Category: National Politics

For those of us of a certain age, it can be difficult to describe to younger people the unbridled optimism that followed the disillusionment of the USSR. It seemed we were “post history” and on the brink of global peace and prosperity. The economic boom of the nineties reinforced this idea for many. Even so early after the transition to a world dominated by a single democratic super power, cracks appeared in the foundation of the body politic. Had we been more attuned to them, these cracks might have forewarned the conversion of the American Conservative party toward self-destructive authoritarianism.

The ’94 Republican/Gingrich Revolution cemented the final success of the Southern Strategy to woo Conservative Southern Democrats to the Republican Party by appealing to latent (or not-so-latent) racism. These appeals were often delivered in euphemisms like “states’ rights” (to do what, exactly?) and stories of mythical Welfare Queens, isolated cases of fraud generalized onto the entire Black ethnic group.

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Two aspects of Gingrich’s rise help elucidate the underlying cultural conditions that made possible the Republican party’s later decent into madness. The first is the curious fact that, despite Nixon’s successful use of the Southern Strategy in his presidential runs, it wasn’t until after the demise of America’s great existential threat, the USSR, that enough Southern whites switched parties to create the Solid South block that catapulted Gingrich to power. The other aspect is that Gingrich succeeded in explicitly tying American Christianity to one side of the partisan divide. This signaled a shift in focus for the American Conservative consciousness from the existential threat of Communism to domestic threats. Liberals were no longer just untrustworthy allies in the global fight against Bolshevism. They were now unGodly, the enemy, “evil”, thereby filling the role left by the falling atheist empire.

And so Gingrich enacted the Republican Revolution in ’94 by questioning the loyalty of his Democratic colleagues with rhetoric such as “people like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz. I see evil all around me every day.” He used conservative Christian tropes to reinforce his efforts to define political enemies as threats, often naming gays, atheists, communists, secularists, liberals, and Islamists interchangeably. In the absence of a credible foreign threat, all opponents of the Republican Party (a party increasingly defined as White, rural, heterosexual, and Christian) were fair game. From 1969 to 1994, the Republican Party had moved all the way from Nixon proposing a guaranteed minimum income to Gingrich describing any effort to provide health insurance to all citizens as “evil.” Of course Gingrich himself was hardly a paragon of conservative American virtue (he was also succeeded as Speaker by a man who later confessed to sexually abusing children). None of this dimmed Conservatives’ sense that the Grand Ole’ Party was the last beacon of moral probity in the world. This lack of concern with the moral failings of the movement’s leaders was partly explained away by (partially) fair comparisons with Bill Clinton, but it also foreshadowed the party’s total abandonment of principles when an unabashed chauvinist later presented himself as a savior.

The Conservative movement even made efforts, however ham-fisted, to directly transition the rhetorical label of the previous, legitimate existential threat onto internal political enemies. “Cultural Marxism” emerged as a Conservative bogey man through the writings of William Lind, Michael Minnicino, and crank pseudo-academics like Kevin MacDonald. The theory even tied in pre-Cold War spectres, claiming that Jewish academics of the Frankfurt School imported post-modernism to the West in a premeditated effort to undermine Western culture. This line carried forward the Nazi preoccupation with the corrupting influence of Jews into the Pax Americana context. The theory’s name even echoed Nazi claims of Jewish “Cultural Bolshevism.” (We can dispense with any semblance of sanity in these theories by noting that post-modernism is, at root, a rejection of grand historical narratives… grand historical narratives like Marxism).

Predictably, the apocalyptic rhetoric spilled out into real violence. In 1995, anti-government extremists detonated two and half tons of ammonium nitrate next to the Alfred Murrah federal government complex in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and damaging hundreds of buildings. In 1996, Eric Rudolph set off a pipe bomb at the summer Olympics in Atlanta, motivated by the event’s promotion of “global socialism.” He would go on to bomb a gay bar and an abortion clinic before being apprehended in 2003. Abortion clinics were plagued by murders, assaults, kidnappings, and arson throughout this period.

The Conservative gaze shifted briefly after September 11th, 2001 when Osama Bin Laden graciously answered Conservatives’ call for an anti-Christ. The resulting War on Terror consumed the lives of thousands of American service members and $8 trillion of national treasure (funds previously unavailable for health care, infrastructure, education, and other basic functions of government in a Western industrialized society). While Republicans continued to tie political enemies to existential threats, they at least offered the possibility to be “with us or with the terrorists,” rather than naming domestic enemies as the existential threat themselves.

Despite the War on Terror’s enormous expense and embarrassing strategic failures, the perceived threat of massive, destructive international terrorism faded and was more or less forgotten after the death of Osama Bin Laden. The Bin Laden raid occurred the same night that Barrack Obama mercilessly roasted Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Trump rose to political prominence based on Birtherism, an Arendtian detachment of fact and fiction if there ever was one. His embarrassment and rage from the Correspondents Dinner fueled his determination to run for president. He later won the presidency on a campaign of violent rhetoric, press bashing, aid and comfort from the globe’s preeminent authoritarian leader (an actual former Communist and KGB member), and incoherent conspiracy theories that found purchase with an audience of cynical and alienated Fox News viewers. His relationship with his base echoed Arendt’s writings, which in their time were insightful, and now read as remarkably prescient as well:

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

At first glance, American Conservatives’ insistence that their neighbors pose a threat to life, limb and liberty – while simultaneously denying that combustion engines could possibly be contributing to an actual global catastrophe – seems utterly bewildering. But we need only step back to see that their misplaced millenarianism is baked into Western, Christian, and especially American culture. From the Book of Revelations, to the Jonestown Massacre, to UFOs, to the ubiquity of the zombie genre, the end of the world thrums in the background of American life. Turn on PBS; an octogenarian relates seeing the first dust storm approach in 1930’s Oklahoma, and what does her mother yell to her? “Get in the house, the end of the world is coming!” Fantasy films whose sole purpose is (one would think) to distract us from the quotidian rhythms of our daily thoughts and lives, can’t help but zoom out in the final moments to reveal the Statue of Liberty corroded and listing from a long-passed catastrophe. From Dr. Strangelove, to preppers, to The Walking Dead, to preachers’ weekly pulpit invocations of a “Kingdom Come,” the assumption of an eventual world rupture is taken for granted. It is a culture-wide anxiety which, on an individual level, would be denied as silly and the ravings of “the crazies.” But look around with an objective eye and it is undeniable: we, as a people, are culturally primed for a world-ending cataclysm.

This sense of impending doom permeates Christianity, especially its charismatic and evangelical offshoots. During the early church’s rise in the shadow of a distrusting Roman Empire, martyrdom became the ultimate expression of connection with the Lord. To die a victim’s death, in the fashion of the son of God, came to embody the ultimate expression of devotion. And when the Christian sect came to dominate Roman politics, and therefore the levers of power, opponents of the Church (or often as not opponents within the church) were labeled as the heirs to the persecutors. Thus by the time of the crusades, those who took up the call to retake the holy land through violence would be bestowed in death with all the heavenly benefits of martyrdom. This view of the cosmically ordained righteousness of Christians and the demonic intentions of their foes pervades Western consciousness from Paul, to Constantine, to descriptions of the Vikings, to the Crusades, to conflicts with the Ottomans, to American explanations of the morality of slavery, right up to the modern American right’s belief in a heavenly mandate for their cause.

With this cultural priming, American whites have had to contend, first, with a genuine threat of obliteration from an ostensibly secular nuclear power. And now, the real threat passed, they are faced with a far more banal world-ending event. The march of demographics pre-ordains that Conservative whites will lose their voting majority in the future. This idea, framed in academic terms as a natural and neutral event, becomes in the hands of right-wing crack pots a premeditated ethnic cleansing: “replacement theory.” This seemingly inexorable movement towards voting minority (or more likely plurality) is paired with the depressing reality that their preferred policy prescriptions for isolating themselves from their Black neighbors has created a quality-of-life bottleneck that boomeranged back onto Conservative whites’ own children. Ubiquitous single-family zoning has limited the housing supply to the point that young people entering the job market are effectively priced out of housing in many areas. A current of anti-intellectualism coupled with a calculated defunding of schools at all levels post-Brown v. Board convinced many young whites, especially males, that college isn’t worth it, or else saddled them with crippling debt. This, combined with their now-unaffordable rent and the multi-thousand dollar depreciating asset they need just to get to work from the suburbs, compiles into one of the first falls in quality-of-life from one generation to the next in American history.

American Conservatives have painted themselves into a corner. Unlike European countries that adopted social policies to blunt the worst effects of capitalism, and thereby diffuse the left’s revolutionary zeal, American Conservatives cannot reconcile with policies that would accrue to Black people because they have spent decades building a political coalition based on the fundamental belief that hardworking-bluecollar-salt-of-the-earth-red-blooded-God-fearing-small-business-owners are solely deserving of social status in American culture. And so policies that might benefit these paragons of American virtue must be discarded out-of-hand if there is even a chance that the same benefit might accrue to the unworthy, the alien, the Welfare Queen. This leaves struggling white Americans up a creek – with a privileged position in the country’s cultural life that does not translate into the most basic promise of an improved quality-of-life for their children. These failures are internalized as the result of disdain from “Coastal Elites,” an impression which on a cultural level can certainly be accurate at times, but which on a political level requires the willful misinterpretation of liberal policy positions that would benefit Conservatives’ lauded rural working man as well.

And this is where the American Progressive movement has resoundingly failed. Ridiculing an opposing political coalition who is motivated by fear and perceived contempt is not only moronic politics, but more importantly evinces a misunderstanding of the phenomenon. Arendt, once again, lights the way,

The masses’ escape from reality is a verdict against the world in which they’re forced to live.

There are two ways to Trump voters’ hearts: the Social Security way, or the Cold War way. Either find a way to acknowledge their suffering, offer real solutions to their problems, and redirect their impulse for cultural dominance towards the creation of a shared identity with the nation as a whole; or find a credible, foreign, existential threat.

An exchange between one of the architects of the modern Christian political movement and a leader of America’s real existential threat illustrates the point:

President Ronald Reagan, “What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?”

Gorbachev, “No doubt about it.”

Reagan said, “We too.”

Gorbachev, “So that’s interesting.”