The Right's View of the Left

OK, now I'm blatantly procrastinating on the deepfakes research in favor of more "Christianity is dying" news. Rod Dreher on The American Conservative website has thus far provided me the most intriguing take on this trend. An early critic of Trump, he still regularly criticizes the President. He was a Catholic until he abandoned that faith for the Orthodox church. He's unabashedly conservative, but he is not shy about refusing to see Trumpism as a reliable standard-bearer for conservatism. Amid the impeachment scandal, Dreher's support for Trump appears to be hanging by a thread.

But for Dreher, that thread of support is spun from the deep and abiding apprehension and loathing he has for the left. I've picked up a similar current of anything but Democrats sentiment across the right-wing sites I survey daily.

This "left" that appears in such red-leaning discourse fascinates me. I recognize some of it. Imagine every excess of racial/sexual/gender/class wokeness you can, magnify it, join it with a deep hatred of Christianity, and you have something that resembles red America's vision of "the SJW [Social Justice Warrior] left," a label that often gets the gendered adjective hysterical attached to it. From this point of view, the left consists of an ongoing cultural inquisition dedicated to rooting out those normal-thinking regular folk who just think good old-fashioned common sense things like marriage should be between one man and one woman, that the point of sex is to have lots of babies within the confines of stable marriage, that worship of the Christian God was-is-should be the basis for much of American culture and law, that human personhood begins at conception and that "science" proves this, that variation in gender presentation should be treated as abnormal, that the climate is basically stable and earth's resources there for humans to use, that Western European culture (and possibly ethnicity) has fairly won out as the best and most noble of human expressions, that...

Well, there's a never-ending list of things lefty SJWs don't like but that regular people do. Mind you, after the first few items (lately, "drag queen story hour is an abomination") the regular people would start bickering sharply about exactly what the right and true is (Is there One True Church? Should women be allowed positions of leadership in church and society? Are mixed-race marriages a good idea?). Such fractures, however, get a pass compared to the clear and present danger of SJWs.

Just what threat do SJWs pose? Well, first of all, they're judgey. Cross them, believe anything different than they do, and suddenly you're a "bigot" or a "racist" or a "sexist"--and that hurts! (That's ungenerous of me; let me try again.)

From the red-leaning point of view, progressives preach a peculiar kind of tolerance: tolerate the things we say you must tolerate--and don't ask too many questions about it. The "snowflake" stereotype often plastered on progressives comes from a sense on the right that their tolerance and social justice exist primarily as an ethical style, a taste for what's acceptable or not, and not as a set of clear or defensible principles. Inquiring about the boundaries of that style, or disagreeing with its arbiters, is in this snowflake religion a dire sin, a performative act that marks you as a heretic. Everything's acceptable and tolerable except questioning acceptance and tolerance.

Conservative Christians--the ur-regular people in right-leaning thought--cannot help but seem distasteful and disgusting to SJWs. They believe things--God, sin, commandments, redemption, moral codes--that SJWs deem as unacceptable. Therefore Christians are hateful bigots just for being Christians. Christians, in other words, are intolerable to pro-tolerance SJWs.

My snide bit about judgeyness aside, red-leaning folk point to actual consequences of holding views disliked by the predominant culture of SJWs (and, to reds, SJW culture predominates). There's social judgment, being seen as bigoted. Then there's the economic and political consequences of being seen as such. Reds often point to high-profile instances of people being shown the door of private companies or disinvited from special events for expressing, say, skepticism about gay marriage. Many conservative folk live and move in predominantly blue circles; they'd lose friends, clients, and referrals if word got out that they were Trump voters.

On larger levels, conservative Christians see threats to their beliefs in anti-discrimination policies. The cake-baker cases, where conservative Christians seem (in their view) to be coerced into celebrating a ceremony they see as contrary to their faith, worry them greatly. Consider Beto O'Rourke's remarks at a recent Democratic debate, where he argued that churches that deny services like marriage to LGBTQ+ people should lose their tax-exempt status. Such a statement, argues Ben Shapiro, is "saying the quiet part of the progressive agenda out loud."

The "left" that O'Rourke seems to be speaking for, from the conservative Christian perspective, isn't merely different than but inimical to Christians. It wants Christianity gone.

More tomorrow,

JF