Currents

We are living in a postmodern moment. That is to say, we are living through a deepening skepticism of the expansive knowledge and moral claims of modernity, from Enlightenment universalism to rationalism, science, and liberal egalitarianism. The fingers of blame point mostly at the political left for promoting identity politics, cultural relativism, and “woke” authoritarianism. But our postmodern moment is very much a bipartisan creation. There is a longstanding tradition of anti-Enlightenment thought on the right, from its intellectual founders Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre to modern-day figures such as Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh. If we want to understand the far right’s dogged opposition to modernity, human rights, and LGBT equality, and why segments of today’s hard left and right seem so eerily similar, we must understand the long history of postmodern conservatism.

In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke wrote that “All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life […] are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason.” The French philosopher Joseph de Maistre was even more vehement in his 1795 critique of Rousseau and the French Revolutionaries. He defended prejudice and attacked reason, writing:

“Human reason reduced to its own resources is perfectly worthless, not only for creating but also for preserving any political or religious association, because it only produces disputes, and, to conduct himself well, man needs not problems but beliefs. His cradle should be surrounded by dogmas, and when his reason is awakened, it should find all his opinions ready-made, at least all those relating to his conduct. Nothing is so important to him as prejudices.”

This disdain for Enlightenment reason was not simply philosophical. To Burke and de Maistre, submitting the claims of authority to the tribunal of each person’s individual reason was dangerous. They feared it might lead the governed to view authority as overly imposing and ineffective. This, in turn, could lead to calls for egalitarian reform of the sorts initiated by the American and French revolutions, which were stubbornly resisted by conservatives, and which many on the modern right have yet to make their peace with.

Yoram Hazony, for example, author of the sweeping Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022), echoes Burke and de Maistre’s objections to Enlightenment “rationalism” and reworks them for the 21st century:

“[When] people reason freely about political and moral questions, they produce a profusion of varying and contradictory opinions, reaching no consensus at all. [...] Where individuals are encouraged to engage in this activity, the process of finding flaws in inherited institutions proceeds with ever greater speed and enthusiasm, until in the end whatever has been inherited becomes a thing of lightness and folly in their eyes.”

This line of thinking extends to the cultural right’s enduring hostility toward LGBT people, whom they see as presenting modes of being and loving which clash with traditional understandings of moral conduct. Some homophobic commentators follow Matt Walsh in rolling out very watered-down “natural law” arguments that, for instance, same-sex marriage is illegitimate since it is the “nature” of marriage to be a union between people of opposite sexes who, in principle, could procreate. Never mind the many straight couples who cannot or choose not to have children.

The British judge Lord Patrick Devlin offered a more honest objection in his The Enforcement of Morals (1959). He concedes that there may well be no truly “rational” argument for criminalizing homosexuality or bisexuality, and that, in other cultural contexts, it may be accepted or even celebrated. But in “Christian” societies, he asserts, the common sense morality of the average person does not extend to tolerating LGBT people. Devlin holds that since we need some kind of morality — even a morality based on nothing more than common prejudices — to prevent social disintegration, society therefore has a right to criminalize same-sex intimacy to protect itself.

Devlin’s arguments are at once proto-postmodern while still being conservative. He marshals a profound skepticism about “rationality” which goes back to Burke, but then redirects that into an argument for the consecration rather than the deconstruction of authority. Devlin thought that in a modern world where we increasingly cannot be sure of the foundations of our moral convictions, the law should step in to silence socially pernicious doubt by enforcing the prejudices of the average citizen. That this comes at the expense of human rights for LGBT people was a sacrifice Devlin was willing to make.

The forms of postmodern conservatism that have emerged in the 21st century take this thinking to an even darker place. Deeply shaped by the postmodern culture which emerged in the 20th century, postmodern conservatives rearticulate many of the classical objections of conservative anti-Enlightenment in a more lethal guise. And they often do so to advance militant forms of right-wing identity politics which are a danger to both liberal norms and vulnerable minorities.

One of the best explorations on this subject is Richard Wolin’s The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (2004). Wolin, a left-wing defender of the Enlightenment, rightly chastises the postmodernist left. In his historical deep dive, however, he traces the intellectual roots of postmodern thinking to well before the leftist radicals of the 1960s and 70s. He goes all the way back to the writings of conservative reactionaries in the 18th and 19th centuries — most notably, Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche offered fundamental critiques of Enlightenment reason which contained real intellectual value, but there was a pronounced political dimension to his project which deserves far more wariness. A “radical aristocrat”, Nietzsche pioneered much of the language that would later be deployed by postmodern leftists — but invoked it to defend dramatic inequality. Appealing to the importance of difference and hierarchy against Enlightenment universalism, he accused liberalism of undermining the “pathos of distance” that existed between fundamentally unequal people. Nietzsche deeply influenced Martin Heidegger and other “Conservative Revolutionaries” of 1920s Weimar Germany, who empathized with his gloomy story of radical decline brought about by the liberal herd’s advancement of democracy, welfarism, and concern for the downtrodden — what Nietzsche termed “slave morality.” Heidegger condemned the modern Enlightenment as fundamentally nihilistic, saying that it “aggressively destroys all rank and all that is world-spiritual” and ensures the “pre-eminence of the mediocre.” Against this, Heidegger came to defend even the Nazis’ violent nationalism as a potential solution to what he saw as the dreariness of liberal democracy.

The great irony, as Wolin notes, is that left-wing thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Richard Rorty essentially appropriated the thinking of the radical rightists to attack the very Enlightenment values that were the inspiration for overturning aristocratic regimes. Left-wing postmodern thinkers typically expressed skepticism toward the claims of the Enlightenment, examining how they became implicated in the establishment of new systems of power and discipline. A classic example is Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975), influenced by Nietzsche’s genealogical method, which examined how ideals of Enlightenment reason and efficiency guided the establishment of modern prison systems.

The more salient point is that many on the 21st century postmodern right have utilized the language of Nietzsche and Heidegger to argue for reactionary causes, often very effectively. In a recent essay for First Things titled “What is the Longhouse?”, the far-right writer known as Lom3z invokes recognizably Nietzschean language with a postmodern twist to argue against the ubiquity of “feminine” values in our culture. Lom3z writes about how the “drive to assert oneself on the world, to strike out for conquest and expansion” has been censured, and how “Male competition and the hierarchies that drive it are unwelcome. Even constructive expressions of these instincts are deemed toxic, patriarchal, or even racist.”

Similarly, the fascist and anti-LGBT Russian thinker Alexander Dugin has overtly appealed to Heidegger as well as French postmodernists to argue that Western universalism — human rights, international law, and the notion that we are all in this together — is inherently bogus. Instead, he contends, each people, nation, race, or “narod” has its own unique destiny which it is not the business of anyone else to criticize. If that destiny includes locking up gay, lesbian, and bisexual people, or invading Ukraine as part of a broader Eurasianist struggle against the West, then so be it.

Even less pseudo-intellectually, right-wing pundits in the US like Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles leverage anxieties about trans rights into a more general panic about LGBT “grooming.” This is linked to a hyperreal web of conspiracy theories propagated online through endless memes and symbolic distortions that form a pastiche of inconsistent appeals to “science”, “tradition”, and “religion.” The result is a backslide in attitudes about sexual freedom and LGBT rights, and an insistence on reasserting heteronormative expectations in society. Sometimes conservatives will even insist this is simply to spare them from having to deal with new kinds of social expectations.

What makes postmodern conservatism distinct from earlier iterations is its adaptation to the norms of the surrounding culture. One of the most frustrating examples is the way they play coy with anti-Enlightenment themes. Rather than arguing directly for homophobic practices, a postmodern conservative may express anger about what “groomers” are doing to children before withdrawing into layers of ironic dissociation or strategic skepticism when asked for proof. Postmodern conservatives will form distinctly online networks which rebrand and recode themselves indefinitely; making it very hard to keep track of who participates on the far right or even what they are trying to achieve complete with “in group” lingo using terms like “longhouse”, “groomer”, “cathedral”, and so forth.

The Enlightenment project is under attack from extremists on both the right and the left. Powerful figures like Ron DeSantis and Marjorie Taylor Greene have mobilized around anti-LGBT and anti-“groomer” conspiracy theories as part of the most sustained campaign against LGBT rights in many years. In better understanding the roots of postmodern thinking, as well as its bipartisan and often horseshoe nature, we can better recognize and refute it. Under the stewardship of “modernity” — liberal democracy, reason, science, and universal principles — Western society has made incredible strides on virtually every quantifiable metric related to human flourishing and human rights. The attempts by our growing fringes to upset this progress are well worth resisting.

Published Nov 27, 2023