Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: The Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia

Abstract

Conservative claims of cultural oppression are familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in American politics. These claims are being issued every time a conservative bemoans the ever-widening influence of the “liberal elites” in media, academia, or government. They are at play whenever we hear of the hegemony of secularism and the marginalization of Christians, the New York Times’s animus toward prominent conservatives, the preening censoriousness of the campus Left, or the assault on the traditional family. These claims of cultural oppression are not always labeled as such, but they are the perennial subtext of many ostensibly narrower issues. If liberals accuse conservatives of disingenuously denying their complicity in the oppression of women, blacks, and gays, then conservatives retort that liberals deny their own involvement in the oppression of tradition-minded “ordinary Americans.” The targets of the liberal elites’ bottomless contempt, these ordinary Americans are now slandered as barbaric relics of a benighted past, psychologically dysfunctional authoritarians driven by subterranean animus. Occupying as they do the commanding heights of the culture, the elites have been privileged to set the terms of the debate, thus putting conservatives at a continuous rhetorical disadvantage.

These grievances are not news to followers of American politics. But for all its easy familiarity, this phenomenon has yet to be examined systematically at a philosophical level. This is what Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression endeavors to do. Conservatives suspect that there is something inherently elitist about liberalism, that liberals employ a deceptive veneer of rationalism and universalism to disguise a parochial ethos, and that this ethos breeds a subtle authoritarianism that liberals refuse to acknowledge and instead project onto conservatives. On the other hand, liberals find themselves exasperated by such accusations, reflexively dismissing them as intellectually muddled and disingenuous, as merely “symbolic” grievances that distract from the “real” issues. Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression tackles the philosophical perplexities raised by this seemingly intractable clash of worldviews and sensibilities.

What would human nature have to be like for conservative claims of cultural oppression to make sense? And what are the moral and political implications of accepting this view of human nature? Conservative claims of cultural oppression are what must become of conservatism once it absorbs the moral and intellectual impulses of the Left into itself, and I here investigate the deeper meaning of this absorption. Can we draw a rigid, clear-cut boundary line between Left and Right, or is this boundary somehow indeterminate, an artifice of cultural convention or social power? Perhaps liberalism produces its own conservatism just as conservatism produces its own liberalism. These are the questions posed by conservative claims of cultural oppression, and this work advances a comprehensive philosophical theory that provides these claims with a new depth and coherence.