I don’t typically read The Federalist. I also don’t drink milk after it has spoiled. But recently I read enough quotes from the senior editor’s column to develop a morbid fascination. I decided to read the whole thing, even though I hate to give him the clicks.
John Daniel Davidson writes,
“The conservative project has failed, and conservatives need to forge a new political identity that reflects our revolutionary moment… [they should implement big government power as] an instrument of renewal in American life… a blunt instrument indeed.”
“Wielding government power will mean a dramatic expansion of the criminal code… parents who take their kids to drag shows should be arrested and charged with child abuse; doctors who perform so-called “gender-affirming” interventions should be thrown in prison and have their medical licenses revoked; and teachers who expose their students to sexually explicit material should not just be fired but be criminally prosecuted.
“To those who worry that power corrupts, and that once the right seizes power it too will be corrupted, they certainly have a point. If conservatives manage to save the country and rebuild our institutions, will they ever relinquish power and go the way of Cincinnatus? It is a fair question, and we should attend to it with care after we have won the war.”
Chilling, right?
Again, I hate to stare for a long time at something so gross and disturbing, but I think this editorial is indicative of a wide international movement toward authoritarianism, and so it deserves at least some of our attention and analysis, in much the same way you might study any disease that poses a threat to the body as a whole.
So here’s the weird thing. Although he advocates incredibly strict governmental controls around the current culture war issues that concern him, in the same article he expresses comfort with some of the merits of trial by combat and arranged marriage.
Yes, really.
In other words, his nostalgia for some of the historic accoutrements of what he believes to have been Western culture leave him accepting of cultural practices strange to our modern era, while other newly arising cultural forms are such anathema to him he is ready to give up democracy and move toward autocracy simply to reverse them. Unsurprisingly, because he takes his concerns straight from the Moms for Liberty playbook, he’s especially worried that kids will attend drag shows [full confession, I was at the Des Moines Art Fair this summer and there was a drag show on the main stage, in public view in the park. Des Moines, Iowa. You know, the hallmark city for the decline of Western Civilization].
This kind of thinking is abject nihilism. It’s morality as window dressing. This editor believes his responsibility is to “save” our country by “saving” Western civilization, but when you get right down to it, his definition of Western civilization lacks any cogent center other than a sheer reactionary will-to-power.
It’s Diet Coke. But of course that’s the problem with fascist lite, it’s always just trying to taste like something when in fact there’s no there there.
I’ll confess I find it strange we are in this moment. I spent about the last 30 years of my intellectual life being taught it was those on the Left who were most at risk of descending into pure relativism. It was the Right, the conservatives, who were more at risk of various kinds of fundamentalism. The Right was supposed to be defending a sense that there was some kind of objective truth available to us.
Yet here we are in 2022 with those of us on the Left defending truth, while the Right increasingly forwards a death-cult mentality that is about as Nietszchean as you can find anywhere. Erode truth. Just take power. Then re-assert and shape truth however you’d like once you’ve won the war.
The editor’s entire letter could be transported wholesale into a Margaret Atwood novel and she wouldn’t even have to edit it.
He seems entirely unaware (perhaps because he intrinsically lacks any real curiosity) that the Western civilization he so romanticizes and believes to be dying always had drag queens. It always had libraries with contents some found debatable and others found essential. And librarians and teachers, heaven forbid, protect student access to those books.
And although abortion did become illegal at all stages of pregnancy in some English-speaking countries beginning in the 19th century, prior to that the very culture he so wishes to save (Western civilization, whatever that is exactly), abortion was widely practiced and legal under common law.
As I read these kinds of calls to radicalism by those now on the alt-right, I am not worried that somehow they’ll succeed at drawing contemporary culture back to their regressive sensibilities. The movement of modern life simply isn’t going that way. But I do worry in the short term these reactionaries and pretend revolutionaries may actually have manipulated laws and gerrymandered districts and positioned judges and gained enough election-denier seats in the House to force their nihilism on a lot of us.
For those of us on the Left who see so much humanity and goodness in the movements the alt-right dismisses as “Woke,” I guess I at least need to say: their plan is to enforce nihilistic nostalgia through the power of big government. It looks and walks like Christian nationalism. It’s actually vacuous fear-mongering not unlike “The Nothing” in A Wrinkle in Time.
Stay awake.
It's scary. I'm watching my family and church body (LCMS) descend deeper into this ideology and it is just so anti-Christ. I don't understand. I don't understand it at all.
I take that back. I *understand* it. I just am grieved by how we got here.
I must admit that editorial is so scary and I probably wouldn’t have read it if it hadn’t seemed important enough to you to share with those of us who read (try to) your weekly Lutheran Confessions . You have a gift of writing in a way that is easy to understand but I had to ask Siri the definition of nihilism. Even took her awhile to find it. Keep up the good work.