Musings on American Right Wing Populist Moronicity...

For most critics of right wing populism, I suspect, the thing that they probably find most interesting about that social movement is its general inability to distinguish fact from fiction and truth from fantastical and fanatical myth. And while the inability of right wing populists to discern fact from fiction is intriguing and important, for me, the most interesting thing about right wing populists is their lack of knowledge about their own identity group history.

While some right wing populists seem to fancy themselves knowledgeable intellectuals, they are, because of their ahistoricism, fundamentally anti-intellectual. For instance, they don't seem to grasp the historical fact that post-World War II "conservatism" is actually a political and cultural hybrid. William F. Buckley style conservatism, for instance, is actually a mashup of Enlightenment laissez-faire liberalism and a pre-Enlightenment conservatism that celebrated the superiority of elite manor house culture and Christian theocratism, hence its Anglo-Catholic and Catholic impulses. Buckley style "conservatism" was an ideology, in other words, that romanticised capitalism--traditional conservatives decried capitalism for undermining the conservative old order leading, eventually, to the rise of the vulgar middle class, economic and political power--along with traditional rural elitism and theocratic Christianity.

Populism, on the other hand, is an entirely different beast born out of similar if differently constituted cultural scripts. It is an intellectual anti-intellectual and anti-academic social movement whose historical forebears include the nativist know nothings of the American 19th century and the nativist John Birchers of the 20th. It is a liberal social movement in its general devotion to the dogma of free market or laissez-faire capitalism and its empathy and sympathy for the capitalist rich peoples movements of the American 20th and 21st century. It is modern and postmodern in its devotion to the theologies of extreme narcissism. It is traditionally and religiously manichean in its division of the world into the good and pure, them, and the evil and impure, anyone who doesn't agree with them. It is traditionally religious in its opposition to intellectual diversity and its seeking out of heretical latter day "witches".