Some conservatives seem to have decided that winning over a new constituency — one that hates rules and ordinances and loves hot people and cool ideas and sex, sex and ideally more sex — is worth changing what it means to be a conservative in the first place. Pursuing these voters is a perilous shift for conservatism, because the ethos relies not on a political ideology but on the lack of one: simply doing whatever one wants. A hornier conservative movement might be more electorally successful, but it will run headfirst into a wall of longstanding conservative policy commitments — to end abortion, eliminate pornography and reinforce the “nuclear family.” Goals that are, at the very least, not very horny.
Playboy magazine was marketed to men, and so is this particular brand of politics. Being a horny bro is not terribly unusual, or even bad. In fact, I’d argue that many men fall in this category — heterosexual men who think that liking sex and sexiness are generally good, uncomplicated things, and think that people who tell them that sex or sexiness is bad or sinful or problematic should be mocked or ignored. Some seemed to gravitate toward the ethos of Barstool Sports, the popular sports and betting media conglomerate.
The “Barstool conservative,” as Matthew Walther has argued, isn’t opposed to abortion; he’s opposed to political correctness. Mr. Walther wrote that Barstool conservatives are “people who, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, accept pornography, homosexuality, drug use, legalized gambling, and whatever Gamergate was about.” But what they do not accept, ever, is being told what to do, whether by “hectoring, schoolmarmish” politicians and media or by the federal government. This kind of conservative might not vote, or at least not vote on a consistent basis. But he does adhere to this specific, attitudinal type of politics. As my colleague Ross Douthat wrote in 2014, “This attitude is ‘liberal’ in that it regards sexual license as an unalloyed good, and treats any kind of social or religious conservatism as a dead letter. But at the same time it wants to rebel and lash out against the strictures it feels that feminism and political correctness have placed on male liberty, male rights.”
When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, Barstool’s founder, Dave Portnoy, jumped on an “emergency press conference” on Twitter, saying: “It makes no sense how anybody thinks it’s their right to tell a woman what to do with her body. I just don’t get it. To take away the ability to make informed decisions on how they wanna live their lives is bananas.” Under the philosophical construct of horny bro-dom, the idea is that abortion isn’t good or bad, but it is an act that a woman wishes to commit, and nobody should tell anybody else what to do, or what not to do. In fact, in 1992, then-Gov. Bill Clinton (a noted horny bro) said something very much the same in a National Abortion Rights Action League survey: “The government simply has no right to interfere with decisions that must be made by women of America to make the right choice.”
Many conservatives disagreed with Mr. Portnoy on abortion (Mr. Portnoy declined my request for an interview). But they seemed to channel the “horny bro” perspective on a raft of other issues. While some conservatives want to ban pornography, others would welcome porn-film stars at right-wing conferences. In this, there’s been a subtle warping of the conservative movement as it sounds increasingly less like itself and more like its horny, libertine opposition, in the pursuit of electoral gains and cultural relevance.