It feels right: An essay about the modern, anti-rationalist radical right

A commentary that Salon published makes some good points about America's radical right. The commentary was written by Mike Lofgren, a former congressional staff member and the author of "The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted." One has to like that book title. Lofgren writes:

There's no such thing as a conservative intellectual — only apologists for right-wing power

From Burke to Buckley to Patrick Deneen (a recent DP post on Deneen is here), we've seen a 200-year history of defending the indefensible

The hundreds of conservative book titles that have geysered out of Regnery, Broadside and other right-wing imprints in recent years are almost invariably distinguished by their numbing sameness: a shrill cry of victimhood, a hunt for scapegoats, a tone that alternates between hysteria and heavy sarcasm, and a recipe for salvation cribbed from Republican National Committee talking points and Heritage Foundation issue briefs. The fact that they sometimes hit the bestseller list is principally due to the well-funded conservative media-entertainment complex's bulk-purchase scam[1].

However much modern theorists have elaborated upon the ideas inherent in conservatism during the two centuries since Maistre[2], they all seem to me to boil down to three simple points:

1. A desire for hierarchy and human inequality. This belief derives from the medieval religious notion of the Great Chain of Being, whereby there is a place for everybody and everybody must know his place. It justifies economic exploitation and denial of political rights. Conservative writers propagandize on its behalf with a straw-man argument: Any gain in equality costs society an equal or greater loss in freedom; egalitarianism is the mere soulless equality of the gulag, where we cannot own property and must share toothbrushes. This sentiment pops up consistently in the works of American conservative theorists, from Buckley's "Unless you have freedom to be unequal, there is no such thing as freedom," to David Brooks' hankering for rule by a wise elite. American-style laissez-faire economics and libertarianism are largely based on this idea.

2. The only acceptable society is based on Christianity. Never mind the establishment clause of the First Amendment; conservatives will forever try to smuggle in more and more official endorsement of religion until the United States is effectively a theocracy. The rationale is that some sort of divine or transcendental dispensation is the sole basis for a just temporal order. Translated into the bumper-sticker mentality of American Christian fundamentalism, that means that if people don't believe in God, there's nothing to stop them from running amok and killing people. 

3. We must obey tradition. For some unexplained reason, our ancestors were infinitely wiser than us, and apparently they get a vote on present affairs. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, if we're going to have democracy, let's extend it to the dead. Scratch someone who fancies himself an educated conservative and you will often find a person who reveres the past; unfortunately they leave out details like slavery, witch burning and childbed fever. Many psychologists consider this mentality to be a cognitive bias in brain function, but whatever its source, the political utility of the attitude is obvious: Utopia only exists in an ever-receding past, progress is impossible, and future generations shall profess bygone superstitions. And tradition, in this case, means the folkways of a specific, favored culture, thus denying the universality of the human spirit. The idea is well expressed by Buckley's statement that conservatives must "stand athwart history yelling 'stop.'"  

Conservative theorizing on politics, civil society or ethics and morals is very likely derived from one or more of these three axiomatic rules. A notable example is Michael Oakeshott, a British conservative much esteemed by Buckley, Andrew Sullivan and other figures in the conservative movement for his suggestion that rationalism in politics ultimately leads to police states and concentration camps.

Rationalism in democratic politics ultimately leads to police states and concentration camps? I don't think so. Irrationalism in all politics, pro- or anti-democracy, tends to do that, not pro-democracy rationalism. This is the radical right explicitly rejecting rationalism. That dogma gives radicals license to deny inconvenient facts, true truths and sound reasoning in the name of the greater whatever, God, dogma or corporate raid. In my firm opinion, rejecting rationalism is the epitome of deep corruption, unprincipled moral rot, and authoritarianism. 

A quibble that's appropriate to voice here is, as usual, Lofgren does not really understand what he is dealing with. He just doesn't get it. It is not conservatism that's in play now in America. It is radical right, anti-democracy authoritarianism. It is the powerful urge that is always present among some people for the promised, comforting simplicity of tyranny. Too many people want and need a dictator, powerful capitalist plutocrats and/or powerful Christian theocrats to comfort them and make the cognitive dissonance of inconvenient truth go away with partisan fantasies and faux realities. Calling radical right authoritarianism 'conservative' masks and distracts from the far more dangerous reality. That's a big, unjustifiable mistake.

Qs: Is it necessary for modern authoritarians to reject rationalism in politics because there is just too much inconvenient fact, true truth and sound reasoning to accommodate in building and maintaining tyranny? Could that be the reason why America is being torn apart by two Overton Windows, one for the center-left to center-right and one for the extremist radical right authoritarians, assuming one believes there are two open Overton Windows?

Footnotes: 

1. In 2021, the WaPo wrote about the Republican's book scam: 

Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s memoir and social critique, “Fortitude: American Resilience in the Era of Outrage,” soared to the top of the bestseller lists when it was published last year. The book helped raise the former Navy SEAL’s profile and burnished his credentials as a rising star among freshman congressmen.

The National Republican Congressional Committee, which works to elect GOP candidates to Congress, spent nearly $400,000 on bulk purchases of the book. The organization acquired 25,500 copies through two online booksellers, enough to fuel “Fortitude’s” ascent up the bestseller lists. The NRCC said it gave away copies as incentives to donors, raising $1.5 million in the process.

Good grief, even the bestseller list has been hacked by RRRAs (radical right Republican authoritarians). Can one trust anything any more? Yes, indeed. One can trust there will be lots more lies, slanders, crackpottery, dirty tricks like hacking the bestseller list and lunacy from the RRRAs in coming years. Some rising RRRA stars get their stardom in part by hacking the bestseller lists. In my firm opinion, the Republican Party is an shell devoid of morals, principles and restraining norms. Only winning power and wealth matter.

2. Émile Faguet, a French author and critic, called Maistre "a fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist, apostle of a monstrous trinity composed of pope, king and hangman, always and everywhere the champion of the hardest, narrowest and most inflexible dogmatism, a dark figure out of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner." That's all the essential points of the present conservative mind. 

Woof! That's harsh by golly.