In his work in progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: On the Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia, Rony Guldmann writes:
* For liberals’ concern with “substantive” equality inevitably draws them into the ambit of leftism, at which point they become no less willing to deploy state power to meddle with a wide array of social practices. Given that the “various maldistributions ”which concern liberals are only another name for what leftists call “social powers,” what get sold as limited correctives to isolated “kinks in the system” always harbor the seeds of leftist totalitarianism. Liberals claim to demand only a “level playing field.” But since there will always be another hither to undetected “maldistribution” waiting to be “discovered” by the anointed, liberalism must inevitably devolve into leftism, which is why conservatives often speak of “left-liberalism” or employ “liberalism” and “the left” interchangeably.
* AlanKors writes that “[d]espite the talk of ‘celebrating’ diversity, colleges and universities do not, in fact, mean the celebration, deep study, and appreciation of evangelical, fundamentalist, Protestant culture; nor of traditionalist Catholic culture; nor of the gender roles of Orthodox Jewish or of Shiite Islamic culture; nor of black American Pentacostal culture; nor of assimilation; nor of the white, rural South. These are not ‘multicultural.’”86Just like diversity, “sensitivity” is a facially universalistic ideal that is unobjectionable in the abstract. But Kors observes that universities’ solicitude for diverse group identities does not extend to those who reject the dominant dispensation. Campus speech codes protect the sensibilities of left-wing students, but they allow these same students to label conservative blacks “Uncle Toms” and label anti-feminist women “mall chicks.” Students who believe homosexuality is sinful can be charged with harassing their gay and lesbian cohorts. But pro-choice students who surround a silent pro-life vigil and chant “Racist, sexist, antigay born-again bigots go away” are seen as engaged in protected speech. Liberals ask us to put ourselves in the shoes of the less fortunate, so Kors proposes the following thought-experiment:
“Imagine secular, skeptical, or leftist faculty and students confronted by a religious harassment code that prohibited “denigration” of evangelical or Catholic beliefs, or that made the classroom or campus a space where evangelical or Catholic students must be protected against feeling “intimidated,” offended,” or, by their own subjective experience, victims of a “hostile environment. Imagine a university of patriotic “loyalty oaths” where leftists were deemed responsible for the tens of millions of victims of communism, and where free minds were prohibited from creating a hostile environment for patriots, or from offending that “minority” of individuals who are descended from Korean or Vietnam War veterans. Imagine, as well, that for every “case” that became public, there were scores or hundreds of cases in which the “offender” or “victimizer,” desperate to preserve a job or gain a degree, accepted a confidential plea bargain that included a semester’s or a year’s reeducation in “religious sensitivity” or “patriotic sensitivity” seminars run by the university’s “Evangelical Center, “Patriotic Center,” or “Office of Religious and Patriotic Compliance.”
If an “Office of Religious and Patriotic Compliance” sounds sinister and totalitarian, we might instead envision a new regime of diversity training that encourages incoming college freshmen to examine their conservaphobic prejudices and overcome these to the extent possible in a conservaphobic culture. The goal would not be political indoctrination. This conservative-friendly diversity training wouldn’t call on liberal students to become conservative any more than standard diversity training calls on straight students to become gay. They need only explore their latent fears and biases in order to create a more tolerant atmosphere for all students. But liberals will not accepteven this moderate solution. And this demonstrates to conservatives that they are unwilling to play by the same rules to which they hold others.
* radical feminists can treat the “social construction of gender” as established fact, and need not contend with the neuroscientists across campus who study the biological hard-wiring of sex differences. These scientists are not members of “the relevant discipline.” …unlike liberal academics, Christian fundamentalists do not have the privilege of exalting their own echo chambers as respected academic disciplines. Fundamentalists who ignore what scientists say about the evolution of human beings in general are disdained as anti-intellectual. But feminists who ignore what scientists say about the evolution of sex differences in particular are just being professional. Unlike fundamentalists, feminists have been culturally credentialed to disguise their hero-systems as disciplinary rigor. Having embraced the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity, they have been credentialed as “the knowing, the knowledgeable, the reflexive and insightful,” and so they are allowed to invent their own intellectual rules.
* progressives have “undermined manliness, feminized your culture, elevated fretful safety and excessive caution into virtues instead of weaknesses.”106Following Lakoff, liberals will diagnose the conservative invocation of manliness as yet another symptom of Strict Father morality, for which strict gender differentiation and masculine strength are how one defends “Moral Order” against a threatening world.107The Strict Father model, says Lakoff, “takes as background the view that life is difficult and that the world is fundamentally dangerous.” And as liberals see it, this background view is really a pretext for conservative authoritarianism, which is sold to the public as a solution to dangers that liberals in their fretful safety and excessive caution refuse to confront. By contrast, conservatives see manliness as an anti-authoritarian impulse, a force that disrupts rather than upholds established convention. Harvey Mansfield writes that whereas rational control “wants our lives to be bound by rules,” manliness “is dissatisfied with whatever is merely legal or conventional.” Whilst rational control “wants peace, discounts risk, and prefers role models to heroes,” manliness “favors war, likes risk, and admires heroes,”109Manliness “seeks and welcomes drama and prefers times of war, conflict, and risk.” It “tends to be insistent and intolerant,” just as it is “steadfast…taking a stand, not surrendering, not allowing oneself to be determined by one’s context, not being adaptive or flexible.” Manliness must “must prove itself and do so before an audience.” It seeks “to be theatrical, welcomes drama, and wants your attention.” By contrast, rational control “prefers routine and doesn’t like getting excited” and therefore aims to keep manliness “unemployed by means of measures that encourage or compel behavior intended to be lacking in drama.”113Manliness so conceived is the very antithesis of the buffered distance, a visceral rejection of its “ordering impulses.” It is most fundamentally a protest against the rationalizing forces of the modern world, against the peculiarly courtly rationality, which is what has made us “adaptive and flexible.” The liberal culture is unmanly because it is hostile, not only to actual contests of swords, but also to the entire range of virtues and identities which these once embodied—which is what the conservative celebration of manliness aims to resuscitate. Rather than pursuing the “new form of invulnerability” promised by the buffered distance, manliness embraces the vulnerability of the pre-modern dispensation, our exposure to the “anti-structure” that relativizes and destabilizes the conventional social world, revealing the precariousness of all merely human designs. As relative pre-moderns, conservatives are attuned to anti-structure—the inherent flux and fragility of all mortal things—as liberals are not, and this is why they think themselves more manly. This conception of manliness is part of what animates conservatives’ embrace of the free market, whose association with conservatism is not as obvious as it seems… These elements include the chaos, unpredictability, and insecurity of the pre-modern condition of porous selves opened out to anti-structure. These are what enable manliness and the anarchic will of free men. And it is these discounted values that imbue untrammeled laissez-faire with its existential resonance for conservatives. Laissez-faire symbolizes the anti-structure denied by the disciplines and repressions of the buffered identity, affirming our submersion in forces we do not control, our openness to powers that transcend our will and upset our designs. Liberals reject this openness as the relic of a barbarian past of less fortunate peoples, which they in their superior enlightenment have overcome.. Cold War conservatives looked upon the Soviet Union and the welfare state as “the ultimate symbols of cold Enlightenment rationalism,” by contrast with which the free market stood as “the embodiment of the romantic counter-Enlightenment.”
* Feminism is a struggle, not by all women against male patriarchs, but by an elite minority of powerful women against a majority of women who never felt compromised by traditional gender roles.
* Feminists now dismiss traditional gender roles as arbitrary. But it was feminists who first engineered these perceptions by enforcing a regime of coerced androgyny. The feminization of men, writes Graglia, was among “the seeds from which women’s discontent grew and which blossomed into the women’s movement.” Absent the support and encouragement of a masculine man, women naturally became disenchanted with a traditional female role—feminism’s ultimate objective.101Theirdissatisfactionhere wasn’t just there waiting to be named by those who courageously spoke truth to power. Rather, it had to be created in order to socially vindicate the self-image of an elite minority of women. To this end, feminists have waged a largely victorious “war against the housewife,” employing any means necessary to denigrate her character, intelligence, and social status.
* While feminism claims to have liberated women from antiquated sexual ideologies that formerly subordinated them to patriarchy, it has in the process instituted a new sexual ideology that subordinates them to feminism itself, reconfiguring gender relations in order to socially vindicate feminist identities and discredit others. Women could never have been drawn into the feminist fold were they not first deracinated of their femininity, which is what feminism pursued. By cultivating a dissatisfaction it could then promise to relieve, feminism turned itself into a self-fulfilling prophesy, concealing all the manipulations by which it finally earned the grudging assent of women.
* what purports to be autonomous self-determination is in fact one historically constructed understanding of human agency among others. The “inner base area” of the buffered identity isn’t something that was lying there all along, albeit concealed underneath various collectivizing illusions, but the product of specific social forces which have conditioned the human organism into its present self-reflexivity. The buffered identity is an imposition for whose sake our “default” human dispositions must be tamed and disciplined. This affect show we see feminism. The subtraction account casts feminism as a revolt against the historical repression of female agency. But the mutation counter-narrative locates feminism as among the forces that created female agency (as understood by feminism). For feminism is merely another extension of modern liberalism’s disciplinary agenda. It was feminism that molded women into the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity, repressing the “lax and disorganized folkways” of traditional femininity, integrating them into the extended chains of social interdependence presupposed by the buffered distance and symbolized by the careerwoman. Feminism claims to upholds respect for women’s personhood. But as John Gray notes, personhood is not the essence of humanity, but merely one of its masks. Persons “are only humans who have donned the mask that has been handed down in Europe over the past few generations, and taken it for their face.”
* gender feminists’ motivation is powerfully enhanced by the “faith that they are privy to revolutionary insights into the nature of knowledge and society.” This “inspires them with a missionary fervor unmatched by any other group in the contemporary academy.”110“An exhilarating feeling of momentousness,” she notes, “routinely surfaces at gender feminist gatherings,” as feminist theorists invoke Copernicus and Darwin to symbolize the importance of their own discoveries, basking in the “exhilaration of feeling themselves in the vanguard of a new consciousness.” Feminists are seeking to express, not merely a set of doctrines one might or might not accept, but, more fundamentally, a consciousness one might or might not attain. They understand themselves, not only as liberated from traditional expectations and stereotypes, but furthermore as special participants in a privileged epistemic and spiritual dispensation that affords them a special lucidity unavailable to women who stubbornly resist feminism.
* Indian practices “related to food, sex, clothing, and gender relations were almost always judged to be moral issues, not social conventions.” Unlike their American counterparts, Indian children did not assign any special status to harm-tracking morality or distinguish it from mutable social convention. For them, “the social order is a moral order.” These children “were not figuring out morality for themselves, based on the bedrock certainty that harm is bad.” Instead, they showed that “almost any practice could be loaded up with moral force.”
