"American Idol Conservatism"

A reader writes about my defense of elitist conservatism. He argues - provocatively - that the prerequisite for the right's new populist tone is the left's deconstruction of authority and reason in the 1960s and 1970s:

"Yes, it was those deconstructionists who attacked not only elites, but the ontological conception of a ‘privileged position,’ which is the idea that some people may have access to better, more complete information (and better culture) and thus their point of view ought to have more weight. Their zeal to dismantle the notion of 'great books' and 'great thought' as reflecting a stultifying, 'white-male' and oppressive ideology was completely successful. Not only did it open up the way for African studies and gay identity (a few of the benefits, I concede), it also destroyed such 'cultured' institutions as objective TV news journalism, 'high' culture entertainment, and contemporary literature. Now instead we have Hannity and Colms, American Idol, and the personal blog.

The effect of this philosophical shift to dismantle any 'elite' position has been so successful, that throughout the '90s and the naughts, the fundamentalist crowd have been adopting it as well, and quite successfully too. They attack these earlier liberals back as now being the 'elites.' This why they talk about the 'east-coast MSM elite' and the 'liberal elites' in Hollywood and elsewhere. The strategy is to cast these former iconoclasts and now being the new Republican Guard. You see this strategy to adopt deconstructionist tactics being specifically adopted in the religious quarters, for example in the debate on Creationism (i.e., 'Intelligent Design'). Their argument to 'teach the controversy' is lifted verbatim from Gerald Graff, the deconstructionist English professor who used controversy as another method for 'deconstructing' a privileged position. (Thankfully, the field of science remains pretty firmly reliant on the privileged position of objective research and empiricism.)

As a liberal who grew up immersed in this deconstructionist thinking of the ‘80s (and who now finds myself adopting classicist and formalist values that would seem in opposition to that), I have to admit that there is value in the deconstructionist enterprise but I believe these deconstructionists were totally blindsided by not thinking through their position by not realizing that anything can become the new Republican Guard ripe for deconstruction, even Deconstruction. Their failure to find a philosophical justification for creating some kind of legitimate ontological 'grounding' some way to justify a privileged position is their biggest failure and quite possibly the reason that both Liberalism and Republicanism is in the mess we see today.

Yes, Andrew your Christianists have become the new deconstructionist Relativists, willing to deconstruct empirical evidence (Darwinism, WMDs, the data in global climate change) and elite knowledge (budget analysis from the OMB) and in fact any shared, political middle-ground in order to promote the cherished value-system of their minority. Just as liberal deconstructionists destroyed the philosophical underpinnings of true Liberalism in the '80s, which also once was great philosophy based on positive values, these new deconstructionists are doing the same to Conservativism. It is 'American Idol' Conservativism, and Bush is the leader of their pack."

I think the reader has a point here, except that some on the right, specifically those trying to resurrect natural law, share the reader's analysis, if not his prescription. My own view is that there can be only one real grounding for a politics: and that is reason exercized within the constraints of an inherited historical tradition. By "reason," I simply mean that deployed in Socrates' dialogues, where mere opinion evolves gradually into reason by conversation and argument. That reason is sturdy enough to provide a coherent defense of elite institutions in a mass society. And you only have to read the Federalist Papers to see it in action. By "tradition," I mean the inherited Anglo-American idea of individual liberty, protected by constitutional forms and institutions. I see no reason why this cannot be defended today, using the reason deployed by Socrates and Plato. And that's what my book is trying to do.