In what passes for conservatives’ moral vision, they embody all the worst demons of Protestantism and capitalism. They’re the living, breathing id of hierarchy and oppression. A descendant of America’s Calvinist tradition, modern secular conservatism exists to settle the same pinched-faced hysterics into a comfortable and pampered suburban existence. Despite its religious affectations, conservatism long ago replaced God with country, which allows them to directly worship America as both their lord and personal friend while celebrating the same petty and punitive characteristics that defined an earlier deity. To the conservative, America’s vast wealth and power are signs of its goodness, because if there’s one thing the Bible is clear about in both the Old and New Testaments, it’s that rich and powerful empires are good and blessed by God.
So what does “America” mean to a conservative? What do they really believe in? The answer to both questions is, of course: freedom. America is a shining beacon of freedom, with a hype man called “liberty.” It’s the best country because it’s the freest country, and, as such, the greatest country that God—which is also America—ever created. A liberal will most likely snort at this, cough up their kombucha, fall off their tassled-handlebarred bicycle, and get up off the pavement just long enough to say that conservatives have traditionally been violently opposed to the freedom of most people in American history. They would be right, but are, as usual, missing the more important point, which is that, to a conservative, freedom means something very different from what a normal person imagines.
In the right-wing vernacular, freedom means the freedom to exercise one’s God-given right to dominate anyone deemed lower than you. This includes rich over poor, men over women, employers over employees, white over black, and America over the rest of the world. This is why, in the conservative mythology, there are few greater enemies than “big government.” In the modern era, it’s usually the federal government that has unjustly intervened in this natural order.
During the George W. Bush years, Thomas Frank asked in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas? why average, salt-of-the-earth types consistently vote for a party so transparently dedicated to fucking them over. The answer given by liberals is usually that the conservative movement is running a massive grift wherein they trick their marks into voting against their own economic interests by catering to their prejudices through a number of “social” issues and culture-war signifiers like abortion and gay marriage. In other words, conservatives run on gays, guns, and God as they dismantle the public sector and facilitate the upward transfer of wealth once they get into office.
While it’s true that anyone who’s not a millionaire or richer is voting against their economic interests by supporting Republicans, the same could be said of the modern Democratic Party as well, and this idea that the Republican base is being “tricked” lets them off the hook too easily. Enough of the red-state rubes in question might vote against economic domination if the Democrats offered an alternative, but in the absence of that, liberals would do well to realize that, to the traditionally minded, the maintenance of racial, religious, and gender hierarchies does, in fact, deliver the goods to the roughly one-third of this country that identifies as conservative. They do get something tangible from this deal: resistance against bathroom sickos, the petty privilege of being white, and the cathartic sadism of American military conquest and warfare.
Conservative religion holds that the representatives of that sadism, its prophets, are the tough, stoic heirs to America’s rugged frontier tradition. But the collection of penguin-shaped dunces in Under Armour polos and khaki shorts grazing through America’s exurbs tends to spoil this myth. These war-dads and bow-tie perverts are unable to reconcile their actual lives with the values of primitive domination and masculine authority they hold so dear. This dynamic is best embodied by political philosopher, neocon godfather, and genuine Harvard professor of “manliness” Harvey Mansfield, who once told the New York Times he displays his own strength and masculine prowess by “lifting things” and “opening things” for his wife, “who is quite small.” Mansfield noted that his lifting included “furniture. Not every night, but routinely.” I
Since the noble qualities conservatives obsess over have been bureaucratized out of existence in the “civilized” West, they fetishize military “operators,” cowboys, and business entrepreneurs, imagining themselves to be rebelling against modern culture. Unbearable, treacly self-regard gives them a lump in their throat when they think of parades, the flag, baseball, and other people running into machine-gun fire on D-Day. Books with names like The Patriot’s Playbook and American Lion: How to Thrive in Life after Marriage sit on their nightstands. Their lives are the epitome of the much-derided “safe space,” and they are constantly offended by everyone and everything who ever hurt their feelings or, even worse, hurt the feelings of America.
Ironically, becoming a popular movement is precisely what undermined the right-wing project drawn up by its founding intellectuals: guys like William Buckley and Russell Kirk—names that no conservative will know in fifty years—planned to build a Platonic kingdom of logical, limited government that funneled society’s wealth to deserving aristocrats, where intellectuals would become philosopher kings over the simple masses. But that required popularizing their ideology and mobilizing the hoopleheads to win elections, which in turn required a much more rigorous apparatus of power and propaganda than the Republicans of old.
Over time, supported by the money of anemic oligarchs who saw the potential to rubber-stamp their (fairly nonideological) capital accumulation, the conservative brainiacs and think-tankers preached culture war, states’ rights, small government, and low taxes. They smuggled in right-wing economics, something middle America didn’t care about, by draping it in cultural bullshit, something middle America couldn’t get enough of. And, as Frank’s book argued, it played pretty well. For a long time they masterfully triangulated racial and class resentments to enrich the upper classes while the Democrats gave up trying to offer alternatives. Within a couple of decades, the New Deal was dying, and “conservatism” was back, with an ideology, a coalition, presidents in office, and a vast customer base—er, voter base—of angry, aging white cranks.
Only problem was, by opening the doors to the CHUDs and the riffraff, the Republicans let in a bunch of wackjobs who actually believed the intellectuals’ Noble Lie, or at least pretended to in order to out-crazy an increasingly batshit wave of GOP populists. As the years rolled on, the movement’s homophobia, racism, and authoritarianism started to unnerve even the very ghouls who set the whole thing in motion.
The Republican Party has certainly conquered American politics. The catch, however, is that in the meantime, American culture could not be more inhospitable to them. The monster created by the effete intellectuals may now turn against its masters. Donald Trump is a stupid, gauche, uncultured philistine whose unabashed jingoism and racism has probably inaugurated a new era of right-wing Blood and Soil politics—which, believe it or not, hinders the interests of the well-manicured, multinational cartel of rich Republican vampires that nurtured the conservative movement.
Now, before we forecast where that nightmare project is ultimately headed, let’s meet some of those aforementioned philosopher kings and queens who founded this dark universe.
Conservatism: A Rich Intellectual Tradition
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Like any good political movement, American conservatism draws on its own tradition of writers and thinkers that make it vital, complex, and, most important, extremely fucking funny. Despite being caricatured as less of an ideology than a series of “irritable mental gestures,” “the incessant whining of collicky adult babies,” or “thinly veiled justifications for base prejudice and ignorance,” the conservative movement does have a proud intellectual heritage of hating anything intellectual. Great minds like Ben Shapiro or Megan McArdle weren’t just hatched as fully pupated geniuses—they were the inheritors of a long and storied conserv
ative canon of truly impressive men and women who have shaped the world we live in today.
RUSSELL KIRK
“Who?” you’re probably asking. And you would be right to do so. Russell Kirk hasn’t been relevant to American conservatism since Gerald Ford last fell down a flight of stairs, but there are still some pencil-necks out there (mostly employed by the New York Times op-ed page) who will insist that “conservative” doesn’t refer to goose-stepping neo-fascists and snake-handling religious fanatics. You’ve got it all wrong, they insist. Conservatism is a rich intellectual tradition!
To make the case, they can’t point to the collection of televangelists, game show hosts, carnival barkers, and anime characters who inspire contemporary reactionary thought, so they dust off ol’ Russ. Kirk was a grumpy Catholic paleocon who called automobiles “mechanical Jacobins” and whose books are filled with such sterling insights as “Tradition is good; that’s why it’s traditional” and “Christianity, gotta have it.” The next time some bow-tied dingus brings up Russell Kirk after the speaker of the House proposes giving cops rocket launchers, remember that the last person to read Kirk was required to do so for David Brooks’s Yale class about humility.
JERRY FALWELL AND PAT ROBERTSON
The Master Blaster of rising theocracy, Falwell and Robertson spearheaded the radicalization of American evangelical Christians. Before this power duo came along, most God-touched citizens steered clear of political organizing and, in many cases, voting. “That’s the devil’s bidness,” they would remark before returning to their humble beet harvest. It was only in the 1970s, when Big Government Liberals started interfering with their noble folkways, that evangelical Christians awakened politically.
No, it wasn’t the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion that broke the camel’s back. Common mistake. It was actually the federal government’s efforts to strip tax-exempt status from segregated Christian private schools. Something had to be done to stop this godless assault on traditional values. Jerry Falwell, who’d founded a radio show called the Old-Time Gospel Hour and Klanbake as a youth and spent the 1950s and ’60s barnstorming against integration, founded the Moral Majority in 1979 to protest the loss of Bob Jones University’s tax exemption for the “crime” of forbidding black students from attending. He was helped in his mission by Pat Robertson, another Baptist fire-eater whose 700 Club show kept generations of Christian shut-ins company while they wrote outraged letters to PBS about Henrietta Pussycat’s whorish ensembles.
These Pentecostal Powerhouses combined to turn the 1980s into the decade when white Christians woke up to the necessity of fighting the culture war at the ballot box. Along the way, Falwell sued Larry Flynt for writing that he fucked his sister, resulting in a landmark Supreme Court decision that has freed trolls to own the shit out of public figures with no consequences ever since.
Robertson actually ran for president in the Republican primary in 1988, but lost to human charisma volcano George H. W. Bush. In later years Falwell and Robertson both presided over religious colleges that spit out class after class of glassy-eyed true believers who filled the ranks of the W. Bush administration. The Bush years were also the high point for Robertson’s and Falwell’s most insane public statements: blaming 9/11 on feminists, blaming Hurricane Katrina on voodoo, and defending Liberian dictator Charles Taylor (who awarded Robertson a gold-mining concession in his country). Robertson also touted a pancake mix that he claimed gave him the ability to leg press two thousand pounds.
AYN RAND
In the pantheon of great Russian novelists, names like Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Bulgakov spring to mind. Missing from the usual suspects is Rand, whose catalog is richer than that of all those goofies put together. Perhaps the single greatest popularizer of the “libertarian” strain of right-wing thought, Ayn Rand immigrated to America in 1926 after the Bolshevik Revolution and immediately began her own American success story. She traveled to Hollywood with dreams of being a screenwriter, and a chance meeting with Cecil B. DeMille scored her the role of “Jewess #2” in the biblical epic The King of Kings. She went on to write a batshit manual advising Hollywood studios on how best to glorify industrialists and stamp out Communism.II
Don’t preach the superiority of public ownership as such over private ownership. Don’t preach or imply that all publicly-owned projects are noble, humanitarian undertakings by grace of the mere fact that they are publicly-owned—while preaching, at the same time, that private property or the defense of private property rights is the expression of some sort of vicious greed, of anti-social selfishness or evil. . . .
Don’t spit into your own face, or, worse, pay miserable little rats to do it.
You, as a motion picture producer, are an industrialist. All of us are employees of an industry which gives us a good living. There is an old fable about a pig who filled his belly with acorns, then started digging to undermine the roots of the oak from which the acorns came. Don’t let’s allow that pig to become our symbol.
Despite her early success in Tinseltown, Rand didn’t really become famous in America until she published The Fountainhead, her novel about an architect named Howard Roark who is better than everyone else. By creating a character who was supposed to be the coolest guy ever and who directly said all the things she believed, Rand took literature to a brave and bold new place. She would use this technique again in her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, a novel about a big, powerful train that also features a character who was the greatest person who ever lived and said exactly what Rand believed, sometimes for stretches of ninety pages, all of it shimmering prose.
Rand knew that before her arrival, art and fiction were mostly tools for the weak and desperate to blame others for their lot in life. A true revolutionary, she embedded in her fiction a competing philosophy, a holistic system of ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics. She called this system “Objectivism,” because it was objectively true. This system held that man is an inherently heroic being and that individual happiness and fulfillment is the only moral good one should aspire to. During a famous appearance on the game show You Bet Your Life, she told host Groucho Marx that Objectivism came only “out of my own mind, with the sole acknowledgment of a debt to Aristotle, the only philosopher who ever influenced me.” To which Groucho retorted, “Try telling that to Nietzsche!” and then ashed his cigar in her lap.
Like all great philosophers, Rand realized that her system of ethics didn’t mean anything unless she possessed a cadre of credulous rich people hanging off her every word. So, she created the Collective, a group of what the weak and timid usually call “friends,” who would meet at her apartment to go over the latest draft of Atlas while Rand berated them for their many personal failings. A young Alan Greenspan was an early acolyte and member of the Collective who would go on to apply the Objectivist beliefs of anti-altruism and ethical megalomania to great effect as chairman of the Federal Reserve. In perhaps her most glorious philosophical triumph, Rand broke up the marriage of two members of the Collective so she could keep having sex with the guy using only reason, facts, and logic.
Rand’s legacy in right-wing thought is clear. Not only did she write several thousand pages’ worth of pseudo-philosophical drivel that declared the highest moral good was achieved in being the biggest asshole possible, but, in elevating reason as supreme among all human faculties, she was the first philosopher to elevate facts over feelings.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Gilbert Keith Chesterton is the favorite writer of a particular type of American reactionary: the Trad(itional)Cath(olic). He taught a generation of religious weirdos that piety can be funny and thoughtful and that wearing tarp-sized tweed jackets and a cape while carrying a walking stick is a cool look. Chesterton was Edwardian England’s most eloquent advocate for distributism, a Catholic social and economic system that contemporary TradCaths embrace, more (skepticism of big-government socialism) or less (actually distributing anything to anyone). Like many of
the Catholic Church’s most ardent defenders, Chesterton was a convert, which made him directly opposed to the Church’s fiercest critics and those heretics who actually had to grow up in it.
An extremely prolific writer, Chesterton was a poet, columnist, critic, and lay theologian who is best known for creating the famous character Encyclopedia Brown. A legendary wit, Chesterton is beloved by contemporary conservatives for his many deliciously quotable lines, such as “The worst part of being an educated man is receiving an education,” “The thing I love most about writing is not writing,” and “I owe my considerable girth to my beloved mother, who, when she sat around the house, sat around the house.”
Unfortunately, his body of work and reputation as a beloved doddering fatso were undone when it came out that his writing inspired C. S. Lewis to believe in God and write a stilted and punishing fantasy series that ruined the tender minds of a generation of children. In addition to incessantly coining acerbic phrases, Chesterton also enjoyed other pastimes beloved by contemporary conservatives, such as civil debate, anti-Semitism, and sweating while he ate.
PAUL KERSEY
The original “liberal who got mugged by reality,” Paul Kersey was a softhearted Upper West Sider whose heart bled for the poor and unfortunate until Jeff Goldblum and his gang of savage thugs brutally attacked his wife and daughter. Instead of checking his privilege or retreating to his safe space, Paul went out into the mean streets of Manhattan to deal out hot lead to thieves and vandals. This hard right turn mirrored much of American culture in the late 1970s and early ’80s as liberal, soft-on-crime policies led to gang rule in the streets.
Tough on crime and strongly in favor of the Second Amendment, Kersey had a Death Wish for the criminals who endangered law-abiding American citizens and a Life Wish for Constitutional Liberty. He also once lit up an entire South Bronx neighborhood with a Browning .50 cal. That was awesome. Whenever you read the comments on a local news article about crime in which every other response is a guy fantasizing about burying hip-hop thugs up to their necks and driving a John Deere over them, you’re taking part in the conservative style pioneered by Mr. Kersey.
The Chapo Guide to Revolution Page 9