Why countercultures merge into GOP orthodoxy

The 1990s Republican Revolution, whose ultra-free-market ideology has largely dictated American politics over the past three decades, was frequently justified by its supporters as a response to the supposedly ultra-liberal media of the Bush Senior Era.

When I first read the Republican Revolution’s advocates — my first experience being Peter Kreeft — I found many of their arguments absurd, but gathered that they viewed the Bush Senior Era media as excessively liberal compared to the opinions of most Americans, and government policy even in the Reagan era as similarly much more socially liberal than public opinion.

What I have come to realise in the past few years, however, is that, notwithstanding their successes in lowering taxes for the very rich to almost nothing, and eliminating public services for ordinary Americans, the “conservative counterculture” that emerged with the Republican Revolution has failed completely to achieve the social goals which it promoted during the late 1990s, like:

1. dramatically reduced immigration, especially from countries of the Tropical World and/or of Muslims
   
2. a foreign policy less supportive of and/or more hostile to strongly Islamic countries
   
3. a return of women to their traditional roles as wives and mothers
4. an end to abortion and even to all artificial birth control
5. an end to violence in entertainment, music and even video games (whether by rigid censorship or public boycotts)
6. a return to traditional religious morality in public education

Author Oliver Wiseman in his ‘Have the National Conservatives Missed Their Moment?’ argues that the nationalist/social conservatives have completely missed their moment because of their inability to challenge conservative economic orthodoxy where it opposes the interests of social conservatives as noted in the previous list. He argues that this occurs even when conservative groups try to secede from a socially liberal society that they regard as corrupt, and much more critically that the problem is that:

“[“movement conservatism” or GOP orthodoxy] removes from the political arena, and consigns to the ‘private’ sphere, the very value judgments and critical questions that most affect our humanity and our civilization”

This point reveals why countercultures on the Right move into GOP orthodoxy. Unless the existence of the private sphere (and the private sector) per se is challenged, it is impossible to challenge anything related to the hyper-capitalism that has become politically hegemonic since the 1973 energy crisis. To challenge the private sector and private sphere involves radical class struggle by the working classes. This has always been impossible in the United States due to racism, by which the ruling classes are intensely invested in tight alliances with lower-class whites and providing them with privileges — from freedom of choice in residence to fairer policing — that prevents them seeing that they have much more in common with poor people of colour than the ruling class.

The cultural interests of poorer whites in the United States — many of whom initially seceded from a Europe intolerant of their churches — has served to create what James Löwen misleadingly described as “the white ghetto”, but is much more accurately called a white cloister. This rural (sometimes exurban) white cloister is completely isolated (substantially of its own choice, as Löwen showed in Sundown Towns) from urban America, and much more still from the wider world. Since the standardisation and nationalisation of media in the late 1970s, information sources and culture available within the white cloister have become more and more uniformly hyper-capitalist, which helps explain why it is less and less able to challenge Republican orthodoxy on the economic front.