Why Is the Political Right Always So Angry?

     Do you find yourself, when discussing politics or society or culture, struggling to define your terms?  Do you notice that anyone you are talking to struggles also, or else falsely assumes that you share a common nomenclature? No words are more empty, more available for broad, differing, even contradictory meanings, than words like "liberal" or "conservative." Liberal can mean either holding progressive views on society or conversely hands-off laissez-faire views of government, society and the economy (a rightist view). Conservative can mean someone who seeks to conserve the natural ecology of the planet (a leftist view) or someone who demands the maintenance of patriarchy and a host of precepts regarding abortion, birth control, and class, race and ethnic divisions. The antiquated designation of one party as the "Liberal Party" and another as the "Conservative Party" in Canada is a prime example of the ridiculous use of these terms. The Liberals really aim to conserve the so-called "environment" and a host of long-standing Canadian institutions; the "Conservatives" would like to usher in a new kind of "libertarianism."

     Putting aside liberal and conservative, what useful terms remain? Not many if we mean to divide North American societies into two distinct camps. We have neo-progressives (the pragmatic Obama style of what used to be termed "liberal"); we have neo-liberals (the free-marketers who will just not go away, despite reality); we have "libertarians" or hyper-individualists who extend free-market economic ideas to all of government and society. And, so it goes, as you all know.

   Yet we know that there are two opposing sides -- that the "born again" Christian is likely to support the free-market capitalist, and that the ecologist is likely to befriend governmental activism and be pro-choice and in favor of socialized health care -- despite the internal contradictions in these positions. So, how can we label them.  For many years now, I have simply divided the two camps into "traditionalists" and "modernists." Traditionalists (I also use the term "rightists" at times) tend to create a static vision of an ideal past (more of which later). Modernists (I also use the term "leftists" at times) tend to create a dynamic understanding of the past, present and future. [But, you might protest, the rise of modernism in art, for example, was a rise in individualism, in artists demanding that they be free to pursue art in their own highly individualistic fashion (much like the "libetarian" ideal that I place largely in the rightist camp with traditionalism). That is in part true. But more importantly, the artistic rebellion called "modernism" was a revolt against older, traditional forms of art. It was dynamic.]

     By now you have started your own list of ways in which my dialectic is wrong. I will not answer your objections here. The point is that "modernists" are open to new ideas, new ways of doing things, to experimentation. This does not mean that they are hostile to things like the "family," although they may be willing to expand the boundaries of family in new ways. The tend to favor the gifts that science can bestow -- not just in pure knowledge, but in the application of science. They may use philosophy and history to provide some general pathways, but they are not as gripped by specific philosophical mandates or historical imperatives in the way traditionalists are.  The ugly side of "modernism" and "modernization" comes when its adherents elevate some particulars to the altar of ideology. Modernization economic and development theory has ruined populations in much of the second and third world, even more so when its disciples refuse to recognize the ways it is not working. Cultural modernism rigidified becomes "political correctness," and can be just as nasty as any  right-wing position. Where modernism fails is where it loses its sense of dynamism and possibility.

   Traditionalism has its merits, I think, when it is emulates the better side of Edmund Burke's conservatism -- not in his particular love for the institutions of Church and Crown but in his argument that "habit," and what he called "prejudice," provide the mortar to hold societies and cultures together. This conservatism might be called the best of cultural evolution. But rightist politics, which I place under the umbrella of traditionalism, hardly follows Burke's conservative ideal any longer. Some might think that "Rightists" are attached to history, that they look to the past for answers.  But modern traditionalism -- those who cry out for the sanctity of the unborn, traditional marriage, patriarchy, and laissez-faire economics, and against government, taxes, bureaucracy, and even society itself on occasion -- are not devoted to lessons of the past or history. They are devoted to a mythical past of their own creation.

     History is about change over time, and its lessons are about how history can positively or negatively inform us about where we are now, and where we might go. Rightists are about fixed principles of economics, fixed principles of the family, and a fixed image of how society should operate, even if they articulate this vision very poorly.  In fact, they are idealists clinging to wrong ideas and romantics clinging to a time in the past that never existed. To be more precise, rightist businessmen (and they are usually men), some entrepreneurs, some industrialists, and most financial movers-and-shakers, live under the foggy impression that there once was something akin to the state of nature in economics -- sometime after Adam Smith (who, if they really knew his ideas about human empathy and the limits of the free market, they would disown) -- when laissez-faire blossomed. They applaud the industrial revolution in this, and the rise of the corporation in the late 19th century, and the business culture of the 1920s, and the conformist culture of the 1950s, and hail these as the brief eras in which all was true and right, when we were all homo economicus. Social and cultural rightists imagine that perfect world of the past in which father was the bread-winner, mother was the home-maker, and the children were all well-behaved.  "Father Knows Best" and "Leave It to Beaver" were the iconic emblems of that perfect time in the past. Most rightists in the U. S. A. today would like to re-create that era, just as earlier traditionalists yearned for 19th century Victorian forms and attitudes. Having grown up in the 1950s, I would be willing to disabuse anyone of the perfectness of the era. Rural poverty, racism, sexism, desperate lives of political and cultural conformity, anti-intellectualism, "Red baiting," child abuse, poor health care, and the Cold War were more the reality than suburban bliss.

     The consequence of this perverted romanticism and perverted idealism has been a perverted cynicism. In the U. S. A., at least, the right has felt that its "vision" has been attacked, corrupted, and disadvantaged in a broad conspiracy to keep their romantic ideology out of power. It began with the Federalists in the 1790s and early 1800s. They were willing to abandon the idea of a new nation, because the "people" might rule, and the best and the brightest (read:  the richest) would no longer hold positions of privilege.  The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the Hartford Convention of 1815 were the height of their frenzy and rejection of the "modern" world. In the late 19th century, the courts were assailed for attempting to interfere with the God-given right of corporations to do as they pleased, including forming discriminating monopolies (e. g., John D. Rockefeller). Social Darwinism became the favored form of understanding Darwinism in general:  some were meant to be rich; some meant to be poor, and so on. When "Progressivism" (1890-1914) retaliated with sweeping social reform, rightist-traditionalists were aghast, but overwhelmed (let's hope 2009 forward is similar). But in 1912 "The Fundamentals" were published, which promised and attained religious backlash against science and Darwin. In the 1920s, the tensions and hatreds the war engendered led to escapism and helped bring about the laissez-faire heaven that rightist-traditionalists had hoped for.  Then the Great Depression and FDR destroyed that. The political right planned its revenge from the 1930s onward. Their hatred of FDR and Truman was venomous. Eisenhower proved too soft for them. JFK and LBJ, even Richard Nixon, and then Jimmy Carter were anti-christs (if the plural is possible). If you don't believe the levels of hatred from the 1930s until Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, read the right-wing press for that era. Then, in 1980, Ronald Reagan put a happy -- let's say "Ronald McDonald" -- face on everything. The right was back. Nirvana had been attained.

     But wait, read the "National Review" from the 1980s forward, and you'll find that isn't true. According to those farthest to the right, the victory had not been won (why? because they demanded, and still demand, total victory). During the 1980s, even during the 1990s when Newt Gingrich and his crew dominated Congress, the right complained bitterly about always being left out, of the Left conspiring against them. Hate was the underlying principle of most rightist editorials, even during their heyday from 1980 to 2008. And, why? Because the transformation was not perfect. Hedonism and pop culture continued. Abortion remained. All government had not been destroyed. The economy was damned near, but not completely laissez-faire. The Right had upped their demands after 1980, and doomed themselves to failure when perfection could not be attained. Rush Limbaugh was their chronicler -- a man who never basked in rightist-traditionalist victories but was and still is always angry, angry, angry at the fact that people are still allowed to live in America who do not agree with the full rightist vision.

     What a strange history -- one hard to believe. And, there is no foreseeable end in sight. Rather than work with a very accommodating president, the Republican right has decided to vote against him -- just like the Supreme Court in the early 1930s worked against the New Deal, and just as most Republicans, for the last century, have identified the Democrats as an evil force. This is not just a post-empire America that is emerging, it is one that is filled with hate from a large minority of its population. As the unilateral power of the U. S. slides away, are Americans going to suffer a continued ideological tribalism or a renewed sense of possibility in which homo civicus once again arises?