I was a fan of Elizabeth Corey before she was famous and have admired her for many years both personally and professionally. Thus, I was surprised to witness her essay in Public Discourse, “Beautiful Losers,” become controversial merely because it rearticulated what she has argued for years: the good life is worth pursuing even if we lose the political battles of our day.
Corey’s “Beautiful Losers” essay offered measured critiques of “scrappy warriors” like Kevin Roberts and Christopher Rufo and challenged their vision of politics as having a clear “friend-enemy” distinction.
I would moderate Corey’s critiques by acknowledging scrappy warriorship as an essential vocation for a flourishing conservative movement. As many commentators have argued, scrappy warriors protect beautiful losers, and some are called to live a life of “scrappy warriorship”. Scrappy warriors can be heroes, like soldiers who charge into the fray of battle to defend their way of life.
But behind every scrappy warrior is a countless number of, to quote Corey, “musicians, educators, physicians, priests, and artists,” who take the form of parents, spouses, friends, teachers, and mentors. These people are our society’s beautiful losers. I would posit that the commentators have missed Corey’s most valuable insight: scrappy warriors need beautiful losers, and our movement has a shortage of beautiful losers.
The Evil in Our Hearts
Many scrappy warriors fail to see this shortage because they believe beautiful losers are simply naïve, blind to evil in the world. Closeted up in the ivory tower (or the rehearsal hall, the doctor’s office, the pulpit), beautiful losers are so busied by their daily routine that they fail to see what the scrappy warrior laments: murders of natives by migrants, mainstream media bias, or other scandals-of-the-day.
I am certainly not advocating for political blindness. Scrappy warriors, however, confuse naïveté with humility. Beautiful losers are attuned to the most subtle, and most insidious, kind of evil: the evil in our own hearts.
“Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” the beautiful loser prays. She understands her own weakness, so she asks for deliverance. With her own sin (and its forgiveness) on her mind, it becomes hard to dwell on the sins of people she has never met.
The beautiful loser is also accused of a lack of compassion: Shouldn’t you fight to relieve the suffering of others? But beautiful losers are filled with sensitivity for those suffering around them. They just look to address suffering where they find it: among their students, ensembles, patients, and parishioners.
As Corey tells The New York Times, the central task of the beautiful loser is to “learn how to be human.” This is an arduous task that cannot be learned on the internet. It requires the pursuit of virtue and beauty: the fine arts, friendship, handiwork, nature, the Word of God, physical activity, and more. In a tech-addled age where the skills and motivation to engage with beauty are fading, the beautiful losers have something valuable to share with future generations.
Waiting Forever
Yet many scrappy warriors believe our struggles are so preeminent that the pursuit of virtue and beauty must be sacrificed in the battle. Colin Redemer, in The American Mind, dismisses Corey’s pursuit of the good life wholesale. “I hope… that calmer and more peaceful days are ahead, where our sons can study the liberal and the fine arts,” Redemer says sympathetically. “But these are not the times we live in.”
Redemer staged the disagreement between Corey and Rufo as a trial, casting himself as the judge. While I dispute Redemer’s courtroom setting (the format suggests conflict, something Corey explicitly attempted to avoid), if the case were a trial, then Redemer’s dismissal of the case would have been premature.
Before issuing a ruling, the judge is expected to review previous legal precedents. And no judge could claim to have done a thorough review of case law regarding the good life without considering the 1939 case The War-Time Alarmists v. Lewis.
In his sermon “Learning in Wartime,” C.S. Lewis decisively rebuts the idea that we must wait to study the liberal arts until the ideal world arrives. Human culture always stands at the precipice of destruction, Lewis argues. “If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure,” he writes, “the search would never have begun.”
If we wait to study the good, true, and beautiful until “calmer and more peaceful days” arrive, we will be waiting forever. There are few times in human history that have the infant survival rate and projected life expectancy of 21st century America. There is certainly no other time where there is greater access to a seminar room where Plato can be read.
Redeemer’s remark betrays the game: for the perpetual warrior, “calmer and more peaceful days” will never arrive. There will always be another battle to win. When warriorship becomes a lifestyle instead of a vocation, anger and discontentment abound. Not even Alexander the Great, Napoleon, or Hitler could win enough battles to quiet their own soul.
Achieving inner peace, then, would seem the more difficult task compared with claiming kingdoms. Inner peace requires a disquieting search – but we are blessed enough to have specialists. Society calls them beautiful losers.
Beautiful losers remind us of our own mortality. They are the ones who teach our sons the liberal and the fine arts, both through the profession of education and through their leisure. Elizabeth Corey has been an intellectual apostle in my own life. My closest friends are apostles to me spiritually. Though they will never get a think tank presidency or thousands of social media followers, their work is more influential in my life than any white paper or 280-character post.
Cowardly Warriors
Scrappy warriors like Christopher Rufo, however, do not believe they need to learn anything from the beautiful loser. “Shrinking, backbiting, enabling, and rationalizing one’s own cowardice as the mark of the ‘beautiful loser’ does immense damage to soul and society,” Rufo tells us. Rufo’s platitude is popular but utterly contrary to reality. Scrappy warriors do not have a monopoly on courage, nor beautiful losers on cowardice.
Take, for example, Easter social media posts by our President (the ultimate scrappy warrior) writing “praise be to Allah,” threatening to destroy civilizations, and, eventually, equating himself with Jesus Christ.
While the most egregious social media post was eventually deleted, there was a general lack of interest among scrappy warriors in the story. With a few notable exceptions, there was little criticism of the President for violating one of God’s central commandments.
The silence was a mask-off moment for many scrappy warriors. Where were they when the world’s top political leader mocked the world’s Savior?
There are a variety of reasons why many conservative leaders did not criticize the President. For one thing, criticism could jeopardize their relationship with their followers. Scrappy warriors must never appear to go turncoat. Their pocketbooks depend on it.
Less cynically, conservative leaders might have held their tongue because they considered the President’s good work on DEI, inflation, trade policy, and other issues-of-the-day more important than his moral righteousness.
These perspectives are shrewd but ultimately cowardly. It forces us to ponder: what are we fighting for? Ourselves? The nebulous “conservative movement”? If we put our success, either as a person or as a movement, ahead of our moral principles, success is no longer worthwhile.
We should be courageous enough to lovingly rebuke those on “our side.” Being anti-blasphemy does not make one part of the thought police: it is merely respecting the commandments of God.
The beautiful loser is called cowardly because she pursues love, but love necessitates courage. Only the brave woman can extend the olive branch to, say, supporters of mandatory DEI training, knowing that the olive branch may very well be chopped off. Love is uncomfortable and unpragmatic. If our love is only conditional on one’s contribution to the “conservative movement,” then it is no longer love, only the sad substitute of a tribal alliance.
Beautiful losers are conservative because they believe the people they love will be happier in a society that cherishes the good, true, and beautiful. They cling to this mission even when it puts them on the firing line of the scrappy warriors.
Sacrificial Lovers
Ultimately, the difference between Corey and her critics does, to some degree, come down to faith. Corey is advocating for a “deeply Christian vision of social life.” She wants to be the kind of person who turns the other cheek. She wants to properly mourn the defeats of the conservative movement, trusting she will be comforted.
The scrappy warrior is tempted to call this meekness weakness. This is only natural: the great temptation of the scrappy warrior is to claim self-determination. We can “save America,” the scrappy warrior promises.
Beautiful losers have the wisdom to know they cannot save the world, and the faith to understand they do not have to. With their future glory set on their minds and hearts, they become so enraptured by the “beautiful” kingdom to come that the title of “loser” loses its sting.
Behind every scrappy warrior is a countless number of beautiful losers. I have no doubt the spouses, parents, teachers, mentors, and friends of the scrappy warriors sacrificed time, dreams, and ambitions to make their warriorship possible. Their sacrifice, their beautiful loss, was not disempowering, but a high act of love.
Sacrificial lovers are a rare breed in our culture of extreme narcissism. In our social media age, the warrior is the star, and everyone wants to be the star. To quote Corey, the “musicians, educators, physicians, priests, and artists” are not the ones praised and exalted, but the “bloggers, writers, and podcasters.” (If you doubt this, consider how many people have podcasts and Substack accounts).
The conservative movement needs more beautiful losers. If more conservatives are not willing to use their talents to quietly cultivate countercultural spaces and relationships, we will find ourselves with fewer scrappy warriors, and fewer still with a sense of what it means to be human.
Conservatives will need to sacrifice their egos to undertake this mission. It is always the Elizabeth Coreys of the world who are unrecognized for their labor and are attacked for refusing to join the political warfare of the day. Yet, I remain an Elizabeth Corey fan. Her contributions to this movement may go unrecognized, but I trust her hope will not be found to be in vain.
