In his famous book The Rhetoric of Reaction, the economist Albert Hirschman discusses three common rhetorical “theses” employed by the Right to blunt the appeal of progressive arguments. The thesis of perversity says that progressive reforms will exacerbate the very problems they’re intended to solve; the thesis of futility says that such reforms will simply have no appreciable effect; the thesis of jeopardy warns that progressive overreach will threaten whatever progressives have already achieved. Hirschman’s analysis is now widely accepted on the Left, but there are limitations to his approach. As its title suggests, The Rhetoric of Reaction conceives of the Right as essentially reactive—merely putting the brakes on progressive ideas. But while the modern Right may have been born of animosity to the Left’s vision of the future, it has only survived and thrived by learning to present its own vision. In the eighteenth century it was the Jacobins who declared it Year One, but in 1980, it was Ronald Reagan who announced, echoing Thomas Paine, “We have it in our power to begin the world again.” As Corey Robin writes in The Reactionary Mind:
The conservative not only opposes the left; he also believes that the left has been in the driver’s seat since, depending who’s counting, the French Revolution or the Reformation. If he is to preserve what he values, the conservative must declare war against the culture as it is…. Even when the conservative claims to be preserving a present that’s threatened or recovering a past that’s been lost, he is impelled by his own activism and agency to confess that he’s making a new beginning and creating the future…. [The conservative] develops a particular attitude toward political time, a belief in the power of men and women to shape history, to propel it forward or backward; and by virtue of that belief, he comes to adopt the future as his preferred tense.
In short, the Right is fully capable of developing its own utopian vision of the future, one where American flags are everywhere and immigrants are scarce. The Right’s constructive dimension becomes especially prominent when conservatives think the Left has “been in the driver’s seat” for too long, and that, consequently, just conserving or holding ground is no longer enough. Today, many on the American Right feel conservatives should get out of the business of conserving and into the business of “regime change.” As the right-wing commentator Glenn Ellmers put it in his essay “Conservatism is No Longer Enough,” “practically speaking, there is almost nothing left to conserve. What is actually required now is a recovery, or even a refounding, of America as it was long and originally understood but which now exists only in the hearts and minds of a minority of citizens.”
To understand what the Right means when they profess a desire “to begin the world again” or “refound” the country, we need to understand its affirmative rhetoric as well as the negative rhetoric Hirschman described. Two of the Right’s most common affirmative theses are what we might call sublimation and naturalization.
Sublimation is perhaps the oldest affirmative thesis on the Right. Its roots lie in an ancient conception of society, one defined by what Charles Taylor, in Modern Social Imaginaries, calls “hierarchical complementarity.” According to this conception, social hierarchy corresponds to a transcendent pattern that exists both within and beyond nature. The medieval image of a “Great Chain of Being” is one famous symbol of this conception. The modern Right’s appeals to sublimation go back at least as far as Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution, which declared that “sublime principles ought to be infused into persons of exalted situations, and religious establishments provided that may continually revive and enforce them…whenever man is put over men, as the better nature ought ever to preside, in that case more particularly, he should as nearly as possible be approximated to his perfection.” As a summation of the sublimation thesis, this can’t be improved upon, but it can perhaps be simplified as follows: sublimation entails the association of transcendent qualities with particular persons or whole classes in order to justify their superior status and wealth and their power over others.
Sublimation is intended to generate what Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, called a “pathos of distance” between the sublimated person and the ordinary “herd.” This gap is in principle unbridgeable: on one side is the mundane and plebian, available and comprehensible to everyone; on the other is the sublime, which is too refined for ordinary people to fully understand or aspire to. The distinction here is analogous to—and sometimes confused with—the distinction between the profane and the sacred. The point of such rhetoric is to get us to perceive either an individual or an elite group as worthy of deference.
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