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 |  Subject: The self-radicalizing logic of conservative intellectuals  Wed Jan 12, 2022 8:15 pm | |
| How an unlikely hope led to a dark new radicalism among the right's intelligentsia
Much has been written about the transformation of the GOP over the past several years from the party of Ronald Reagan to the party of Donald Trump and his populist imitators. But at the same time a parallel change has been taking place among conservative intellectuals.
This evolution of ideas and temperament has been catalyzed by the political shift to Trumpian politics, but it isn't reducible to that change. Ideas, like psychological dispositions, shift according to their own logic. What we have been witnessing among growing numbers of conservative thinkers is a process of self-radicalization driven by the interaction of political events with prior ideological assumptions and moods.
The most pessimistic and culturally alienated thinkers on the American right have been given hope — and that distinctive mixture is an ideal fuel for political extremism.
During my own time as an ideological conservative, which overlaps quite closely with the first term of George W. Bush's presidency, I worked under Richard John Neuhaus at First Things magazine. Neuhaus was a conservative Catholic priest, but he was also an American patriot and (usually, though not always) an optimist who wanted to believe that all good things could go together. So he sought to develop an ideological outlook that smoothed over tensions among various institutions and projects: The Reaganite Republican Party, including the Bush administration's Global War on Terrorism; the American experiment in democracy; free-market capitalism; political liberalism, rightly understood; evangelical Protestantism; and the Catholic Church of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
According to the outlook cultivated and promoted by First Things in that era, one could be — moreover, one ought to be — a moral traditionalist, a Republican, a promoter of American democracy and neoliberal economics at home and American-style democracy and political economy abroad, and a devout (orthodox) believer in Abrahamic religion. (There were a small number of Orthodox Jews in the First Things orbit, and, prior to the 9/11 attacks, the magazine made overtures to Muslims as well.)
As a pessimist myself and someone predisposed to see intractable problems and contradictions all around me, I came to dissent rather strongly from this ideological project and program. But more interesting in light of subsequent history was the private reaction of many members of the First Things circle of intellectuals to Neuhaus' optimistic drive toward political, moral, economic, and theological synthesis.
Once a year, the First Things governing board would convene in New York City, along with frequent contributors to the magazine, to discuss the state of the country and the world, the conservative movement, and related subjects. I worked at the magazine for nearly four years, and every such meeting devolved into a cry of cultural despair, even though a friend and ally was then ensconced in the White House.
That's because the people in the room were profoundly alienated from the moral, cultural, and spiritual drift of contemporary American life, and they didn't expect that to change. They supported the Bush administration and were willing to provide a public defense of its policy agenda. But in private they doubted any of it would fundamentally change the most troubling trends unfolding around them. Abortion would remain legal. Homosexuality would keep being normalized and even celebrated. Pornography would continue to permeate the culture. Euthanasia would become more widely accepted. Secularism would persist in its march through the country and its institutions.
From the emergence of the first conservatives in the wake of the French Revolution, this has been the default disposition of those who have risen up in defiance of cultural, moral, and political change. The latest shift in mores always inspires gloom among conservatives. That doesn't mean conservatives have always been quietists. On the contrary, they have often allied with other, less purely conservative political factions to try to slow, halt, or even reverse the direction of change.
More: .https://theweek.com/republicans/1008822/the-self-radicalizing-logic-of-conservative-intellectuals |
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