Luke Ford

When your hero system is far removed from those who hold power, you’re going to look like you believe in crazy conspiracies.

Rony Guldmann writes in his work-in-progress Conservative Claims Of Cultural Oppression:

* The conservative magazine Chronicles explains:

Once upon a time in America, you could say you loved your country, believed in God, and held your marriage sacred…and not be snickered at as a simple-minded simpleton. You could believe in honesty, hard work, and self-reliance; you could speak of human responsibilities in the same breath as human rights…and not be derided an as an insensitive fool.

You could speak out against profane books, depraved movies, and decadent art; you could express your disapproval of drug-sodden entertainers, America-hating educators, and appeasement-obsessed legislators…and not be branded as an ignorant reactionary. And yes, once upon a time in America, you could actually believe in morality, both public and private, and not be proclaimed a hopeless naïf—more to be pitied than taken seriously. But that was before the “censorship of fashion” took control of contemporary American culture. This insidious form of censorship is not written into our laws or statutes—but it is woven into the very fabric of our culture. It reigns supreme in literature and the arts, on television, and in film, in music and on radio, in our churches, our public schools, and our universities. And above all else, it is dedicated to the propagation of one agenda—the liberal activist agenda for America. The “censorship of fashion” is not only sinister and subtle, it’s also ruthlessly effective. It employs the powerful weapons of ridicule and condescension to stifle the voices of millions of Americans, like you, who still cherish our traditional values.

* I argue that the relationship between religious conservatives and secular liberals is most profoundly conceived as a contemporary recapitulation of the relationship between conquered pagans and conquering Christians endeavoring to uproot these pagans’ idolatry. What liberals call religious neutrality is an intellectualized, sublimated, and secularized iteration of this ancient ambition, which now operates within unacknowledged layers of social meaning rather than through formal creeds. This plausible deniability is why conservative anxieties about the encroachments of an aggressive, evangelizing secular humanism sound paranoid and conspiratorial. But like all conservative claims of cultural oppression, these apprehensions become intelligible once placed in their broader historical and philosophical context, which always reveals the larger truth of what strikes liberals as conservative obtuseness.

* Chronicles treats the “censorship of fashion” as anew phenomenon. But Kirk lamented that late nineteenth-century conservatives became unsettled in their first principles by the march of science and “shrank before the Positivists, the Darwinians, and the astronomers.” The intimidation of conservatives by liberals has a distinguished pedigree, it seems, and is not limited to those now fancying themselves “ordinary Americans.” Nor is the idea that an intellectual elite conspires behind the scenes to maintain a stranglehold on the means of cultural reproduction. Unable to realize their ends by “any direct or immediate act,” the atheists of Burke’s day conspired to pursue them “by a longer process through the medium of opinion,” to which end the “first step is to establish a dominion over those who direct it.” O’Reilly alleges that late-night television comedy paints liberals as smart and conservatives as dense. And in the same spirit, Burke charged that atheists connived “to confine the reputation of sense, learning, and taste to themselves or their followers,” and sought with “an unremitting industry to blacken and discredit in every way, and by every means, all those who did not hold to their faction.” Conservatives have long held that intellectuals are driven by their own self-contained interests, and long warned that centralized planning, unqualified equality, and other utopian dreams are recipes for a leveling and homogenizing tyranny. The language may have changed, but conservative claims of cultural oppression are built atop of these long-held conservative suspicions about liberalism and the Left.

* The claimants understand themselves as speaking truth to a power that conceals itself at every turn, to forces that will never officially announce their goals, their motivations, or even their existence. This does not typically devolve into the crude conspiracism that we usually associate with the extreme right. There is the visceral sense that things are not as they seem, to be sure. But whereas this once meant things like the John Birch Society alleging that President Eisenhower was a knowing agent of communism, the conservative claimant of cultural oppression judges the problem to be largely structural and unconscious or semiconscious, and not the calculated product of human agency. There is indeed a liberal conspiracy, but it consists in hidden layers of meaning rather than secret plots. It transpires, not in smoke-filled backrooms, but in the fabric of our culture, as Chronicles says.

* What strikes liberals as conservatives’ eschewal of rationality is, in its deeper hermeneutic structure, an eschewal of the rationalism that underpins liberals’ claims to moral superiority, and hence the liberal identity.

* Conservatives charge that the “new class” of liberal elites harbors an ingrained hostility to the traditional family. But the indisputable truth is that many of these elites form part of such families themselves. And so the conservative accusation seems rather conspiratorial. The list of counter-arguments available to liberals is quite long. The comic aspect of Bobos in Paradise immunizes it from any direct intellectual confrontation. But is it not in this regard a microcosm for conservative claims of cultural oppression and their penchant for strategically deployed innuendo whose real upshot can never be quite pinned down? Conservatives would characterize liberalism as a surreptitiously parochial creed, the lifestyle preference of a privileged minority.

* Liberals do not construe the conspiracy-mongering of some black nationalists—like Louis Farrakhan for example—as conclusive proof that racism is dead. And this is because the underlying reality of racism can be distinguished from what may be implausible characterizations of its nature—for example, as involving genocidal conspiracies to infest inner city communities with AIDS or cocaine…

And likewise, perhaps conservative claimants of cultural oppression are, just like these black poll respondents, anthropomorphizing what are very real social forces, which are ill-understood by virtue of the distorting yet understandable resentment that is usually the lot of the oppressed. Most of McWhorter’s poll respondents simply lacked the theoretical detachment and sophistication that allows critical race theorists to frame their grievances in more intellectually nuanced terms. And likewise, conservatives may simply lack access to a theoretical framework through which to plausibly articulate their irrepressible intuition that they are culturally oppressed and that the ideals of liberalism can be appropriated to their own cause.

* Conservatives’ often conspiratorial-sounding allegations about the cunning machinations of an all-powerful liberal elite working “behind the scenes” to strip them of their very agency are the anthropomorphization of what is really a metaphysical and existential problem. The ideal of the modern free subject is covertly embedded in a hero-system that liberalism will not acknowledge. And this means that to embrace liberalism is to embrace more than a set of policies. If some African-Americans anthropomorphized structural racism as a government conspiracy to infest inner city neighborhoods with narcotics, so conservative claims of cultural oppression anthropomorphize the spiritual dimension of the modern self as the sundry depredations of the liberal elites.

* Conservatives’ “convoluted stories” may seem unhinged. But this impression is the predictable outcome of the conservatives’ historical predicament, which allows them to sense deceptive and self-deceptive histrionic mimicry without illuminating its essential nature. Like Kafka’s K. in The Trial, they can only access an assortment of partial “leaks” concerning the true nature of their oppression—like the Smithsonian memorandum—without ever receiving a more general accounting. It is this dilemma, itself a feature of their cultural oppression, that yields the conspiratorial flights of fancy. And this is why even these flights of fancy have a social meaning and philosophical significance. Though generally inaccurate as accounts of the actual present-day intentions of identifiable liberals, conservative claims of cultural oppression are meaningful as symbolic references to the “old loves” that liberals will not acknowledge, to the structural forces that may portend as yet greater cultural oppression in the future. These endlessly convoluted stories are at their core distorted articulations of these old loves, and so distortions with a heretofore undiscovered logic.

* Lee Harris concedes that the “populist conservatives” of the Tea Party movement have been susceptible to paranoid conspiracy-mongering, as in their concerns about Obamacare “death panels.” Their appeal to the yeoman virtues of a rugged, republican individualism is moreover an exercise in political nostalgia, as they aren’t truly interested in returning to the harsh conditions of frontier life.75Thisnostalgia is also at odds with their insistence that America keep its place the planet’s sole superpower, which presupposes a far larger government than was ever countenanced in the national past they idealize.76And in bewailing the depredations of overbearing liberal elites, populist conservatives betray their blindness to the workings of “impersonal forces far beyond the control of even the most cunning and ingenious cabal of villains.” Their affinity for doctrinaire libertarianism furthermore blinds them to corrupt corporate executives and amoral financial consortiums, responsibility for which cannot fairly be laid at the feet of big government. It also lands them in the contradiction of taking for granted some government programs, like Medicare, while being reflexively hostile to others. On these and similar points, Harris is in full agreement with liberals. But unlike them, he believes that it “does not matter greatly whether the resentment and resistance makes sense logically or is backed by solid evidence.” The grievances of the populist conservative are rooted, not in any kind of social or economic theory that could be rationally evaluated, but in “a specific character type,” the “natural libertarian” who becomes “ornery” whenever “he feels that his self-image as a free and independent individual is under assault.” “Ornery Americans” are the heirs of the Jacksonian spirit, the egalitarian ethos of independence and self-sufficiency that once defined America. And their populist conservatism is their attempt to keep this ethos alive against the efforts of the liberal elites to uproot it. In resisting the forces that seek to tame and subdue them, populist conservatives try to “hold back, at least for another day, the dusk of decadence that comes whenever the forces of order have triumphed too completely over the anarchic will of free men.”

* Feminists who protest patriarchy are not necessarily alleging any calculated backroom conspiracies to keep women down. They are describing, not a plot but what they understand to be a “complex ecology of domination and subjugation,” as Sommers puts it, which cannot be reduced to some discrete set of enumerable transgressions. Naomi Wolfe writes that“[t]he beauty backlash against feminism is no conspiracy, but a million separate individual reflexes…that coalesce into a national mood weighing women down; the backlash is the more oppressive because the source of the suffocation is so diffuse as to be almost invisible.” Andin a similar vein, conservatives feel weighed down by a national mood of conservaphobia, suffocated by liberalism through the cumulative effect of “a million separate reflex actions” all serving to reinforce the buffered identity, activating certain neural make-ups while devitalizing others.

* Just as critical race theorists warn that we may fail to recognize our own racism, so conservative claims of cultural oppression warn that we may fail to recognize our own secular humanism and anti-religious hostility, which is too pervasive or deep-seated to be recognized as such.

* Religious conservatives’ apprehensions about the connivance of a small coterie of secular humanists whose insidious tentacles now reach into every sphere of life sounds outlandish and conspiratorial. But the conspiracy theories are just distorted anthropomorphizations of these conservatives’ visceral aversion to an alien cosmological orientation. They are culturally oppressed, not by the secular, but by the modern understanding of the relationship between the religious and the secular. Ravi Zacharias observes:

“The California Supreme Court proved it has little problem with the state endorsing a religion, even forcing religious beliefs down its citizen’s throats, provided the religion is secular humanism. On March 1, 2004, the Court ruled that Catholic Charities of Sacramento must comply with the statute requiring California employers to include contraception coverage in their employee healthcare plans. Under the Women’s Contraceptive Equity Act of 2000, only religious employers are excluded. The Court had no problem rationalizing its decision, saying that since the Catholic Charities provides services that are secular in nature, such as counseling, immigration services, and low-income housing, for people of all faiths, it is not a religious employer. One would think that the politically correct California court would applaud the pluralistic attitude of the charity in making its services available to non-Catholics. Instead it used the charity’s tolerance to punish it.”

* …the rhetorical supremacy of the buffered identity, which forces conservatives to articulate cosmological grievances in epistemological terms, at which point they are easily discredited as outlandish, conspiratorial, or authoritarian.

* Conservatives’ visceral conviction that liberalism is an omnipresent force that slyly insinuates itself into all the minutiae of our lives is indeed paranoid and conspiratorial once liberalism is intellectualized as a moral philosophy or personalized as a political movement, reduced to the opinions of a Walter Mondale. However, I have sought to de-intellectualize liberalism by tracing its roots to the disciplines and repressions of the buffered identity, of which the opinions of a Walter Mondale are merely manifestations and symbols. The “liberalism” that besieges conservatives isn’t the conspiratorial machinations of nefarious East Coast elites, but these disciplines and repressions. The elites have simply internalized these to a greater degree than the “ordinary American,” who retains a residue of the pre-modern impulses which modern disciplinary societies seek to extirpate.

* Conservatives may be unscientific in their tacit devotion to some “order of things.” But liberals are unscientific in their eagerness to detach culture from physiology, not explicitly in their official theoretical positions, but implicitly and unofficially in their easy dismissals of conservatives’ “symbolic” grievances. And this dismissiveness simply betrays liberals’ inability to take its naturalism to its logical conclusion, where conservatives’ ostensible paranoia and conspiracism begin to make sense.