Time to Treat Movement Conservatism Like the Ideology It Is
Have you noticed a certain pattern to how people from other developed countries talk about the United States?
“The United States doesn’t have X.”
“Americans don’t have Y.”
“Z doesn’t exist in the US.”
If you are someone who comes from an industrialized democracy other than the US, you may be baffled or resigned as to why the US lacks any of the following: universal (perhaps public) healthcare, tight controls on civilian gun ownership, comprehensive public transit, tuition-free higher education, and guaranteed paid maternity leave.
These features of basic social democracy are ingrained in your societies, and the vast majority of you take them as normal.
In your everyday lives, these public institutions don’t seem like the results of a whole system of particular beliefs about the role of government, morality, and human nature itself.
Even though they are. Universalist social democracy is a political ideology, and it is one that is widely accepted in the countries of Europe and the Anglosphere, and among other developed powers, such as Japan.
There is a basic consensus behind these beliefs among the populations of these countries. That essential agreement looks indestructible now, but like all political ideologies, social democracy had to build support for itself.
It had to defeat alternatives, including ideologies that were much stronger at the time.
I would like, as an American social democrat, to suggest that the reason why the US lacks various social democratic institutions is simply that an ideology opposed to social democracy dominates the contemporary US. Believers in this ideology are among the most powerful Americans. In fact, this ideology has been the most powerful political force in the country since the end of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1970s.
The core of this ideology is what the American linguist George Lakoff has described as “the strict father model” — where the metaphorical stern father of the government prepares his children for the “real world” of laissez-faire “Protestant work ethic” capitalism, and in turn is owed loyalty, respect, and obedience by those children. The mother of those children, who is the wife he provides for, also owes her husband those things. In this model, both guidance on social morality and the policies of political economy come from the lens of patriarchy. A large state interferes with the father’s efforts to rear moral future workers — that is, hard-working, God-fearing ones who do not engage in sexual or other immorality. Of course, heterosexuality, and the clearly marked roles it prescribes, is central. Likewise, this strict father is assumed to not only be white (European-Christian descended) but to uphold whiteness to a strict degree. Bob Jones University, a key institution in the history of the ideology, did not allow interracial dating until 2000.
I am an opponent of this ideology, but I will do the courtesy of referring to it with the name its adherents prefer: movement conservatism.
Adherents. Within US political analysis, the bafflement that non-Americans experience simply does not exist, because the existence of this ideology is taken as the first fact from which everything else follows. Some of the basic beliefs of the ideology, such as the assumption that the role of government must be and only realistically will be kept limited and that this is a much higher good than promotion of social welfare or any effort against climate change, that Christian faith is inherently a positive, praiseworthy element in people’s individual lives and in US national life, and that white people should continue to be the ruling caste in the US, not only receive little scrutiny, but are routinely defended with a self-pitying vigor by US opinion journalists.
You may say, “well, don’t non-Americans have a more neutral, objective viewpoint, then?”
But objectivity doesn’t mean failing to notice significant phenomena. Yes, mainstream US political analysis inherently has a pro-capitalist, pro-military, anti-social democracy lens. It pays less attention than it should to either the poverty within the US or the impressive growth of Malaysia, Romania, Vietnam, or Turkey. It focuses on white voices, and especially white movement conservative voices.
But it does acknowledge that movement conservatism is an ideology, and the one that dominates the US.
Whereas, coverage of the US by non-Americans not only doesn’t recognize movement conservatism as the ruling ideology of the US, but seems to think Americans are incapable of ideology at all.
What do we gain when we put aside the idea that Americans are just too stupid or greedy to know that they should have the features of social democracy in their national life? What do we gain when we say that if we really don’t believe in “American exceptionalism”, that that must mean Americans are as capable of ideological thought as the Chinese, the Indians, the Argentines, the Egyptians, the North Koreans, or the French?
We gain the ability to see movement conservatism as the ideology it is, and to disentangle the issue of nationality or intelligence from what we can begin to recognize as ideological statements. We can begin to analyze these statements in order to build a desperately needed counter strategy. We gain the ability to begin thinking historically about where these beliefs came from in the 1920s through 1960s. We are able to notice aspects of American culture that sustain the ideology, such as the popularity of the TV show *19 and Counting*, about a white movement conservative patriarch, his obedient wife, and their 19 children. We gain a fear and dread of the destructive power of this ideology and the deeply illiberal, hierarchy-loving reality it wants to build. We can analyze how the absence of social democratic institutions furthers the ideology’s goals. We begin to appreciate that this ideology neither starts nor ends with Donald Trump.
From all this, if we take it seriously, we gain the possibility of solidarity and true internationalism.
On the other hand, we may have to give up on the familiar pattern of superiority and inferiority that have shaped how Americans and citizens of other developed countries relate to each other.
