Kevin Mattson responds to Chapter 8—The End of Universalism (1962-1990s) in Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History.
Welcome to America’s “Post-Truth” Culture
The picture today in American politics is of intelligence without force or enthusiasm facing force and enthusiasm without intelligence.
—David Riesman and Nathan Glazer, 1955
I often wonder what events from our recent political culture will be remembered in the future. They might not be the ones you would expect. When looking back at recent US history prior to our most contemporary strange times, I think of a violent twosome from the first decades of the twenty-first century: of course, the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol Building and, perhaps less well-remembered, the so-called Pizzagate conspiracy theory. I am especially interested in what these two events can teach future historians—and maybe even us now—about our capacity in the United States to govern ourselves rationally, deliberatively, and inclusively—in full, democratically.
I probably do not need to rehash every element of these two horror-drenched episodes, but here are some basics. Pizzagate culminated in December 2016 when baseless reports of a pedophile sex ring involving Hillary Clinton and based at a Washington DC pizza joint, Comet Ping Pong, lured a man named Edgar Maddison Welch to the restaurant, where he shot up the place with his rifle, all ostensibly in the name of defending children from lecherous Democratic Party elites. Welch had been inspired by online accusations circulated by those beginning to form the ranks of the rightwing QAnon movement. Four years later, it would be some of these same people—a mob of QAnon activists and Proud Boys—who attacked the Capitol Building to try to stop the certification of the 2020 election’s electoral college votes. What brought them there? Again it was a fictional conspiracy, this time then-President Trump’s false claims that he lost the election because of secret manipulations and fraud.
January 6th and Pizzagate remind us that intellectual history should not merely attend to rational ideas, as Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen does in The Ideas That Made America, but also to crazy and berserk ideas.
Many of us watched flag-waving mobs crawling up the walls of the Capitol building; these images are now iconic (like the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination was for my parents’ generation). Pizzagate is perhaps less well-remembered in popular culture now. Yet both events reveal to us that people can act upon lies and conspiracy theories, turning to violence to express their anger at elites.
January 6th and Pizzagate remind us that intellectual history should not merely attend to rational ideas, as Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen does in The Ideas That Made America, but also to crazy and berserk ideas that may not be so alien to American intellectual life at all. After all, these two strange and terrifying events actually fit into a long tradition of thinking that compels violence conceptualized as virtuous. It dates back to even before the revolution that founded the nation and it also stretches right through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first with the arrival of so-called “postmodernism.”
The Will to Disbelieve?
This is the concept Ratner-Rosenhagen takes up in chapter eight of her survey, “Against Universalism: 1962-90s.” Reading her acute definition of the term, I found myself drawn back to the book’s excellent discussion of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First and less important, I was reminded of the parallels with John Dewey’s social and educational philosophy. Ratner-Rosenhagen writes that “postmodernism is skeptical of all binary oppositions,” which made me think of good ol’ Dewey, who long ago thrashed at divisions between thought and action, thinking and doing. He did this long before French intellectuals came along and wrote of binary oppositions in opaque prose (not that Dewey’s prose was exactly clear).[1]
Pragmatism looms large in this survey of US intellectual history. That is not just the case with Dewey’s presence in the book, but also the appearance of William James. James was among the boldest to develop new versions of “truth” and pluralism, both ideas associated first with Pragmatism, and, later, postmodernism. Ratner-Rosenhagen does a nice job at dealing with James’s sometimes confusing essay, “The Will to Believe.” Many readers (including a number of undergraduate students I have taught) take it as James granting license to do whatever one wishes, to believe in whatever one wants to be true. Pragmatism as total relativism, as if James foresaw the rise of “truthiness” as the comedian and late-night talk show host, Stephen Colbert, labeled it in 2005.
Ratner-Rosenhagen, however, explains well how things are more complicated. James, she writes, explored the ways in which ordinary citizens might have what he called a “passional nature,” which, Ratner-Rosenhagen explains, “steps in to make decisions when the individual is faced with a dilemma between positions for which there is insufficient evidence to resolve.”[2] Ratner-Rosenhagen nicely links James’s focus on what people do when lacking full information to his theory of truth. Truth for him was “contingent, perspectival, pluralist, and dynamic.”[3] It was not a license for anything goes, but it did bring to philosophy—and history—a far greater awareness of uncertainty.
Dewey and James’s Pragmatism from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century lays the groundwork for Ratner-Rosenhagen to turn to philosopher Richard Rorty by chapter eight (by way of Thomas Kuhn, whose concept of the “paradigm shift” Ratner-Rosenhagen discusses in more detail as well). Rorty was, of course, a huge fan of Dewey and his liberal politics. The connections get us from Pragmatism to the idea, by Chapter Eight, of anti-foundationalism.
From Pragmatism to “Postmodern Conservatism”
Postmodernism is, for Ratner-Rosenhagen, the late twentieth-century extension of Pragmatism’s questioning of foundations. There was a time when conservative thinkers would be expected to ridicule Dewey and James, and maybe even Rorty. These were supposedly lazy, therapeutic thinkers. They were raging relativists. They refused to see the necessity of supposedly timeless things such as family, church, strong leadership, “law and order,” and Platonic truth. Indeed, Allan Bloom (a figure Ratner-Rosenhagen also discusses) played the role of delivering the classical conservative retort to Dewey’s experiential definition of “truth” and James’s views of a “variety” of small t truths. A Platonist (there’s not a lot of them), Bloom, in 1987, decried the Rolling Stones and rock n’ roll in general as signs of a decadent and debased civilization. While Ratner-Rosenhagen generally tracks the liberal politics extending from Dewey and James to Rorty, she actually finds Bloom’s critique somewhat convincing. She describes Bloom’s arguments as “persuasive histrionics” (the histrionics I get, the persuasive I don’t).[4]
Emphasizing Bloom’s Platonism, however, misses something else rising up in the late twentieth century in US intellectual history: what we might call a strange kind of postmodern conservatism. This postmodern conservatism grew throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Eventually, it shed the prickly baggage of reactionary stodginess and grandiose universalism. Conservatives no longer embraced stolid or consistent thought, but now portray themselves as rowdy rebels against the reigning elites and victims of political correctness and expertise and higher education.
During the 1990s-2000s, postmodern conservativism appeared in phenomena such as the rise of “intelligent design,” a replacement for “creationism” that focused on doubt (in this case, with scientific expertise) and perspective, rather than Biblical certitude. Or take the postmodern right’s attack on “objectivity” and the “mainstream media.” Drenched in the language of doubt and perspectivism, the rhetoric of Fox News from the 1990s to now is more brutally in the smashmouth talk radio mode than it is in the register of Edmund Burke. Limbaugh and Liddy presaged Fox News, never mind Newsmax and Donald Trump’s “Truth Social” social media platform (an Orwellian twist of phrase for a name if ever there was one).
Or take the postmodern conservative’s incessant critique of academia as an institution of liberal indoctrination that refuses pluralism of political views. This one goes back to the rise of William Buckley in the 1950s, briefly discussed by Ratner-Rosenhagen. Buckley is a figure who belongs to the transition between modern and postmodern conservatism. He could still, in the Burkean mode, critique the teaching of liberal, secular humanism, with its dream of the pluralistic democratization of knowledge to undo traditional social hierarchies. This Buckley did not like. At the same time, he began the more recent right’s shift toward what we might call a libertarian weaponization of “academic freedom” and pluralism itself in the name of including more illiberal perspectives. And just around the corner from Buckley? Pizzagate and January 6—when belief went berserk and turned paranoid and violent all at once, joined together.
Truthiness
Our contemporary political culture has developed, starting in the 1990s and 2000s in ways best summed up by the term “truthiness,” a neologism coined by Stephen Colbert in his earlier satirical rightwing talk show host persona (before he became the more affable late-night television host of today). Consider our current contrast between so-called “Libtards” and “Deplorables,” a binary opposition of its own that now proliferates throughout political debate. It is a binary opposition that not only polarizes, but in its contempt also suggests that perhaps violence is the only resource to claim victory (this was in fact put into effect with “stand your ground” legislation).
Some might think that “truthiness,” a thing made for the Kerry defeat by Swift Boats and the 2004 election, has become a thing of the past. Far from it. This style pervaded the entirety of Trump’s presidency (and as of this writing Republican Vice-Presidential candidate JD Vance has returned to the very Swift Boat approach itself in his dubious critique of 2024 Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee Tim Walz’s military service). Recall how every time Trump made a big and bold and stupid statement that was false, his henchmen would say, well, he’s not to be taken literally (just laugh it off as he says what makes him feel good, they would claim). Here was postmodern conservatism’s truthiness at work. The goal was not to speak the truth or outright lie, but rather to destabilize the difference between truth and lies.
A political ad by “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” a group campaigning against the 2004 election to president of Senator John Kerry, aired 24 September 2004, later discredited. Source: C-SPAN.
Trump’s steroid narcissism transformed the public sphere and intensified the post-truth culture that Pizzagate’s edgy conspiratorial outlandishness presaged. It’s the world we inhabit today: persuasion across the political and cultural spectrum has decreased to the point of being deceased and citizens increasingly inhabit only their own siloed holes of truthy opinion. The black-gloved Trump can say whatever he wants while dodging any follow-up or accountability as the forces of whacked-out paranoia take out a pizza place supposedly full of sexually abused children and run by Hillary Clinton. Or eventually arm themselves with nooses (purportedly for Vice-President Mike Pence) and bum rush the Capitol.
The union of postmodern conservatism with violence marks today’s right wing. Think of the Proud Boys, whom Donald Trump asked to “stand back and stand by” at his 2020 debate with Joe Biden. The group requires physical acts of violence against “Antifa” in order for applicants to become members. Or think of the Oath Keepers, or QAnon. Or the gazillions of lies that the ex-president has told during what should be thought of as the transformational presidency of Joe Biden. Trump has his own history here, to look again to the US past. Not just Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare, but also the great humbug entertainer himself, P.T. Barnum, who saw how much people enjoyed being hoodwinked—they would even pay for the experience!
The Will to Be Stupid
We live in a political culture in which James’s “will to believe” has turned into the “will to be stupid,” in which anything some want to think is welcome in the public square. All have a right to think how they want, even when their claims are baseless. Recall the recent masking debate and the attack on scientists for not providing what so many wanted to hear: that the whole thing was a hoax. Truth Social yes; truth itself be damned.
We live in a political culture in which James’s “will to believe” has turned into the “will to be stupid,” in which anything some want to think is welcome in the public square.
Our history and our contemporary public culture are rife with anti-intellectualism and distrust of elites. Now it is the basis for postmodern conservatism. Nooses for Pence are brandished to replace any inkling left of deliberative debate. James’s complex argument about the will to believe and perspectival definitions of truth have been recast as anything goes, say what you want belittling and name calling. Insults replace intellect.
I make no predictions for how long this will last, but there are few reasons to believe that it is going away any time soon. By adding the concept of postmodern conservatism to the final sections of a survey of US intellectual history, we can at least start to recognize recent developments better. We can even start to consider their surprising historical roots. Pragmatism began on the left, but it did not lead to the victory of Rorty’s procedural liberalism. Instead, we see a strange constellation of ideas that combines the reactionary dimensions of conservatism with the most relativistic aspects of Pragmatism. The will to believe things for oneself has turned into an obsession with mockery and abuse of one’s opponents. Deliberative democracy vanishes and there is just yelling and screaming on Twitter (now Elon Musk’s X) and satirical videos on TikTok. Most alarmingly, in place of a pluralistic universe of complex truths, the nooses have appeared.
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About the Author
Kevin Mattson is Connor Study Professor of Contemporary History at Ohio University. His books include Rebels All!: A Short History of the Conservative Mind in Postwar America and “We’re Not Here to Entertain”: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America.
Notes
[1] Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 160.
[2] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 105.
[3] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 106.
[4] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 162.