like conservative humor, is there conservative theory other than the usual fascism
There’s an article that tries to identify contemporary conservative thoughtthat isn’t the usual amalgam of artistic or literary formalism, Whig history, neoclassical economics, scientism, or logical positivism. It doesn’t succeed, but it remains an interesting project to find something that could rationalize Trumpism. You may find it interesting if only to have something to talk about when convincing Trumpists with college degrees why they shouldn’t support Josh Hawley.
It may be that there is no such thing as a conservative humor other than those which are sexist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, lookist, ableist, and racist. This would leave us with observational, self-deprecating, ironic humor of an infantile sort. Think Dennis Miller without the intellectual references ceteris paribus. Or maybe Bill Cosby without the crimes.
That’s clearly not what would define as humor of a liberal sort, but it is similar to the relatively circular and often disinformational logic of what might be conservative theory. Such a theory would have some strange idealist libertarianism constructed on racial privilege that scapegoats some classic liberalism with what seems a self-centered, reactionary thought and behavior in a world without imperialism and colonialism, and capitalism is ubiquitous and canonical. Think William F. Buckley’s National Review without the closeted gayness.
This article by Geoff Shullenberger tries to deconstruct whatever conservative theory might be shared by Trumpists who graduated from college and have some position in its political structure. YMMV. It even soft-pedals Heidegger’s Nazism, because math. This is like Trump’s speech to his special, “very fine people” yesterday, except with smaller words.
The career of our next subject points to a similar conclusion. Just prior to becoming a Trump speechwriter and policy adviser, Darrien J. Beattie completed a Ph.D. in Political Theory at Duke, with a dissertation on “Martin Heidegger’s Mathematical Dialectic.” Beattie’s dissertation, the abstract tells us, “attempts to elucidate Martin Heidegger’s diagnosis of modernity, and, by extension, his thought as a whole, from the neglected standpoint of his understanding of mathematics, which he explicitly identifies as the essence of modernity.” Heidegger was not a postmodernist or a critical theorist, but he was a key influence on French post-structuralists like Foucault and Derrida, and on the Frankfurt School, especially Marcuse.
Beattie’s dissertation overlaps thematically with the bodies of theory brought up in relation to Breitbart and Hahn. The theorists discussed by both of them, as we have seen, shared a preoccupation with the way that power is exercised in the modern era by means ostensibly neutral institutions and ostensibly objective scientific techniques. Heidegger’s famous account of technology as an intrinsically violent “enframing” of nature influenced the way thinkers like Marcuse and Foucault challenged the nominal objectivity and neutrality of scientific expertise and technological control. Beattie’s investigation of Heidegger’s account of mathematics – broadly seen as the epistemological basis of this objectivity and neutrality – as the “essence of modernity” fits in well with this set of concerns.
Beattie’s trajectory has certain parallels with Hahn’s. After a successful career as a student of theory at an elite institution, he went on to become part of the Trump White House communications team. Whereas Hahn preceded this with her stint at Breitbart, Beattie is now involved in revolver.news, a pro-Trump news aggregation site. He is also currently writing a book “in defense of Trumpist nationalism.”
Along with Hahn, Beattie has been heavily criticized by organizations like the SPLC for his associations with extreme anti-immigration groups. An exposé of his participation in a 2016 gathering that also included white nationalists let to his firing from the White House. Recently, he again attracted additional criticism when Trump appointed him to a commission that “helps preserve sites related to the Holocaust.” Beattie, like Hahn and Breitbart, is Jewish, but all have been faulted for excessive proximity to white nationalism.
In Beattie’s case, these controversies are something of an echo of the one that once surrounded his dissertation subject, Heidegger, who notoriously became a member of the Nazi Party in the early 1930s. Beattie addresses this fact in a prefatory remark to his dissertation, in which he states that there are “important cautionary lessons to be learned from a careful study of Heidegger’s monumental political blunder,” but also explains that he will not be addressing these lessons at length in his own work. He writes that “out of respect for the magnitude of scholarly literature devoted to this question . . . one must conclude that sheer limitations of space and scope simply prohibit an adequate treatment of Heidegger’s political involvement with National Socialism within the context of a study that intends to explore seriously and comprehensively any separate feature of Heidegger’s thought.” However, he also states the following:
“[T}o study Heidegger’s disastrous political involvement to the exclusion of other aspects of his thought would not only be damaging philosophically, such a stance would also run the risk of unwittingly inviting the repetition of new political misjudgments in the future. To put the matter in more general yet more concrete terms, just as it is important to understand the extent and nature of the philosophical errors behind the 20th century’s most brutal and illiberal totalitarian regimes, it is equally important—indeed, perhaps more so—not to allow an exclusive or inordinate attention to such blunders detract from a deep and critical attention to the dangers that might be lurking within the seemingly more benign political expressions of modernity that have survived the downfall of fascism and communism.”
In other words, Beattie seems to say, an emphasis on Heidegger’s complicity with Nazism risks sidelining the insights his work offers into the “seemingly more benign political expressions of modernity” that shape our reality. It seems safe to infer that Beattie is referring here to the technocratic liberal consensus ascendant today.
In a more overtly polemical piece of writing, in which he attacks neoconservative interventionism and defends an “America First” foreign policy, Beattie states that “the chief threat to America, and indeed the West, is not an overseas regime like the Soviet Union or a foreign-born movement like radical Islam. To the contrary, it is a home-grown threat: the corruption and de-legitimization of our domestic institutions and the elite entrusted with the custody of the American way of life.” Again, these institutions, as has been evident during the pandemic, rest their assertions of authority on assertions of their own expertise, objectivity, and neutrality – claims that are increasingly in disrepute. Heidegger, as well as a number of the later theorists he influenced, have provided their followers with the means to critique of this form of power. It should be no surprise that such an approach is of interest to some adherents of a political movement that aims to exploit and accelerate the crisis of these institutions.