Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: Conservatism as a Liberation Movement

Abstract:     
Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression investigates cultural conservatism’s predilection for incorporating the relativistic intellectual temper of the left into its critiques of the left. Where the multicultural left critiques the hegemonic cultural aspirations of the white Eurocentric male, conservative claimants of cultural oppression critique those of an arrogant class of liberal elites, which exploits the legal system in order to foist its parochial moral and cultural predilections upon recalcitrant ordinary Americans - a sentiment that has been repeatedly invoked by the likes of Justice Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork. If Lochner era jurisprudence reflected the interests of the traditional capitalist class, so expansive interpretations of the First and Fourteenth amendments now reflect those of the new verbal class. Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression asks whether these much-advertised feelings of cultural oppression are delusional, the thesis set forth by Thomas Frank in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, or whether there is in fact a sense in which expansive interpretations of some constitutional freedoms can be culturally oppressive to those who do not embrace them.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 264

working papers series