Like a chorus of Maenads in a Euripidean tragedy, goaded into religious ecstasy and ruthless in their avarice, the prophets of cultural conservatism in America cry with one voice that "no thought, no act shall progress beyond the old beliefs" (Bacchae, 891-2). To their eyes, hazed by fervor and fear, social and political progressivism is a heresy and the humanistic values inherent to progressivism are the false-gods of a foreign cult.
Echoing amongst these prophets’ daily calls-to-prayer is a demented nostalgia for the Old South, for the American Frontier and for Mediaeval Authority... in effect, the wistful and deluded invocation of 'simpler' times when pitiless, necessitous and daemonic power could be wielded unencumbered by the oppressive strictures of tolerance, altruism and rationality.
Whatever is god is strong. Whatever long time has sanctioned, that is a law forever. The law tradition makes is the law of nature. (Bacchae, 893-6)
SOUTHERNIZATION
Contrary to apologist Pat Buchanan’s benign reconstruction of Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy,’ the Republican Party has, since the late 1960s, deliberately and systematically built their base voting-bloc upon the tenets of pre-Civil Rights southern white working-class culture: religious fundamentalism, anti-intellectualism, anti-scientism, xenophobia, racialism, and naïve patriotism.
The Republican ‘Southern Strategy,’ once a specific focus on obtaining the support of working-class whites in the geographic South, has undergone a sociological transformation. It has expanded into the current ‘southernization’ of the Republican Party, a cultural conservatism embodying southern mores, predicated on issues of religion, race and an abiding distrust of and disdain for the Federal Government, intellectuals and other secular authorities, all of which appeals to a naïve, disaffected and reactionary element in American society which extends far beyond the physical geography of the Old South.
Although cultural conservatives have at times striven to cloak these irrational, immoral and inhumane values behind the rhetoric of smaller government and states' rights, we are witnessing in the emergence of the Tea Party and in the increasing visibility of other right-wing extremist groups just how diaphanous this façade has become. Duplicitous defense of states’ rights is, quite simply, the conservative strategy to forestall Federal intervention in the Culture Wars.
FRONTIERISM
The values and slogans of contemporary cultural conservatism also evoke the romantically mythologized American frontier experience: do-or-die individualism, Manifest Destiny, the adoration of unrefined Jacksonian politics (Andrew... not Jesse), a disdain for East Coast élites, and the glorification of a reactionary folk-culture in which ignorance is virtuous.
Republican and Tea Party views of the American economy are decidedly frontierist. Their desiderata—unfettered capitalism and systemic deregulation—create a literal ‘Wild West’ of the relationships between businesses, consumers and citizens. Moreover, their dystopic veneration of laissez-faire capitalism operates from the ‘assumption of plenty’ characteristic of exploitation of frontier resources, the untenable belief that perpetual growth is possible on a finite world. It is this frontierism, particularly the false assumption of plenty, which underlies the hostility among Republicans and Tea Partiers to resource management and to long-term environmental issues.
MEDIAEVAL AUTHORITY
Contemporary conservatism is less a political ideology than a religion. Right-wing media are the Church; corporations assume the rôle of landed gentry, scheming over secular interests within their manors, at far remove from the human chattel on whose backs their fortunes are made; neoconservative think-tanks operate as the priestly class, mediating between the worldly and the divine; and the culturally conservative base gleefully accept their fate as serfs, a repressed caste exploited by their lords and conditioned to servitude by their Church.
The extremist "public intellectuals" of conservatism—Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, Boortz et alii—function as prophets, speaking in tongues and invoking the end-of-days. The folksy serfs, fated to ignorance by their reverence for the Church, mistake the gilded speech of the priests and prophets for divine authority, for the Word of their God.
Cultural conservatism is a modern counter-Reformation, hearkening to a time when the ignorant mass of peasantry was enthralled to both their lord and to a divine authority expressed through a language they could not comprehend. Existence and religion were inextricably bound, visceral and elemental. Heresy was punished through the public purifications of the Inquisition.
EPILOGUE
The Maenads of the Bacchae, zealously anticipating the death of Pentheus, the articulate intellectual whose opposition to their cultish behavior and traditionalism so provokes them, cry forth:
Let these things be the quarry of my chase: purity, humility, and an unrebellious soul, accepting all. Let me go the customary way, the timeless, honored and beaten path of those who walk with reverence and awe beneath the sons of heaven. O Justice, principle of order, spirit of custom, come! Be manifest! Reveal yourself with a sword! Stab through the throat the godless man, the mocker, who flouts custom and outrages god! (Bacchae, 1007-14)
We progressives must align ourselves with the Messenger, the voice of reason who, having recounted to the Meanads the merciless dismemberment of Pentheus at the hands of his mother Agave, her eyes clouded by divinity, ultimately condemns them:
You dare to rejoice at these disasters which destroy this house? ... This exultation in destruction is immoral (Bacchae, 1032-3, 1039-40)