Why the Study of the Right is Broken, Part I

In the summer of 1981, the New Left Review published a special issue titled, “The Anatomy of Reaganism.” Featuring the writings of prominent sociologists and political theorists including Alan Wolfe and Mike Davis, the issue explored the ways in which “the radical right has played a major role in determining political agendas around the West.” Each author took up the issue’s challenge according to his respective analytical predilections based on a common case study: conservatism and its appeal in the United States. Davis illustrated what he called the Right’s “Road to Power” by examining the congruence of Sun Belt economics with the ways in which direct mail had begun cultivating specific conservative resentments of difference and class within the body politic. Alan Wolfe explored the intimate relationship between sociological imagination and academic insight on the right in the writings of Richard Hofstadter and Daniel Bell in their classic 1963 collection, The Radical Right. The updated collection reminded its readers that it was the first of its kind, but it was also extremely limited by its own imaginative faculties. While it would take more than half a century for scholars to begin examining such methodological insufficiencies, Wolfe was onto something all those years ago in his initial analysis very much worth considering today: “The crisis that produced the victory of the right is also a crisis in our understanding of it.”

Seldom is the United States considered one of many examples of conservatism’s rise to power. Only in moments of relative catastrophe do we hear of conservatives outside of the US and their various socio-political machinations. This means that comparative analyses of conservatism(s) that bring multiple theoretical perspectives together across varying geographies are virtually nonexistent within one of the longer historiographies in the American historical profession. Wolfe’s suggestion that the crisis that produced the Right’s ascent mirrors a crisis in our understanding of it rings particularly true in today’s calamitous present- one filled with the diatribes of too many alarmists to count, or to keep up with for that matter. Wolfe’s suggestion is an opportunity to reconsider the methods we have for studying the Right, and why we haven’t been clearer about the theoretical assumptions that undergird such collective labors since America’s mid-century. Part of this has to do with geographic specificity. The theories and methods used to understand the Right in America have been very different from the ones used by scholars and cultural theorists to understand the rise of, say, fellow neoliberal conservative Margaret Thatcher in late 70s Britain. One of the most well-known but underutilized theorists of such socio-political movements, or swings, is Stuart Hall, a former editor of the New Left Review. Despite the recent interest in Hall and his work, the theoretical implications of his intellectual corpus remain to be fully taken up- especially when it comes to the right and its study. Using Wolfe’s intervention as a jumping off point, I want to consider Hall’s idea of conjunctural analysis as a viable alternative to the Cold War liberal pluralism of Richard Hofstadter and Daniel Bell for understanding the right’s ascent in both the US and abroad.

For Hall, the conservative subject is not inherently different from the liberal subject, or any other subject in the public sphere. She is not inherently and already a discontented person due to her less than desirable place in society. She is also not necessarily a reactionary subject, either. If anything, Hall argues that we have to better understand how Thatcherism made its listeners feel at home and less displaced in an otherwise turbulent and crisis-defined moment. Instead of exacerbating the hyperbole of such subjects, Hall looks to “get the analysis right” in his “The Great Moving Right Show.”  “Thatcherism discovered a powerful means of translating economic doctrine into the language of experience, moral imperative, and common sense, thus providing a philosophy in the broader sense – an alternative ethic to that of the ‘caring society,’” argues Hall. “This translation of a theoretical ideology into a populist idiom was a major political achievement…the conversion of hard-faced economics into the language of compulsive moralism was, in many ways, the centerpiece of this transformation.” Very few scholars of the American right have been able to explain exactly how conservatism has found such a home in the US since the 1960s beyond appeals and parallels to Reconstruction, race and suburbia, the threat of fascism, or the rise of the latest wave of Christian fundamentalism. Turns of phrase, it seems, have been easier to invent in recent times than doing archival and historiographic work beyond the demand of the bombastic op-ed. It also implies that scholars are unwilling to engage the very ideology that has taken the proverbial high ground within the conjuncture. In short, Hall’s work “is an argument against the satisfactions which sometimes flow from applying simplifying analytic schemes to complex events…we miss precisely what is specific to this exceptional form of the crisis of the capitalist state by mere name calling.”

The clearest distillation of Hall’s work on the right and its ascendence in the 1970s can be found in his article, “The Great Moving Right Show.” Unlike American scholars of the right, Hall foregrounds what he calls “the conjuncture” in order to better understand how Great Britain shifted from a social democratic consensus to a neoliberal and authoritarian populist one under Margaret Thatcher. Hall also draws upon an entirely different theoretical tradition compared to his American counterparts for his analytical conclusions. In short, the conjuncture implies a terrain of struggle, the grounds upon which centrist orders attempt to resist challenges from both radical sides of the political spectrum. Under Thatcher, the right gained prominence in both ideological and discursive terms because it found a new home in British society as a newly defined form of common sense. This process was anything but painless, often requiring Hall to use the image of a plant being pulled up violently by its roots to describe how new forms replace the old. Instead of relying on theories of deprivation that assume a displaced, anxious subject prone to conspiracy and status envy, Hall examines how conservatism “makes sense” within a given historical moment in time to various constituencies of voters. But before he can begin his descriptive work on the right as a collection of social forces, Hall must first establish the reasoning behind his theorizing in the first place. What are we after when it comes to the right? What are we trying to explain? And for how long?

Hall begins his The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left on a procedural note “The construction of a new political will must be grounded in an analysis of the present, which is neither ritualistic nor celebratory and which avoids the spurious oscillations of optimism and pessimism, or the triumphalism which so often passes for thought on the traditional left “(12). For Hall, the work of understanding any type of social formation begins with an acknowledgement of the present, and our attempts to analyze its real time characteristics in addition to its synchronic continuities with the past. Analyses in this vein must be rigorous, attentive, and textured without succumbing to the political idiosyncrasies of any given present. In other words, conjunctural analysis is ultimately about “getting the analysis right” through what could be understood as an analytical disposition. Instrumental to this disposition is the analyst’s understanding of theory itself, and its particular purpose in the public square. Instead of repurposing categories more than a century old in describing the vast swing to the right that’s taken place in America since the 1960s in largely reactionary terms, Hall’s work suggests that theory should concern itself less with the hyperbole of our subjects, and more with revealing the larger assumptions and cross-purpose forces that have informed our particular, idiosyncratic moment in proverbial time: the conjuncture.

For the likes of Hofstader and Bell, studying the right was not simply an academic enterprise in the 1950s. It was a civic one as well. The disciplines of history and sociology were certainly self-sustaining entities by America’s mid-century, but they were also susceptible to threats to the public square- real or imagined. Such threats, and their collective study, became what we know today as the study of the American Right. The rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy gave scholars a model from which to extrapolate their various theoretical conclusions about populism, conservatives, and American democracy. While this model would on to become the predominant methodological approach to the right, even today, it would also go on to create many of its own worst enemies. As the product of a “liberalism against itself,” the academic study of the right was forged in the crucible of Cold war liberal thought and practice that imagined a world on the constant edge of catastrophe. As Samuel Moyn has recently argued, Cold War liberalism wrought its own undoing by imagining its enemies “at the gates, or already inside of them.” An “anxious, minimalist approach” that reflected pluralist assumptions about the public square and its undoing accompanied such commentary as Bell and others focused their attention largely on the most radical of conservative subjects. Such attention reflected the Cold War’s attention to existential threats to democratic order. As such, the theories of Hofstader and Bell functioned as both academic intervention, and civic prescription at the same time. In this sense, sociological theory identified threats to instability, specifically potential sources of democratic instability from either the “radical” left, or the “radical” right. For Hall, theorizing does not form itself over and against its subject, but rather emerges in conversation with it and its larger historical context. “The purpose of theorizing is not to enhance one’s intellectual or academic reputation, but to enable us to grasp, understand, and explain–to produce a more adequate knowledge of–the historical world and its processes…and thereby to inform our practice so that we may transform it.”

Such an approach to the conservative subject reflected less than capable faculties of professional scholars, and more the reactive analyses of everyday citizens. As political scientist Michael Rogin has argued, scholars of the right reflected larger pluralist assumptions about American public life and potential threats to its safety. This meant that theories of deprivation and status anxiety best explained the behavior of conservative subjects ranging from those who joined the John Birch Society, to those who voted for Barry Goldwater. Despite the fact that The Radical Right began as a series of conversations within the confines of the Columbia University History department, its conclusions largely foregrounded psychological explanations for conservative mobilization such as dispossession and the discontented classes as its formative frames of categorical analysis. Hall warned against such methodological reductionism across his writings about the right and its ascendance in public life from the vantage of Great Britain. While the majority of Hall’s works on the right were published in the 1980s, he began writing on moral panics, mugging, and authoritarian populism during the preceding decade. As a result, his work tracked with the rise of “the New Right” in the 1970s in both England and the US. Despite the geographic and temporal differences, Hall’s analyses can and should be read as a radical alternative to those of Hofstader and Bell. For Hall, theory was meant to illuminate larger processes and forces around a singular subject. This meant that compared to his methodological predecessors, Hall understood the extent to which the Right had been the beneficiary, instigator even, of crises both economic and social. Compared to the regressive, downtrodden, morose subjects of The Radical Right, Hall’s conservatives were capable of great feats of discursive strength- especially one Margaret Thatcher. “The moment you collapse everything into that level, so as to say there is nothing but their desire to escape from their freedom, that they are nothing but the dependency of the worker on the hand that feeds him or her,” Hall warned, “you run a real risk of reductionism.”