Matthew McManus - The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism: Neoliberalism, Post-Modern Culture, and Reactionary Politics

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The expected mark of competent books, articles, or introductions concerning post-modernism is an opening set of cautions, qualifiers, and anticipatory retreats from definition. Post-modernism after all, has long been a witching term, and one that undoubtedly calls for such lists. It is, conversely, a mark of ignorance to use it too boldly, or to deploy it without restraint. Much like other relics pillaged from the shrines of academic discoursewords like culture and ideologypostmodernism is no longer the sole possession of specialists; today it is rather more portentous. Rather than perform the usual rites, I suggest that the reader pretend to have found all required provisions here, such that I may go on to spin other yarn.

In this volume, Matthew McManus dissects the forked tongue of post-modernism while extending the definition to recent phenomena, particularly its deployment as rhetorical strategy by nationalists. Although the term was once limited in association to Parisian academics, McManus demonstrates its aptitude in describing the contemporary trolls of neoliberalismBrexiters and Eurosceptics, xenophobic nationalists, and brazen politicians who refuse to be cowed by political correctness. How then did a pathogen cooked up in the lecture halls of Paris 8 come to contaminate the spiritual aquifers of rural Kentucky? What is the connection between deconstruction and the erection of a massive fence in the Great Hungarian Plain?

The connection between the two is thoroughly examined by McManus in the following pages, and while I shall defer most of the discussion to the author, theres one particular similarity worth emphasising, even when comparing narratives as dissimilar as those of UKIP on the one hand and the 60s post-structuralists on the other. First, their identities are defined by the transgression and disruption of a particular, local status quo. Second, this disruption has a distinctly narrative structure.

In some cases, post-modern transgressions are gleeful and satiric, exemplified by political animals like Roger Stone. In other cases it comes with bereavement, as in the later reflections of Jean Baudrillard. Of course transgression alone is by no means a criterion of the post-modern. As McManus argues, it is profitable and edifying to examine post-modernism as a culture which has emerged in tandem with the neoliberal societies of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries (78). If we should, with McManus, label it a culture, it is then a culture of disruption. More than that, as I shall argue here, it is a disruption of a history as inherited by particular politics. My method in this introduction is thus a historiography of such disruptions in the post-modern genre, a narrative of rising action whose climax remains to be seen.

Whereas news is rhetoric of the present, history is rhetoric of the past. The quiet correlate of fake news (the 2017 Word of the Year, according to the American Dialect Society) is fake history , which has perhaps not yet received the analysis it is due. In this context history is an imagined but contentious territory, an absent object of appeal and desire. Nationalists, for their part, often use history as a store for pernicious rhetoricthe Third Reich was the third . This is no reductio ad hitlerum . Of course, these three events are not even superficially symmetrical, but the wanton heroism of nationalists is nothing if not self-serving. For their parts, Marine Le Pen and her party eagerly solicit comparisons with Joan of Arc, and thus any critical responses may be rendered as further persecution of the Lords unassuming instrument. Elsewhere still we hear the pangs of nostalgia echoing in slogans like Make America Great Again , as the past becomes a sort of guarantor of right action (political correctness is the true slavery). History here is strapped to the Procrustean beds of malapert sloganeers, their truths are appeals to imagined worlds, story worldsthe rites of ancestor worship for ancestors who never lived.