“We are not gonna let this state be overrun by woke ideology,” Ron DeSantis declared in his gubernatorial victory speech last year. “We will fight the woke in the businesses, we will fight the woke in government agencies, we will fight the woke in our schools. We will never ever surrender to the woke agenda. Florida is the state where woke goes to die.”
DeSantis has staked his political career on joining the culture war fray as the ‘effective’ anti-woke candidate. In doing so, he has positioned himself as the ideological successor to Trump, who was catapulted to the presidency in 2016 on a wave of cultural grievances. Although the idea that culture and politics are linked is an old one, it has been newly infused into the modern American discourse and reoriented the right towards a particularly polemical focus on cultural politics.
This shift finds its origin in Andrew Breitbart’s famous aphorism: politics is downstream from culture. The “Breitbart Doctrine,” as this maxim came to be known, has come to animate conservative politics and transform the 21st-century Republican Party. Breitbart’s mission was to create alternative cultural institutions to fundamentally reshape the civil superstructure of American society. This mission has been taken up by his protégé, Ben Shapiro, whose media company, The Daily Wire, is openly attempting to become the right-wing alternative to Hollywood. However, this mission is likely doomed. Cultural power is so entrenched in existing institutions that it is unlikely new ones will affect any lasting change. The struggles of The Daily Wire reveal an old truth conservatives know well: it?s hard to build new institutions from scratch.
Today’s culture-war conservatives complain about the social dominance of a liberal ruling class supposedly controlling the news, the media, certain churches, higher education, and major corporations. Through these civic institutions, the ruling class can infuse society with its progressive values.
The right’s struggle against the cultural hegemony of the left has been a losing battle. Yet while the left has gradually risen to sociocultural dominance, the right still has substantial political power. DeSantis has used this power to reverse the Breitbart doctrine: culture can be downstream from politics; the power of the government can affect cultural change. This is DeSantis’s gambit in going after woke corporations (such as Disney) and higher education (by replacing the progressive administration of New College).
A popular target of the cultural right is postmodernism, often conflated with Marxism. There is no shortage of conservative figures decrying the movement, from Jordan Peterson’s rants on “postmodern neo-marxism” to former British Prime Minister Liz Truss blaming the failures of education on postmodernism and Foucault. Yet this view conveniently ignores the postmodern strains of thought within conservatism which animate the culture war today.
Postmodernism critiques objective empirical truth, instead treating truth as a reflection of power. Those who have social power are able to have their perspectives treated as objective truth and their values treated as objective morals. Subjective identity then becomes the locus of worldview, and the new focus must be on “lived experience” rather than empirical rational truth. For postmodernists, it is only natural that different identities will perceive different “truths” and socially accepted “truth” is only the “truth” of the powerful. This makes postmodernists inherently skeptical of any grand meta-narratives, including Marxism. While Marxism acknowledges that while “truth” is bounded by history, identity, and society, there still exists a higher objective truth – that being the Marxist worldview, of course. Therefore, in Marxism, one can be subjectively correct while objectively incorrect. Postmodernism, on the other hand, dismisses the Marxist meta-narrative claim to objectivity.
The mainstream cultural right, including DeSantis, has largely advanced a defense of conservative values not because they are necessarily true, but because leftism is perceived as antithetical to our culture, nation, or tradition. In laying out his new higher education plan, DeSantis praised the cultural and philosophic tradition of the West. “The core curriculum must be grounded in actual history,” he stated, “the actual philosophy that has shaped Western civilization.” DeSantis’ opposition to DEI and CRT education programs is not staked on a conception of the truth-seeking mission of the university, but rather on the conservation of a cultural heritage. The preservation of a Western identity is the animating cause for the right-wing culture war; that which opposes the Western classical tradition must be excised from society.
Conservatism has long contained its own strain of truth-skeptical politics. These ideas were developed in opposition to the universalist claims of the Enlightenment, and especially the French Revolution. Writing in opposition to the revolutionaries, Edmund Burke criticized the rationalism and universality of the Enlightenment, instead emphasizing tradition, identity, history, and the wisdom of the ages. While this appeal to tradition made Burke a conservative icon, it also implied a view that regarded values and truth as subjective to different historical and social circumstances.
The modern cultural right can be viewed as postmodern in several ways. In addition to their identitarian defense of values, the cultural right is highly skeptical of seemingly objective power structures, especially bureaucracies and scientific “experts.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, the right used postmodern critiques of scientific consensus and the healthcare apparatus, arguments that could have been lifted from Foucault. This is in no small part a reaction to the pseudo-religious devotion of progressives to their values – including scientism – as objective moral truth, any opposition to which must be due to sheer ignorance or reactionary prejudice.
The problem with this view is not that it critiques the intersection of power and truth (or that truth is often distorted through identitarian lenses), but that postmodernism might disavow, be indifferent to, or at least be nihilistic about the possibility of ever even ascertaining objective truth. The frightening endpoint of this worldview is a deep relativistic nihilism, in which the subjective passions of the self become the only guides for truth and morality.
Today, the cultural right has abandoned all pretenses of libertarianism, content to unabashedly use political power to influence culture. Yet in doing so, many fall into the same identitarianism the left suffers from. Worse still, reason itself is dethroned as a guiding principle, made subject to the passions of tradition. If conservatives are not to fall into the trap of relativism, politicians, students, and philosophers alike must ask themselves why certain values are worth defending over others. After all, defending a value based on identitarian tradition may be conservative, but that does not make it true. The preservation of liberty, the furthering of human flourishing, and the achievement of a just and virtuous society are only possible when politics orients itself toward reason and truth.
(photo courtesy of Flickr/Gage Skidmore)
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