Conservative Identity-Making and the Politics of Our Times

Since the Enlightenment what we think of as progressive, "liberal," "left," has stood by belief in a common humanity and the essential universality of the human--the idea that what people have in common is more important than the comparative superficialities of "culture." (Not nationalism, but internationalism, is the cry of the left.)

It is those who opposed them--the conservative, the reactionary, the right--who placed the stress on difference between one group and another, who defined their group against others, and conventionally did so in line with their desire to shore up existing social hierarchies and the elite privilege they undergirded. Thus those elites defined their countries in terms of what they wanted it to be, rather than what it actually was--their vision of its supposed age-old identity a demand they made of their "lower orders" rather than how things had always been, as reflected in the plain and simple rewriting of history to make it conform to their project.

Consistent with this, in one way or another they all ended up arguing that all that talk about reason and individuals and rights and freedom was a noxious alien import that had nothing to do with them. "Faith, each individual in their place, obligations, subordination--these things are who we are," they say, and if a foreigner proves skeptical, they add "You Others just cannot understand the profundities of our national soul."

Ironically, the "difference"-singing conservatives proved surprisingly universal in their answer to universalism--while it is a demonstration of the essential character of postmodernism that, in contrast with the left that treated such claims as self-serving exercises in obscurantism, they defer to them completely, to the point of presenting the most nihilistic and brutal of the Counter-Enlightenment as gentle hippie multiculturalism, the high-handed imposition of an identity on a people for the sake of a reactionary elite agenda as a glorious recognition of some group's supposedly innate specialness, and the most vicious act of Othering of another group as an embrace of "diversity."