Living Through Another Democratic Party Conspiracy Theory

Every year around August I am reminded of the differences between journalism and the social sciences, which I teach. I always begin my introductory Sociology class by having my students watch Louis Theroux’s BBC 2 documentary on the Westboro Baptist Church, The Most Hated Family in America. After students have watched it I point out to them how Louis’s portrayal of the Westboro Baptist Church is sensationalistic and the questions he asks are meant to portray the Church as weird and abnormal. Sociologists, on the other hand, try to hold their values at arms length by exploring groups like the Westboro Baptist Church through the causal frames of economics, politics, culture, geography, and demography.

I was reminded in August of 2017 of the difference between journalism and the social sciences while listening to journalist and former public servant Bill Moyers and Steven Harper, an adjunct in the Northwestern University Pritzger School of Law, talk about their timeline of Russian interference in the US election on Lawrence O’Donnell’s The Last Word on MSNBC. What stood out to me while watching this news report was that in academia it is generally (or should be) de rigueur to explore contrary evidence and different interpretations while in journalism journalists tend to ignore contrary evidence and interpretations in their reporting.

A number of red flags were raised for me as I made my way through Moyers’ and Harper’s timeline of Russian interference in the American election. First, I remembered that Moyers has long had Democrat sympathies and that while Moyers, like Robert Reich, another Democrat civil servant, has been critical of neoliberal Democrats he is still a Democrat and Democrats have recently been obsessed with Russia’s supposed role in the 2016 US presidential election. I learned that Lawrence O"Donnell, the host of the programme that Moyers and Harper appeared on to talk about their timeline, says he is a European style socialist but he has, during his career, been more sympathetic toward Democrats than Republicans. I learned when I made my way through Harper's timeline on Moyers's blog that there wasn’t any reference to or empirical criticism of those experts who have raised questions about the supposed hard evidence of Russian manipulation of the US election in 2016. Harper's timeline, then, which seems to assume, mistakenly, that quantity is quality, is hardly dispassionate and balanced as a consequence.

There were other things Iearned during my adventures in HarperLand. I learned once again that, politically and culturally speaking, scapegoating is a common practise among human beings and has been so almost as long as their have been human beings. Democratic scapegoating of those evil Russkies, is akin to the scapegoating of anarchists, socialists, communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Mormons in America’s historical past. I learned that apparently Democrats are unable to accept that they got beat in the presidential election of 2016 by a near fascist moron of the lowest order. I learned that American Democrats cannot and do not take note of America’s interference in foreign elections. Ironically, it was Democrats who interfered, in the Russian election between Boris Yeltsen and Yevgeny Zhuganov in 1996. I learned, given the reaction of the military-industrial complex and the deep state to the election of Trump, who was favourably disposed to America’s long time evil other Russia, that America’s military-industrial complex and its deep state might be uncomfortable with candidate Trump’s unconventional foreign policies and might be using disinformation to undermine Trump’s foreign policy reset.

"Liberalism" versus Liberalism: The Right Wing Perversion of the History of Liberalism

In a recent post, "That Good Old New Time Right Wing Religion", I tentatively explored the demographic, economic, and cultural aspects of that good old time right wing religion of Prager University and others of its ilk. In this post I want to explore another cultural aspect of PU and similar right wing religions, specifically its manichean (mis)perception of liberalism.

For many, particularly in the post-World War II era, "liberalism" has become a dirty word, a caricature and a stereotype. For many on the right "liberals" are to them what the Jews were to the Spanish Inquisition. Those who caricature, stereotype, and demonise liberalism, however, really do not have, and not surprisingly I might add given their manichean religious inclinations, a sound grasp of the history of real empirical liberalism. Liberalism, of course, is the product of several intellectual streams. Historically speaking liberalism is the product of Florentine and Italian city-state ideas about representative government and practise of representative government. Liberalism is the product of the Scientific Revolution beginning of the sixteenth century. Liberalism is the product of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century with its emphasis on anti-monarchicalism and anti-theocratism. Liberalism is the product of mass capitalism, which, while it has antecedents in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, became prevalent in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the modern world, and dominant in the twentieth century. Liberalism is the product of the American and French Revolutions both of which helped increase the power of the bourgeoisie or middle class. Liberalism is the product of political debates surrounding concepts like liberty, freedom, property, justice, equality, and fraternity since the sixteenth century.

Liberalism has been and continues to be, as a result of this history, multiple. Lockean political liberalism, which challenged absolutism, for instance, emphasised the inalienability of the "natural rights" of life, liberty, health, and estate or property, which Locke, like Marx after him, argued originated in the mixing of one’s labour with the land. The laissez-faire form of economic liberalism, which, ironically, most of those who detest liberalism these days actually believe in, that emerged from the Scottish Enlightenment emphasised the need for a free marketplace in the face of monarchical monopolies. That brand of liberalism relied on a deus ex machina in the form of the invisible hand to make it work making it, in the process, akin to a religion. The American propertied elite liberalism of America’s founding fathers borrowed heavily from Locke with its inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Constitutional liberalism, as opposed to nationalist liberalism, began with the American Revolution, was stimulated by the French Revolution, and was further stimulated by the triumph of mass capitalism and corporate capitalism in some places in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Social liberalism, which emphasised the need for a stronger government to deal with what was seen as the ravages of mass capitalism including poverty and inequality, emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Leftism or radicalism, by the way, emerged as a challenge to liberalism during the French Revolution and became a prominent modern subculture or counterculture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many on the radical left saw the central symbols of liberalism, life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, as inherently contradictory. Conservatism arose as a nostalgic, theocratic, and romantic or utopian reaction to liberalism.

Throughout constitutional liberalism’s history the concepts of life, liberty, health, estate, the pursuit of happiness, and others that followed, such as equality and fraternity, have had and continue to have, as symbols often do, multiple meanings. Many American liberals, for instance, found slavery inconsistent with their understanding of “liberty”. Many American liberals debated how big constitutional liberal states, which vouchsafed liberalism’s sacred symbols, should be. Some, anti-federalists, wanted a very weak central state and strong regional states. Some federalists, like Jefferson and Madison, wanted a stronger federal state than that allowed by America’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, but disagreed with others, like Hamilton and Washington, who wanted a stronger federal state than the weak federalists.

So given this historical context what is the best way to understand liberalism? First, liberalism is best seen as a continuum with a number of levels to it. Liberalism, for example, is a continuum with free market liberalism at one end of the continuum, and, a mythical total state control of the economy on the other end of the continuum. I say mythical because no liberals I know of advocate total state control of the economy. Social liberalism or progressivism, with its advocacy of things like food and drug regulations, lies somewhere in the middle of this continuum. The social liberals Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Baines Johnson, for instance, enacted social liberal legislation that saved capitalism rather than destroyed it. Liberalism is a continuum with right libertarians and left libertarians, differentiated largely by their attitude to big economic institutions, on one end and a mythical group of no liberty or freedom types on the other end. No political liberals I know of want total abolition of free speech, for instance, though some do want limits, hence they lie somewhere along the continuum. Liberalism is a continuum in which some advocate for limits on civil rights--I know of no liberals who advocate for zero civil rights--while others advocate for the expansion of civil rights, American liberals pursing civil rights for Blacks, homosexuals, and trans people, for instance. Liberalism is a continuum in which some liberals, including liberals of left and right, are authoritarian while others are less authoritarian. I know of no liberals, by the way, who advocate for total anarchy and anarchism.

Why do those of the right wing religious persuasion like PU and others of their ilk ignore this real history of liberalism? The reason is simple. They ignore it because they have to. They need to believe in an enemy and proclaim "liberalism" as their enemy because fear, as history repeatedly shows, is a polemicists and a demagogues best friend. Fear allows them to raise money and pied piper the opiated masses. Fear, with its stereotyping, caricaturing, demonisations, and mythhistory, allows right wing cults to try to achieve power and influence with the help of the pied pipered masses they have opiated. Fear with its manichean "logic" gives them collective life. Marking off your group from an "inferior" and "polluted" "enemy" "other" is a tried and true method of creating an identity and a community with a mythic sense of their own superiority. Given this, manufacturing "enemy" "others" is not likely to end anytime soon.

That Good Old New Time Right Wing Religion

I have had a long intellectual interest in religion. The reason for why is simple, I have long been interested in why humans think and act the way that they do. Like other social and cultural constructionists I argue that the reasons humans think and act as they do is because of the meanings humans give to the world around them and their place or places in it.

One can see the process by which cultural meanings or cultural ideologies become "realities" most clearly in the rise of new religions like Mormonism, which I have extensively studied, Quakerism, which I have also studied, Anabaptists, which I have studied, the Oneida Community, which I have studied somewhat, Burned Over District evangelicalism, which I have studied somewhat, Shakerism, which I have studied somewhat, and the post WWII radical right, which one can't, thanks to it going mainstream since the 1980s, help but explore given its omnipresence on social media.

One of the new religious groups I have been studying recently is a right wing group that calls itself Praeger University. Because PU evidences that hybrid of Christianity, social Darwinism, the gospel of wealth, bah humbugism, and neoliberalism I am going to categorise PU a cult. PU is a cult because, just as Christianity was a cult to Judaism because it added new wine to old, PUism is different from the Christianities of the past despite containing older Christian elements within it. My observations are based on ethnographic analysis and, since I haven't done statistical analysis, random or otherwise, of PU my conclusions must remain tentative. I hope that despite this my observations are not only accurate and interesting but that they contribute to the study of right wing cults like PU.

Demographically, the PUers, as I call them, whether they are committed devotees of PU and their high priest, radio host Dennis Praeger, or whether they are fellow travellers of PU, are mostly male. This seems to be the case with a lot of the religiopolitical groups that were once marginal in American society and which have become more mainstream in American society since the 1980s, religiopolitical groups like the John Birch Society and the many neo-Nazi groups one finds across the US these days. Many of the "members", who are somewhat fluid, not surprising given the nature of postmodernity, and fellow travellers, are, I suspect, GenXers and millennials, whose lives have been disrupted by the economic changes driven by postmodernity including the decline of well paying and good benefit manufacturing jobs in the US and the rise of jobs in the low paying and low benefit retail or sevice sector of the American economy since the 1960s.

Economically, as I hinted, the devotees and ideological fellow travellers of right wing religious cults like PU have been displaced and dislocated by a postmodern economy that has seen the expansion of the service sector of US economy and the contraction of the traditional manufacturing sector of the economy which has fled overseas to take advantage of low labour costs in places like China and other semi peripheral nations. PU, like many religious groups, is registered as a charity and funded by the passing of the social media plate. Apparently most of the start up money for PU came from the Christian fundamentalist and fracking loving Wilks brothers.

Culturally, PUers and others of the right wing ilk appear to have what one might call a socially and culturally constructed manichean mind. Those with this social and cultural "(dis)order" think that what they believe is "good" while what the other knows is "bad". This is the I am OK, you are not OK, if you want to be OK you must be just like me syndrome. Others might call it, on the basis of the William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal controversial tête a tête on national TV in 1968, the scratch a right winger and you will find an ethocentrist or, in Buckley's case a fascist, beneath the surface complex.

So how does the manichean religious mind work? Well it works just like the religious manichean mind has always worked. Let me give you an example. Many PUers and other right wingers, in their blanket condemnations of left wing colleges and universities, ignore or elide the fact that Calvin College, a Christian reformed evangelical college, is similar to yet different from Amherst College, a secular college, in important ways. They ignore that Jesus College, Cantab is similar to but different from Ball State University in important ways. They ignore, in other words, the complexity of colleges and universities in the postmodern core nation world. Second, they ignore the fact that universities are home to a variety of different departments with a diversity of faculty in those departments. Engineers, mathematicians, physicists, biologists, and astronomers, for instance, are found in most broad curriculum based colleges and universities. If you believe PUers and right wingers, however, you would think that all of these folks are not only manning the red barricades but are actually in control of universities. The fact is, however, that college and university administrators with degrees in things like student personnel really run universities particularly in the US and UK outside of Oxbridge. They, by the way, run universities like managers run a department store. They run universities like retail establishments. The notion that universities and colleges are run by revolutionaries common among PU cultists and other right wing cultists is so delusional that some might argue that, as with those who believed themselves messiahs or prophets in the past and in the present, right wing cultists who today believe that colleges and universities are bastions of Marxism and socialism, the evil others par excellence in their theodicies, should perhaps be placed in mental health institutions. Perhaps they should thank their lucky stars that those "bleeding heart liberals", who right wing cultists in their theodicies wrongly conflate with Marxists, socialists, and nazis, downsized them in the late 20th century.

Another cultural aspect of PU and other right wing religio-political cults is their eschatology. Many Christians have claimed over the years and continue to claim, that the Crusades and Christian anti-Semitism, for instance, both of which were hazardous to human health, were and are not characteristic of "real" Christianity. Only when "real" Christianity comes will, they claim, time be no more, lions will lie down with lambs, and swords will be beaten into ploughshares in a post- or pre- apocalyptic Garden of Eden. Free marketeers, like their religious forebears, claim that contemporary versions of capitalism, specifically corporate capitalism, in core nations with their monopolies and cartels, their elite control of politics and politicians, and their ability to obtain subsidies, grants, and bailouts from American taxpayers, is not "real" capitalism. "Real" capitalism, free market capitalism, they fantasise, has never really existed and only when it does will, say true believers, the radiant paradisiacal capitalist future arrive making everybody in their free market capitalist version of the Garden of Eden rich in the process. The rub is, is that just as with the Christian apocalypse, which many have predicted on many occasions, the right wing free market cult apocalypse, though predicted almost as often as the Christian apocalypse, never comes. Such realities, however, rarely ever troubles true believers whose relationship with reality is tenuous at best. As a result the ideology constructs reality circle remains unbroken.