The Age of Anxiety and the Rise of the “Postmodern Conservative”

“While we should note the absurdity of simultaneously blaming global elites and destitute refugees for the collapse of tradition and order, we also recognize that this confluence is the transference of a real but unsignified fear.”

For many conservatives, postmodernism remains a boogeyman beyond all others. Very few conservatives have commented on the irony that many on the right support a President whose administration coined the phrase “alternative facts,” has displayed a marked enthusiasm for lying, and has consistently attacked government agencies, social institutions, and critics concerned with knowledge production. Over continents, right-wing populists quote from a similar script, adding volume to a swelling tide which motivated Oxford Dictionaries to christen “post-truth” the word of the year in 2016 and an independent panel of German linguists to dub “alternative Fakten” Germany’s “un-word” of 2017.

More fantastically still, many conservatives seem unperturbed that in their spirited defense against the alleged evils of identity politics and cultural relativism, many on the right in the United States and abroad—from Marine Le-Pen’s National Front to Viktor Orban’s “illiberal democracy” in Hungary to the surge of the anti-Muslim/immigrant Lega Nord in Italy’s 2018 election—have embraced an exclusionary identity politics, whose primary concern is the restoration of their in-group’s privilege.

In place of an appeal to common values, compromise for public welfare, and rational civil discourse, we find nationalist xenophobia, conspiracy peddling, and reactionary invective against any who criticize these zero-sum attitudes. With this uncompromising appeal to narrative over argument and to group identity, we are witness to the emergence of a postmodern conservatism.

The emergence of postmodern conservatism is an impetuous response to tangible, long-term, global trends. These offer some explanation as to its common swell, which spans from Eastern Europe to the United States. This is because postmodernism is not first and foremost an intellectual movement, though its inner dynamics were first consciously or unconsciously understood and expressed by intellectuals and artists. Postmodernism is a historically situated hermeneutic perspective which maintains that objective or universalist considerations, particularly meta-ethical standards for making moral judgments, are not all they are cracked up to be, and thus should be cracked up or at least subject to critique.