warriors like Chris Rufo as well as conservatives cosseted away in the ivory tower like Elizabeth Corey. A healthy movement has a division of labor: the Rufo-style operators take institutional ground while dispositional conservatives do the slow work of forming students. Each, properly understood, needs the others.

The reason this synthesis does not save Corey’s argument, however, is that she is not playing the contemplative role in the division of labor she gestures at. She has come down from the ivory tower to spit on the warrior who is defending the ivory tower she spends most of her time in. Corey is not building the parallel institution. She is sitting in the chair Rufo cleared and using it to call him crude.

The conditions under which the conservative scholar lives in 21st-century America were not lost in some impersonal cosmic drift. They were taken by particular people, at particular moments, and through particular policy, hiring, and funding decisions. The scholars Corey wishes to nurture do not exist apart from the budgets that pay them, the trustees who hire them, the foundations that fund endowed chairs, the state legislatures that determine accreditation eligibility, and the IRS rulings that decide whether their schools keep tax-exempt status. None of that is governed by the rules of the contemplative life. All of it is governed by the rules of the kind of contest Rufo and his colleagues are willing to enter: the political life.

In order to exist, the seminar room requires a political operator to set it up. Political action is not a sufficient condition for thriving contemplation—but it is a necessary one. Aristotle knew it. Augustine knew it. Calvin knew it. Cotton Mather knew it. Every founding father and the generations of men who fought for our country and served in its highest office knew it.

The polite Right has had its run. But it has produced nothing of lasting value, only a few well-mannered generations of defeat. It has produced no schools the Left ever had reason to fear, no journals it could not buy out, and no institutions that materially shifted the conditions of intellectual life in this country. It has produced only a great many careful essays for an audience of friends.

There is one more piece of evidence the defense has held back until now. What closed the DEI office at Baylor—which Corey conceded on the Law & Liberty podcast that started this whole exchange—was Rufo. She herself said the trainings are “absolutely gone,” and even granted that “it may be that that was the only way forward, which was to try to ruin it.”

That is a stunning concession. The prosecutor is admitting that the polite version of her own critique—the version she has practiced for 15 years—did not work. But Rufo’s barbaric attack did. Then she goes to the Wall Street Journal to name Rufo as a friend-enemy partisan whose tactics she rejects.

For every Baylor that has removed all DEI trainings there are hundreds of universities where they remain, even if they’ve rebranded as “Diversity and Togetherness” trainings to avoid a federal DOE investigation. Until the last one is gone, Rufo must keep the pressure on.

Case dismissed.