In September 1966, age 17, I escaped from Pittsburgh. In September 2002, I escaped from what American conservatism was becoming. The two liberations are not unrelated.
Leaving Pittsburgh for Yale University was exalting. I loved the place; I still do. But within a few weeks I found myself thinking, “Something’s very wrong here.” A few weeks more and I understood. The problem was the New Left, as it was called back then. Not so much the substance. Although I’d been a teenage Goldwater supporter (come back, Barry; all is forgiven), I never saw any sense in Vietnam and had little use for racism, for what later became known as male chauvinism, or for the notion that the planet is ours to trash. What bothered me was the New Left’s style—the self-righteous grandiosity, the desire to be shocking, the leering arrogance and acting out, the screaming, the crude hints of violence.
The final epiphany came in September 1967 as my class sat in the Morse College dining hall, working through our registration packets. Course schedule. ID cards. Laundry and miscellaneous amenities.
Application for II-S student-draft deferment.
No one’s eyes met as we filled out the form. But on the way out, guys exploded into obscenities and maledictions about evil fascist Amerika: how tragic it was that we had to debase ourselves thus; let the revolution come, and all the usual rest.
Who was kidding who? And about what? Did they really believe what they were saying? Or were they merely saying it to reinforce each other in their boundless self-esteem?
And I knew. This style of contrived unreality, this latticework of invincible ignorance and arrogance and self-serving delusion, this quest for unearned moral superiority would ultimately do great and lasting damage to the Republic.
And now that the NFR, the New Far Right, the imploded, metastatic Right, has embraced this way of seeing and speaking and doing . . . the damage is real and about to become grievous.
As I write this (August 2009), we’ve had two years of lunacy and ugliness, from the ongoing “birther” nonsense to the summer “town brawls” over health care. The lunacy and ugliness will only intensify as 2010 unfolds in all its imminent disaster. So it matters to understand what drives these people.
There are three explanations, all of value.
The first is, in essence: Nothing new here. Fifty years ago, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote of “the paranoid style in American politics.” He had a point. The fringe ye have always with you. But this fringe is no longer confined to the fringes, and when times are hard and the ruling oligarchies falter, hitherto fringy people and ideas begin to appeal to the hitherto immune.
They appeal for a very good reason. People in desperation crave certainty. And the NFR has, if nothing else, certainty. Some might call it religious certainty. It is. But a certain kind of religion and a certain kind of certainty.
Ever since the electoral debacle of 2006, and certainly since 2008, the NFR has acted like a religious cult whose prophecies have failed and whose leaders have brought them only disaster. Under such circumstances, cults often move to reassure their remaining members: “We weren’t wrong. We just weren’t right enough.”
So they reinforce each other with ever more extreme affirmations, often bizarre to outsiders, pending the arrival of the next prophet or messiah. Another form of reassurance is to declare themselves combatants in a Manichean struggle of Good versus Evil, with themselves as the saving remnant and with every issue a matter of cosmic importance, not mundane disagreement and compromise. Thus the lunacy over health care.
So the NFR partakes of both traditional and all-too-human nutsiness and the fervor of true believers cast (temporarily) into the wilderness. But something more is involved.
Around the time historian Hofstadter was dissecting America’s journey from the Salem witch trials to the John Birch Society, sociologist Philip Rieff was writing about “the triumph of the therapeutic”—the elevation of psychologized values and ethics over all others. In this organization of human interiority, the relevant question is neither “What are the rules?” nor “What are the consequences?” nor even “Is this rational or real?” What matters is: “How do I feel, especially about myself?” The Vietnam “Resistance,” that carnival superimposed upon a tragedy, knew of this. So too has nearly every Left protest movement since. The Bush administration’s greatest nightmare was never Code Pink and its flaunting antics. It was a few million sober, modestly attired, dignified Americans getting together and proclaiming, “Stop these pointless, disastrous wars. Now.”
I did what little I could. In 2002, I became one of the first mainstream conservatives to publicly oppose the upcoming Iraq war and the Bush/neocon agenda. After getting invited to leave a conservative think tank, I broke away totally. In truth, it had been a long time coming: decades of increasing disillusionment with conservative obduracy on everything from the environment to women and gays to the delusion that America must or can run the world. And slowly I realized: These people aren’t reacting to reality. They’re reacting to how they feel, especially about themselves. And in particular, to the feeling that they, the Children of Light, have been deprived of their rightful place at the center of the American universe by Children of Darkness who refuse to acknowledge their goals and values as the ideals toward which all must at least pretend to aspire. This was more than “stranger in my own land” resentment. This was the reaction of those who had little left beyond resentment . . . and a self-image redolent of ’60s hubris.
For the past few decades, America could afford such attitudes and indulgences. Rising markets cover a lot of mistakes, elide a lot of problems. But we no longer have the material luxury of letting prosperity take care of things.
Nor have we the intellectual and moral resources to oppose them. All we have is a Left that long ago devolved into self-referent PC sterility and a people deep into learned helplessness. For decades, we have squandered our intellectual and moral as well as our physical and financial capital.
And it’s funny. When you dumb down your intellect, inevitably you dumb down your emotions. You also coarsen them both. This happens to civilizations as well as individuals. The dumbing down of the mind. Then the coarsening of the emotions. Then the reckoning.
It’s at hand.
—Philip Gold
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