He argues that 200 years of conservatism ideation all have three fundamentals in common.
A desire for hierarchy and human inequality.
The only acceptable society is based on Christianity.
We must obey tradition.
It is not too much to say that conservative apologetics is a vast rhetorical structure that purports to say one thing when it means another. Economic freedom means the right to exploit one’s natural inferiors; religious freedom equates to imposing religion on sinful unbelievers; defense of tradition means censoring and rewriting history, the better to make the present seem like the culmination of conservative ideas.
Since WWII, these fundamentals have manifested themselves in three dominating wings of conservatism.
Econcons, whose bugaboos were economic planning, deficits, and welfare states. Neocons, who used the military to spread American ideals. Theocons, Christians theocrats that want to rule according to their ideas of the Bible.
He argues that the first two have been discredited by the repeated, endless, tragic failures of their policies. Nothing is left other than Theocracy.
I’m putting this thread in P&E rather than Great Debates because I don’t want to debate this. It’s all true and beautifully researched and summarized. Lofgren’s argument is a political one. They’re coming to get us.
Ever since the Joe McCarthy era, conservative intellectuals have played a game of rhetorical obfuscation, never quite coming out and saying that their real problem with America wasn’t with elites or liberals or creeping socialism or a godless civic culture, but rather with the very notion of popular democracy under the rule of law. Deneen [the author of a book he reviews] at least renders us the service of telling us what he desires: the “overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class” and its replacement with a new elite, his elite, that would rule through “raw assertion of political power.”
We’re a long way from William F. Buckley saying in 1961 that “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty.”
Trump isn’t that scary. He’s a useful idiot. (No, Lenin didn’t say it.) People who believe in hell and are willing to send you there based on nothing other than you not being them are scary. I think they are a receding minority. But useful idiots are thick on the ground.
I do too but I worry that they are going to be aggressive the way a cornered rat is. They will see the country is slipping away from them, feel that there is nothing to lose, and would rather burn it down than see people they hate in charge.
I’m not sure that I agree with 2#, the part about this all being based off of Christianity.
I’ve interacted with a lot of Trumpers on message boards over the last few years, and I’ve noticed that a great many of them care little for Christianity at all, or even if they claim the religious label, hardly have anything that indicates that they know anything about the Bible or doctrine or anything.
Rather, they just rage against woke-ism, SJW-ism, Obama, Biden, Hillary, and whatever, but there’s very little Christian flavor to their raging. They dislike it just because they dislike it.
So I think it’s perfectly possible to have non-theological conservatism.
And there are still a few bona fide conservative intellectuals left; I think people like David French, Robert Gates, etc. count.
I would dispute this point. I feel the real principle at work is that the only acceptable Christianity is based on right wing ideology.
The Theocon movement has very little to do with spreading anything that has any resemblance to the teachings of Jesus. They have hijacked Jesus’ good reputation and attached it to a political agenda which Jesus himself would never have supported.
The point specifically is that whatever thin intellectual base behind conservatism has been taken over by the Christian nationalists.
If I didn’t say openly enough before, Trump and his base are the useful idiots. They have no thoughts to contribute. They rage against whatever they are told is evil. Who decides this? Evil has been a special preoccupation in western culture for hundreds of years, first with Catholics and later, especially in the U.S., with Protestants. They, especially what is left of the Southern Baptists, get all the press today, but Deenan, from the article, is a Catholic intellectual. John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are all Catholics. Neil Gorsuch was raised Catholic but is now an Episcopalian.
And aren’t Gates and French never-Trumpers? That means they now have less influence over the future of the movement than AOC.
Pointing this truth out hasn’t gotten anyone very far. Any time in American history. Heck, Thomas Jefferson tried to make a thing of it and got vilified as an atheist.
At the risk of hijacking the thread, I think it’s more that the Bible, being an immensely thick book of vastly different writings, contains immense fodder for both right-wingers and left-wingers to use. You can spin almost any political view or theology you want out of those 31,000 verses.
The right-wingers, of course, select the conservative-sounding verses and discard the liberal-sounding ones. So yes, you’re right, to these Trumpers, right-wing-ism is the Supreme Court of theology and politics, so to speak, and the Bible has to take a back seat to it.
The same thing happened among Muslim extremists and the Koran’s teachings. We see the danger when any religion gets hijacked by people with ill intent.
The Federalist Society “has a large presence on Notre Dame’s campus” noted the Nov. 11 issue of Scholastica, the student magazine. Notre Dame is “kind of like the Federalist Society distilled in the sense of that’s the place you go for your judges and this is where you go for your clerks. Its graduates take on major roles in the legal field,” a Notre Dame Law School faculty member told Genevieve Redsten Scholastica.
I don’t think it’s really a matter of creative reading of the text. I think the important point is that most followers aren’t following the text; they’re following the leaders. They’re not doing what the Bible tells them. They’re doing what people tell them the Bible tells them.
They tell themselves that this is okay because they believe that the leaders they’re following are fellow Christians who are advancing Christianity.
But I think the reality is that the leaders are no longer really interested in advancing Christianity. They now identify themselves as powerful and wealthy people and they are advancing the interests of powerful and wealthy people like themselves. The rank and file Christians are not getting any benefit out of this program.
Cyrus (aka Koresh) was the Emperor of Persia. He was not a Jew but he gave some benefits to the Jews who lived in his Empire. This got him good reviews in the Old Testament.
Modern Christian conservatives (who identify themselves as the heirs of the Old Testament Jews) point to this precedent when explaining away Trump’s sins. He may not be a good Christian himself but he’s aiding Christians. So Christians should ignore his sinful personal behavior and support him.
Personally I feel the better Biblical model for Trump is the Serpent. Trump is telling Christians lies and offering them secular benefits in order to lead them away from God.
A common thread of people who support theocracy is an attitude of “We can do this the easy way, or the hard way - but it must be done eventually, whatever “it” is.”
Their attitude towards America is very similar to their attitude towards parenting. Either the child can willingly and enthusiastically go to church, read the Bible, pray, sing in the choir, and all that - or be forced against their will to - but either way, it must be done in the end. We’ve all known countless instances of this.
So they take their parenting attitude towards America as well. It’s important to bear in mind that theocrats don’t consider force to be ideal. The ideal is for America to willingly and enthusiastically embrace their version of Christianity, ditch abortion, voluntarily pray in schools, everyone goes to church, everyone becomes a bona fide right-wing Christian of their own volition. Using force is their second resort, or last resort.
Their reasoning is, “We’ve been so patient but our patience is now running out. We’ve given America many decades to come around and it just hasn’t. America refused to do it the easy way. So we now have to do it the hard way.”
Either that, or it’s some version of “our land was invaded and taken away from us.” America was a Godly nation, but then secular bacteria came in, infected, and took over the body and now America is fighting for its life against sepsis; some analogy like that.
What if one substituted black Americans for Christians? “We’ve been so patient but our patience is now running out. We’ve given America many decades to come around and it just hasn’t. America refused to do it the easy way. So we now have to do it the hard way.” The Christians would go absolutely berserk. We’d be in martial law in ten minutes.
It’s the core thinking that is so frightening. “We have a holy book whose every word is God’s law (although we reinterpret those words all the time for our convenience and pretend we don’t.) The country must be run according to those words because secular society is anathema (even if it gives us virtually everything we want). Until then we can opt out of secular law with impunity.”
That’s the mentality of extreme religiosity everywhere. In Israel, in Muslim countries, in Catholic-dominated countries, and here where Protestants want to rule. It’s always frightening. It leads to oppression, bigotry, inequality, anti-intellectualism, war. Reason cannot be applied, because faith is to them reason. God said it: that’s reason enough.
The rest of us, fortunately the majority although the principle would be the same even if we were in the minority, must build a wall against such thought. Although it could never be legislated, treating the mentality as the hate crime it is might someday put it under the same rocks as its buddies in the KKK, neo-Nazis, and white separatists. (Who would be a lot less powerful if Christian nationalism were removed from the equation.)