The Schizophrenia of the GOP Platform
Social conservatism and economic conservatism are incompatible
Not to be dramatic, but a recent death in the family hasn’t left me much time or mental bandwidth to put together the third part of the “Dante & Transhumanism” thing I’ve been playing with. So here’s something I punched out and had saved for a rainy day.
I might be mistaken. Maybe I’m just observing the oddballs and exiles, or making too much of the ones who sound like they’re flirting with socialist-flavored economic ideas. It’s hard to make anything but half-educated guesses about a massive group whose members I have little to no real-life social contact with. But it almost seems like American conservatives, some of them, are on the verge of having something like a Pierre moment.
Yes, yes, calling it a “hello darkness my old friend moment” might have gotten more or less the same point across. But the devil is in the details: what I’m talking about isn’t the recognition of having rushed headlong into a giant mistake, but of having labored and fought and cracked one’s throat in service of a cause which wasn’t only hopeless, but predicated on an error since the beginning.
Herman Melville’s Pierre is a novel anyone could be forgiven for not reading. As the author says, it is indeed the kraken to Moby-Dick’s leviathan: a misshapen monster of a book birthed through the convergence of financial exigency, delirious ambition, and exhaustion. To make a long story short: protagonist Pierre Glendinning is a young patroon of the early nineteenth century who discovers he has an illegitimate sister named Isabel living right on his family’s manor. Though Isabel is clearly a little touched in the head, Pierre decides that her story about her paternity checks out.
Split between the necessities of doing right by his sister and preserving his family’s honor, Pierre takes the sins of his father upon himself. He brings Isabel home and makes an announcement of the lie that he’s been carrying on a secret affair with this unnotable rustic girl, and intends to marry her—which means his upcoming marriage to his respectable fiancée is off. Pierre’s mother disowns him and cuts him out of her estate, and then suddenly passes away before she has time to calm down and reconsider things. Pierre, now a pauper and a pariah, moves to New York City to live with his kooky sister in grinding poverty and alienation.
In the very last chapter, when they visit an art gallery’s exhibition of recently acquired paintings, Isabel is arrested by a portrait of a dark stranger with an ambiguous smile: “only my mirror has ever shown me that look before! See! see!”
Isabel sees in oil on canvas the face of the gentleman who sometimes visited her and called himself her father. While Pierre admits a superficial resemblance, he’s certain the man in the painting isn’t his father.
He doesn’t have much time to chew on the idea that he threw his whole life away on the basis of a tall tale fed to him by an anomic orphan girl with a wild imagination, because he has to go gun down his cousin in the street (over a not altogether unrelated matter) and then kill himself in prison.
But getting back to the point: some conservatives seem to be realizing, if not completely, that the whole political program they’ve been buying into for as long as anyone can remember is a beguiling but specious phantom in which they too credulously placed their trust.
For as long as I’ve been alive, the GOP’s platform has stood on two pillars:
The empowerment of private enterprise. Deregulation. Tax cuts. Supply-side economics. The nation’s prosperity depends removing barriers that would inhibit the free market from firing on all cylinders, and on incentivizing entrepreneurs, small business owners, and large firms to compete, improve, and innovate. (A quick search on the Ronald Regan Presidential Library and Museum’s website for speeches in which the word “innovation” appears in speeches given between 1980 and 1988 yields 215 results.)
Social conservatism. The nuclear family, gender roles, the role of religion in civil society, traditional (white protestant) American values, and so on, are to be cherished and preserved against weird liberal social experiments.
These platforms are contradictory, and their combination is incoherent.
The fact of the matter is that under the capitalist system of social organization, allowing the free market behaving the way it “wants” to behave makes society into a weird liberal social experiment.
There’s a reason the Amish generally shun new technologies (and only adopt them after careful deliberation), and that’s because the Amish are serious about their social conservatism. They value the traditions which define their way of life, and understand that any invention that transforms their everyday methods of doing things must necessarily transform their behavior as a group. It has been reported that they typically stand back and watch what happens when the outside world adjusts to a new invention because they correctly understand that the depth and breadth of its effects extend beyond its immediate area of application, and are impossible to anticipate before it has been interiorized. For the Amish, the whole outside world is a product testing laboratory.
A few generations ago, the conservative bugbear was the hippie and the adolescent activist. How did they come about?
Prior to the 1960s the United States had already waged a war in Asia, and seen civil rights demonstrations. But it wasn’t until a new foreign adventure and a new wave of anti-segregation protests confronted the television generation that shit hit the fan. Very generally speaking, what made the difference was:
(1) that a generation raised on sensuous mass media had an acute perception of the dissonance between what The Establishment was telling them and what they heard and saw with their own ears and eyes (even if at a mediated distance),1
(2) the culture gap between a younger cohort which had the explicit and implicit values of electric media (particularly what Ong called the “participatory mystique” of secondary orality) impressed on them since birth, and an older cohort raised on the abstract detachment of print and the national-tribal voice of radio,2
(3) and the divergent values and expectations of a group that had come of age during the precarity of the Great Depression and the heavily regulated economy of the second World War, and of a group that had grown up during the ascendency of the Consumers’ Republic.
In his eagerness to paint the hippies and student activists as communist stooges, the American conservative utterly failed to realize that Karl Marx, whom he despised to the same extent and for the same reason that the Vatican loathed Martin Luther, had already told him why the kids had apparently gone crazy:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…
That’s what a laissez-faire economy does. That’s what a “launch it all and let the invisible hand sort it out” approach to technological innovation does. That’s how Schumpeter’s creative destruction works.
Obsolescing modes of production obsolesces ways of life. New media of communication and information access entail the repatterning of old social relations into new ones, and transfers of power and authority. Revolutionary products and services engender revolutionary kinds of people. To be a social traditionalist and a market libertarian is like being a passionate outdoorsman who lobbies Congress to hand ownership of the national parks over to the lumber and mining industries.
The conservative Cold Warrior who execrated both the Soviet Bloc and the young radical set really and truly had no inkling that the domestic forces besieging his sacrosanct American institutions were manufactured, in an aleatory way, by the very capitalist system whose superiority over “godless” communism he took as an axiomatic truth.
The Boomer cohort—which swung hard for Regan in 1980 and 1984, remember—proved itself no wiser than its forbears on this front. The true believers, enthusiastic about both Reaganomics and conservative values, preached the virtues of an economy unrestrained by governmental fetters and lauded the fixtures of traditional American life, and were as gobsmacked as their parents when the Xennials and Millennials started acting strangely.
It wasn’t the Russians who were printing and distributing copies of On The Road, selling the Silent Generation automobiles and Benzedrine so they could drive across the country and settle in San Francisco, or running the pharmaceutical firm employing the research chemist who accidentally invented LSD. That was advanced capitalism at work. And it wasn’t Bill Clinton and Tipper Gore putting gangster rap and Marilyn Manson records in nineties kids’ hands, selling them goth uniforms and G-strings at the mall, or locking them in their bedrooms to play video games and gab in chatrooms all night. That was advanced capitalism at work.
Why did Millennials (and now Zoomers) desert religious groups? It’s not entirely a matter of the dissonance between an ancient narrative of invisible supernatural powers and the concrete facts of modern life, but of social dynamics. The context in which church attendance provided an indispensable community occasion ceases to exist in affluent regions where people can afford to be strangers to their neighbors, simulate face-to-face conversation and activity with electronic media, and become accustomed to participating in volitional communities of shared (secular) interests via the internet. Blame the manufacturers and marketers. Capitalism makes people irreligious by turning to sand the rock on which old modes of group behavior stand.
That’s not to say that religious groups didn’t do all they could to alienate themselves from the younger generation by obstinately cleaving to their traditional outlook on homosexuality. And the gay rights movement—the most brilliant and successful political program in living memory—wouldn’t have attained irresistible momentum so quickly without television (and the narrowcasting tactics promoted by cable’s multiplication of channels) and the fledgling commercial internet. Hardline conservatives could whinge about “family values” and “god’s plan” and attribute the zeal of the activists to whatever demons they cared to, but private enterprise provided the venues in which Middle America heard out and came to sympathize with (even idealize) their gay and lesbian fellow-citizens. More lately—and regardless of what anyone believes about the biological and/or social provenance of gender identity—it’s impossible to imagine gender politics becoming a national preoccupation if it weren’t for Web 2.0. Again, cultural traditionalists can blame whomever they want, but it wasn’t progressive schoolteachers, activist academics, or Michelle Obama putting smartphones in everyone’s hands and directing them towards Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, TikTok, sissy porn, or ContraPoints’ YouTube channel.3 That was their free market doing its sacred anarchic work. All of these devices and spaces are shaped up and served up by private firms seeking to make a profit, as Reagan and his ilk urged us to let them.
For that matter, the ubiquity of “queer panic” content is largely the outcome of for-profit media firms competing for attention in an arena where clickability and shareability make ragebait and tribalist victory laps the best investment of a journalist or blogger’s time. Otherwise there might be at least a little more talk about, say, the economic factors that have made it veritably impossible for more than half of Americans with children to have a stay-at-home mother (or father) committed to domestic responsibilities and childcare. Or maybe we’d be paying a bit more attention to a problem that’s about to confront Boomers and Millennials en masse. People like me were raised in suburbs where our parents could afford to buy homes when they were about our age, but which are now altogether out of our price range. Many of us relocated to cities at least a few hours’ drive from where we grew up and rented apartments or row homes. What happens when our parents need daily attention and care? Do we quit our jobs, uproot ourselves, and move back in with our folks? Do we bring them into the city and set them up in the living room (assuming we don’t have roommates or a landlord who’d object)? Or do we just go with the flow and drop them in some callous and understaffed for-profit senior care center?
These two examples come to mind because they’re concrete cases of the unmanacled invisible hand undermining the old forms of family life which American conservatives claim to cherish. We could go on.
Here and there you hear whispers of a vibe shift in American political life or of a realignment in the two-party duopoly. It’s way too early to predict anything definite, and I suspect suggestions of truly profound changes are overstated. But it’s possible that the recognition of the longstanding paradox in the GOP platform will come into play.
Unless our bewildered and economically degraded social conservatives truly are as boneheaded and hypnotized as I’ve always been lead to believe (and I suppose that’s not altogether unlikely), they can’t possibly be unaware that the forces preventing them from earning enough to afford a nice house in a healthy neighborhood, having or being a stay-at-home wife, raising well-behaved “normal” children with “natural” gender identities, and preserving the world in a form that makes sense to them haven’t been arrayed by any governmental cabal headed by the Clintons.4 It’s the free market doing what it does. It’s the perpetual striving of big business to transform production and labor, and to manufacture demand for new products and services. It’s the permanent revolution of capitalism.
If the lot of them had any sense, surely they’d be doing some uncomfortable soul-searching right now.5 It’s become all but obvious that they can choose only one of their two sacred cows. The willful self-delusion of American conservatism is the promise that they can keep both.
On the other hand, the social progressive has a similar (but not nearly as pressing) contradiction to confront: how to reconcile our radical individualism and ongoing liberation from outmoded traditional social constraints with the fact that we have the capitalist system of organization (which we’ve railed against for most of our lives) to thank for them?
Joshua Meyrowitz:
Many of the unusual characteristics of the 1960s can be related to the influx of traditionally backstage behaviors into onstage spheres. A common theme underlying many of the issues that led to protests was the “credibility gap.” This “gap” may have been related to the imbalance between front region behaviors and (newly exposed) back region behaviors. “Credibility” involves consistency among all visible behaviors. Yet since all people display inconsistent behaviors in different spheres, and since television merges previously distinct situations, the generation that grew up with television kept catching its elders in what seemed to be acts of deception and immorality. This led to widespread disrespect for parents, government officials, and authorities in general.
Meyrowtiz again:
While essays, articles, and books must be composed by trained “authors,” the content of a video “essay” can be provided by almost any passing man, woman, child, or animal. In these terms, there is an underlying similarity among the messages presented by different people on television—a similarity that does not exist in any other form of communication except face-to-face interaction. Groups of people who were excluded from the public forum created by print because they lacked the requisite entry skills are now able to participate in the public arena created by electronic media.
Andrea Chu, interviewed by Literary Hub (in case you were wary of clicking the link):
While I don’t have the research to back this up, I would certainly anecdotally say that sissy porn has done something in terms of modern trans identity, culture, and awareness. Of course, it’s in the long line of sexual practices like crossdressing in which cross-gender identification becomes a key factor. It’s not that all of the sudden, in 2013, there was this thing and now there are trans people. However, it is undoubted that the Internet has done something in terms of either the sudden existence of more trans people or the sudden revelation that there are more trans people than anyone knew there were. Whether it’s creation or revelation, I think everyone would agree that the internet has had an enormous impact there.
The GOP platform becomes somewhat less incoherent when you consider that a comfortable and insulated traditionalism is a luxury that the megachurch pastor, the oil company executive, the military officer, the police chief, the successful small business entrepreneur, et al. can more easily afford.
Or they could simply lash out at “woke” corporations, whinge about how censorship stopped being fun or fair after they lost the culture war, and concoct grand unifying gibberish about a New World Order conspiracy run by Jews, pedophiles, and the Walt Disney Company. Denial is one of the stages of acceptance, after all.
I always wonder whether a group will adapt to the times, or else as the reasonable leave it it becomes less reasonable. It's painful to watch in slow motion...