Right Wing Inquiry

Minerva Combatting Brute Force, Isadore Pils

 ​  The left and right have different motivations, clearly.  In our current moment, with science, journalism and academia showing a generally liberal ideological bent, the mainstream right has all but forsaken these pillars of institutional democracy.  The twin right wing bases of Christian Nationalism and Elite Capital have their reasons for doubt.  Religious skepticism of any authority outside their fundamentalist biblical interpretation has long put them at odds with evolutionary theory, and in the 20th century the social sciences challenged their beliefs about sexuality, the family structure, and a tacit view of White cultural supremacy.  As they adopted a hardline anti-abortion position in the 1970's, this deepened a sense that biblical purity was directly contradicted by scientific authority to the degree that it took a nuanced view of fetal personhood.  Elite Capital, from the 1% to small business owners, mainly interested in avoiding progressive taxation and government regulations, emphasized private property protections and the maintenance of existing economic structures in which labor power was reduced and resources were freely accessible so as to be more easily exploitable.  Thus, the two essential pillars of social power and order - economic and cultural hegemony - were felt to be under threat by the basic processes of science, journalism and the academy.  

   The tension at the heart of democracy is the historical tendency for power to accumulate in fewer and fewer hands.  To avoid despotism and plutocracy, democratic institutions are required to act as a check on power and to level the playing field such that each citizen is born with an opportunity to live as an equal with his fellow man.

   Journalism has long lived by the maxim "comfort the afflicted and afflict the powerful".  This follows from the press' role as the "Fourth State" in providing to the public a means for preserving an egalitarian, pluralistic democracy.  In 1897, the owner of the New York Times declared his paper's purpose in the line "all the news fit to print".  Implicit in this declaration was the duty of the press to make decisions as what is and is not important for the public to know; it would be absurd to report on events with no consideration to importance.  But what then becomes important?  If a free press is essential to a democracy, then importance becomes lifting up the voices of the powerless and applying scrutiny to the powerful. 

   Science can be defined broadly as a search for truth via empirical means.  The veracity of a claim must be born our by rigorous testing, and subsequent argument and counterargument.  Multiple levels of confirmation have been designed to attempt to produce high levels of confidence, ranging from empiricism, parsimony, philosophical doubt, skepticism, accuracy in testing, controlling of variables, peer review, publication standards, and institutional reputation.  Given the almost limitless boundaries of the natural world, the scientific method remains one of the clearest paths to truth as humanity has developed.  From particle physics to molecular chemistry, cell biology to geology, medicine to behaviorism, and countless other fields of research, the scientific ideal is to operate with no other goal than to expand human knowledge.  As such, it is fundamental to the democratic ideal, in that nothing is more critical to decision making than to have all the facts about a particular issue.

   Similarly, the broader academy - the humanities, the arts, mathematics, history, economics, political science, engineering, social sciences and philosophy - seek to add in their own way to humanity's greater understanding of itself and the larger world.  Though often dealing with an array of variables vastly larger and more nuanced than the hard sciences, as well as methods that approach inquiry not via randomized trials but forms more subjective, poetic, theoretical, and experiential, these disciplines more than pull their weight in answering questions that cannot be resolved merely through experimental analysis.  They inform not only the facts about the world, but also moral, political and economic questions in a complex pluralistic democracy.  While some more or less have explicitly egalitarian aims, others provide essential context for what egalitarianism might mean, what is has looked like in the past, and what it may in the future.  The academy serves a metaphysical role for society to better understand itself, its wants and needs.

   To Christian nationalists who seek cultural hegemony for their particular religious ethnicity - historically dominant in the US over every other group - the fundamental role of these three institutions present a grave threat to their project.  Journalism, science and academic analysis that scrutinizes the unfair results of their dominance serve to promote in the public sentiments that would weaken their grip on cultural power.

   To Elite Capital, these institutions present a threat to their economic power to the degree that they inform egalitarianism.  Externalized costs of deregulation that pollutes the commons, harms workers, or solidifies plutocracy serve to weaken those who would seek to maintain unfair capitalized positions.  Progressive taxation that seeks to redistribute profits more equally amongst the public through the power of government law diminishes their strength.  To the degree that science provides evidence, journalism exposes, and the academy scrutinizes these harms and inequalities, Elite Capital is threatened.

   These institutions are the first things to go under authoritarianism and autocracy.  With mendacious claims, dictatorships realize that, as threats to their legitimate authority, public trust in them must be weakened so as to distract and obfuscate any pushback that might arise from honest inquiry.  Poets are imprisoned, science budgets are slashed or channeled into regime-friendly projects (often with puppets installed to ensure only certain results are confirmed), and media is either nationalized or placed under strict laws that ban what types of stories may be published.

   Liberalism and conservatism are not inherently good or bad.  Thought of as a push and pull between progress and tradition, experiment and experience, both political impulses are necessary in a healthy society.  But the modern right - which in many ways is more progressive in its own twisted way than classically conservative - is more interested in maintaining power and supremacy than anything else.  A proper conservatism is in dialogue with liberalism.  Think of what an honest conservatism would be in journalism, science and the academy: stories on the marginalized would be complemented with scrutiny of over-reach in proposed left wing policy proposals, science on gender or behavior would be studied, as well as the positive effects of traditional family structures or testing of pro-growth pollution remediation, histories of left-wing totalitarianism and musical compositions that present consonance and modern art that elevates traditional technique.

   Of course, these conservative dispositions do exist in these institutions.  However, as human knowledge and inquiry flourishes, they require a deftness of thought and a humility in the face of an ever-changing intellectual and social landscape.  They must be willing to acknowledge new truths, and when it conflicts with their received and well-worn notions, to adapt and adopt.  

   Sadly, the over-representation of liberal thought in these institutions represents not corruptive discounting or marginalizing of conservative views so much as conservative views not being able to compete.  Instead of holding forth with their own steady inquiry, modern conservatism has been a project of leaving the battlefield and encamping to the fringes.  Instead of honest, good-faith argument, they have retreated to stubborn refusal and conspiracy.  And yet from this position, having ceded multiple essential pillars of democracy, egalitarianism and pluralism, they have found themselves on an unfortunate path that has historically come in the form of fascism and mass violence.  Because when one gives up on honest debate and intellectual co-determinism, all that is left to maintain power is brute force.  

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