Recently at Current Affairs Nathan Robinson wrote up a piece about how conservatives have been manufacturing scares to protect monied interests and stoke fear for generations. He has also argued that such paranoia-selling has not been characteristic of the left.
Well, conservatives I know would say the entirety of the anthropogenic climate change crisis is a manufactured panic, not all, but some. I think Robinson does have a point on how conspiracy theories are sold by agitators to the faithful within specific ideological and political scenes. I think there’s even a serious case to be made that Gulf War 2 and the War on Terror were pursued without having adequately established either long-term obtainable strategic goals or an honest appraisal of the real scope of the risks … but then I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I’m a Mark Hatfield style Republican if I have to delineate the morass of my views in hashtag level summaries. Make of that what you will.
But … Robinson’s appeal that the left hasn’t sold conspiracy theories invites a point of finesse, which is something I’ve been writing about since Trump won in 2016—leftists are not the same as progressives or liberals or neoliberals or even necessarily other leftists. I take Robinson more seriously than I take most contributors to Jacobin, for instance. He bloviates and there are times when I consider his arguments to be terrible, and in this recent case I think Robinson doesn’t so much overstate the claim that leftists don’t shill conspiracy theories as he seems to have forgotten that for a few years it wasn’t hard to find theories that Russia hacked the 2016 election and that’s why Trump won. For a time one of my relatives heard someone try to assert simultaneously that Trump was a Russian puppet president who was going to go to war with Putin. I have a friend who over the years was sure that W was going to suspend the Constitution; declare martial law; make himself dictator for life and invade Iran. There are Red Scares in the DNC and GOP wings and I recognize that people in the left don’t necessarily subscribe to those views.
Now I’ve written about Mark Driscoll’s embarrassingly bad Christian Theology vs Critical Theory a few times already. If Driscoll wanted to create an example of ludicrously incompetent bad faith ranting about things he shows no understanding of in a dog whistle laden tract of the sort liberals, progressives and leftists could use to show how stupid and/or dishonest rightwing religious demagogues are when they try to rally their faithful then, well, mission accomplished. I could write a lot about what I consider wrong with Adorno, for instance, and I have already. But … I’ve also seen progressives rely on easily disproven myths when addressing Driscoll, such as the easily refuted canard that Driscoll said Gayle Haggard must have let herself go. Dan Savage was the one who jokingly claimed that as a response to Driscoll and for some reason progressives and liberals wanted to believe so badly that Mark Driscoll said that the vitriol of Dan Savage was imputed to Mark Driscoll.
People in Seattle for a while were so worried about what they thought Mark Driscoll might do to their city they didn’t seem nearly as concerned about what Mark Zuckerburg has done to civic discourse. That, I think, is an example of a distinction between fairly conventional liberals and actual leftists I’ve read over the last fifteen years. Liberals may have fretted about Driscoll while leftists seem to have fretted more about Zuck, with cause.
If I had to pick an example of a liberal/progressive sales pitch that comes off like a conspiracy theory I’d probably pick Randall Balmer’s argument that the origin of the Religious Right is explicable entirely in terms of white evangelicals opposing racial integration in schools that he published at Politico and has made the basis for a new book. I haven’t read Jemar Tisby’s work yet but a glowing endorsement by the self-serving hack Frank Schaeffer can’t serve Balmer’s book well. Frank Schaeffer was a bulldog for the Religious Right and switched teams decades ago and while Crazy for God was a fun read Frank Schaeffer showed he’s the kind of guy who would use the death of Nelson Mandela as an occasion to shill one of his novels. He also kind of prophesied Obama would save the United States. I expressed my cynicism about that years ago.
I’m not alone in regarding Balmer’s basic thesis as a conspiracy theory. Let me assume for sake of conversation that dispensationalist eschatology invited reactionary political views. That’s nothing Crawford Gribben didn’t unpack for us elegantly in Writing the Rapture. The Rapture novel is the fever dream paranoid genre of fearful white guys but Gribben did us the favor of showing how many groups that pivoted to dispensationalist futurism did so after having been postmillennialists. The TL:DR version for folks who don’t study this stuff is that pivoting from postmillennial futurism with all its entitled optimism (Doug Wilson might as well be the handy stand-in in our day) to paranoid dispensationalist futurism was still a shift within futurism. Gribben’s The Puritan Millennium is a book I’m still working through but he charts how Puritans developed millenarian ways of reading Revelation that shifted from the historicist school of thought to the futurist school of thought well before the founding of the United States.
American theologians have oscillated between insufferable triumphalist entitlement and raving paranoia for quite some time now. So when I saw Rolsky’s review of Balmer’s book at Los Angeles Review of Books this conclusion stuck with me:
Reflecting on the intimate
relationship between conservative Protestants and their professional analysts,
anthropologist Susan Harding observed:
They would rather
be on the right side of God than history. We have been engaged in a critique of
our knowledge practices for some time, but we are not done yet, or else we
wouldn’t be in the predicament of being unprepared, yet again, for the
creativity, ferocity, and mutability of opponents to the left/liberal/secular
project. In addition to fieldwork, I think we need to do some more homework.
This does not mean more books
on this topic. We remain overreactive interpreters to such movements because we
remain beholden to static understandings of them: ones often of our own
intellectual machinations.
Was race a factor in the ascendancy of Reaganite conservatism? Absolutely. Was it the explanatory be-all and end-all of the Christian Right’s rise, as Balmer suggests? Not by a long shot. To assume so is to project a particularly reductive vision of conservative organizing and politics onto the very conservative subjects we’re attempting to understand. Making America Great has been a coordinated effort: one spearheaded and executed by Weyrich, Viguerie, and others for some time now. The sooner we realize this, and the less willing we are to rehash the same categories and descriptions, the better able we’ll be to interpret the future of conservatism in and through our calamitous present.
In
fact I think I’ll quote a bit more from Harding myself:
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/a-we-like-any-other
…
Suddenly, it seemed, fundamentalists were back. Their bold
public reemergence and its ratification in Ronald Reagan’s election shocked us;
moreover, it took something away from us, something on which we relied just as
surely as our sense of which way history was headed. It turned out that who we were
somehow depended on our assumptions about who they were. If they weren’t dying out as a social category, then we no longer represented the natural, normal,
secularizing outcome of modern history. We no longer owned the present as well as the
future. Our seemingly capacious, ecumenical, universalizing we became a particular and contingent we. A we like any other.
At the time, most of us did not
recognize these sensations, let alone see them as the classic signs of lost
hegemony, of our having lost the easy and apparently (but not really)
effortless assumption of political and cultural dominance. Instead, we—or, more
precisely, the public intellectuals (journalists, pundits, scientists,
scholars, policy experts) who represented us—set about trying to explain how
this breakdown of public order had occurred, so that we might get things back
to normal. Grounded in our surprise that fundamentalists still existed in what
appeared to be alarmingly large numbers and in our firm conviction that their
activism was illegitimate, we interrogated them, the fundamentalists, asking: where did they come
from, where have they been all this time, and how did they manage to survive?
Since this first shock a few decades
ago, things have not gotten back to normal. They have morphed, taken on new facets, and
become more manifestly heterogeneous. Pentecostals and conservative
evangelicals, Catholics, and Mormons piled on. The Tea Party mobilized the more
libertarian-motivated faction. Donald Trump scooped them all up and brought out
the more overt and aggressive white supremacists, anti-immigrant nativists, the
anti-Muslims, anti-Semites, anti-feminists and anti-reality-based public
intellectuals. With his election, we find ourselves, once again, shocked in the
face of something we never expected to happen. Once again, we ask: who are
they, where did they come from, and how could this have happened?
All good questions, and yet it’s also
worth wondering why we still have to ask them, and ask them after the fact. In
what ways are we oblivious to our history, society, and political culture such
that we do not see these mobilizations coming? I think one answer, certainly in
relation to religion and the so-called culture wars (both backgrounded in
Trump’s campaign and election, but both very much in play), is the extent to
which notions of progress are still embedded in our concepts and knowledge practices.
…
This would be where I bring things back to what literally eschatological expectation was planted in American culture that might spur such presumptions of progress. One historically defensible answer is the Puritan legacy of shifting from interpreting Revelation as a typological reading of history to an anticipatory prediction of a future Utopian Millennium. Ergo I’ve been reading a few Crawford Gribben books. Historians of the Puritans have had this covered, it turns out, for quite some time. Puritan soteriology I have fewer issues with than Puritan eschatology. But even there I’d say there seemed to be a sea-change between the postmillennialism of a Jonathan Edwards or a Roger Williams and the applied postmillennialism of Manifest Destiny.
I guess what I’m suggesting is that so long as liberals and progressives keep working with ahistorical reified archetypal forms of the ideas they object to they won’t spot the ways in which the Religious Right of the Reagan era onward seems creepy, entitled and eager to grasp a legacy of cultural hegemony that, oh, well, the mainline Protestants actually had during pivotal moments in the Cold War and before that during the Manifest Destiny era. The Religious Right might be scary to progressive and liberal Christians in the United States for wanting to seize for themselves a level of political and cultural cachet the mainlines once had. So maybe now people can anticipate what “barstool conservatives” may have in store for the United States. We can read about the illiberal upstarts who hate the established order.
But did religious fundamentalists run the Indian boarding schools? I have been thinking for a while that contemporary progressives and liberals find it too easy to scapegoat contemporary figures and masses in the Religious Right as racists. No doubt a few of them are … but people like Mark Driscoll could easily go on about the racism he thinks is not-so-latent in the legacy of Margaret Sanger.
After
decades of reading I have grown weary of worldviewist approaches to ideas. I
sometimes wonder whether or not worldviewest apologetics in Christian writings
in the Anglo-American West is part of the Cold War legacy of a battle-of-ideas.
It seems to crop up in pro-Western and pro-Marxist polemics. I
had fun comparing the fusillades that the conservative Presbyterian Francis
Schaeffer and the Maoist Marxists Cornelius Cardew and John Tilbury published
against John Cage a few years ago. Now beyond his music for prepared piano
John Cage isn’t really my jam but I found it fascinating that a protean figure
on the American Religious Right could lambast Cage for the same basic reason
that Maoists did, on the charge that man as man cannot live out these ideas
promulgated in Cage’s music. But if Cage hadn’t played with “prepared
piano” then Nikita Koshkin wouldn’t have played with “prepared guitar” in Piece with Clocks and
that would be a shame (if you want to see how he performed it with
less-than-ideal audio head over here and start at 1:06).
It was not merely possible for partisans on the right and left to dismiss Cage’s music on a mixture of ideological objections and “yuck” for the music itself. This will no doubt continue to be the case. Some might object to Cage seeming to be no less (if no more) racist and against popular music for his time from the proverbial left while from the proverbial right his sexuality and seeming assault on the Great Tradition of the West will be part of his having been some kind of charlatan. I don’t subscribe to either of those caricatures. So while I’m not gonna rush out and go soak up the recorded concert John Cage did with Sun Ra I figure I can at least be aware that it happened and someone recorded it.
To bring this roundaboutly back to Nathan Robinson, he’s alternately interesting and exasperating to read. I am not sure there haven’t been cottage industries devoted to conspiracy theorizing within liberal and progressive scenes, as I’ve merely outlined so far. Maybe American leftists have been at so far a remove from significant institutional power they can’t entertain the conspiracy theories of the liberals and conservatives in the largely duopolistic political system we have because if you’ve never had any significant institutional power to begin with how do you go about developing any conspiracy theories that other teams would try to take power from you? That, in a nutshell, is what I find plausible about Robinson’s basic contention. I also find it interesting that Robinson, as he’s put it, tries to read conservatives to find, as he puts it, the better versions of their ideas. Thus Robinson’s sprawling back and forth with Glenn Loury (he seemed far less friendly to deBoer’s The Cult of Smart) Or, in another vein, Robinson had a conversation with another author about whether Christopher Hitchens is still worth reading. That could be seen as a continuation of his dissent from the New Atheism and its posse of men he described simple assholes. Sometimes I find Robinson completely unconvincing and at other times he says stuff that I think makes sense. I think the proposal that conservatives have had a generations-long cottage industry of stoking the fires of paranoia among their support base is fairly plausible with the caveat that the left hasn’t managed this because they haven’t gained comparable institutional power.
No, I don’t actually think the case has been made that academia is rife with cultural Marxism has been successfully made. I also don’t think that postmillennialist variations of “theocratic libertarianism” are nearly as different from “cultural Marxism” as people in Moscow, Idaho probably believe. Maybe a West coast moderately conservative Presbyterian who was born to a Native American dad was already not going to think in the same way about things as an agitprop preacher in Moscow who won’t disavow R. L. Dabney. Before there was the utopian meta-historical claim of Marxism there was the Puritan revolutionary investment in postmillennialism. One of the things I’ve been appreciating about Crawford Gribben’s writing on the evolution of millennialism as eschatological ideological field is he manages to situate specific views in geopolitical contexts within the English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish legacies. Among Reformed writers I guess I would be hard-pressed to find a better summary of why this would matter than a recent post by R. Scott Clark.
https://heidelblog.net/2021/12/pew-poll-christendom-lives-in-the-hearts-of-many-americans/
… In
the sixteenth century just about everyone, including more than a few
Anabaptists, was theocratic. That is, they wanted the state to enforce their religious orthodoxy on everyone else. In the
marvelous providence of God, in the USA, we have opted out of the Theodosian
system of the state-church and state-enforced religious orthodoxy. Some
Americans, however, would like to overturn the American experiment and return
to the old system and to the endless and bloody wars that accompanied it.
Strangely, I have yet to meet a a theocrat who has accounted for the second of
the original ten Amendments, which was adopted in part to protect the first. In
other words, one wonders if these would be theocrats have considered what they
are buying should they get their wish? Should they try to impose episcopacy,
surely the dissenters would band together to resist. Should the Baptist
theocrats, who seem to have aligned themselves with postmillennial, theonomic,
Reconstructionists in Moscow, ID, get their wish, then why would not the
anti-theocrats form a resistance movement? In short: Americans ought to learn
the history of Northern Ireland before they reenact it.
…
Doug
Wilson can say he’s in favor of some kind of incrementalist theocratic
libertarianism all he wants. When I look at the last four centuries of how
postmillennialism as applied political theology played out among the Puritans
and eventually in New England in the United States I wonder what substance
Wilson is consuming that lets him pull a no True Scotsman imagining that his
version of postmil optimism isn’t going to end up being a repeat of what he
rejects about the land of the Puritans around Boston now. When it comes to critical theory and critical
race theory Doug Wilson goes one step further than Mark Driscoll did claiming
he studied critical theory in Christian
Theology vs Critical Theory without quoting a single primary source. Wilson
has recognized people might propose he doesn’t actually have any idea what he’s
talking about beyond maybe skimming Cynical
Theories (which
Driscoll also read but didn’t cite in any footnotes in his own book). His
response has been, “… I
have kept my eyes open wide, and am now 68 years old, I have the life
experience equivalent of 5 or 6 PhDs in Scottish common sense realism. …”
Allow me to explain how the Marxist enemies of the gospel did it. This is what we should see if we are looking intelligently at the game film. And we are quite willing to look intelligently at the game film, are we not?
He gives someone like Nathan Robinson evidence that drumming up fever dream conspiracy theory scares is not just for established conservative academics or think-tanks, it can also be the purview of preachers in Idaho who have started their own schools and publishing companies and tout their self-conferred credentials. Wilson sells his fan base on the idea that there’s a conspiracy of envious socialists trying to ruin America and as he sells that message to his fan base he gives the Nathan Robinsons of the American left a case study that bolsters rather than weakens their argument.
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