Ideography and the failure of American conservatism

I’ve referenced the concept of ideography before, but I haven’t given it a proper treatment yet. In short, an ideography in the political sense is a set of ideographs: terms assigned a particular emotional load by an ideology for use in its rhetoric.

The use of ideographs will often seem absurd to readers outside the ideology to which they belong. An average American going through Nazi political material would almost certainly find the references to Volksgemeinschaft, das Führerprinzip, and Jewry to be, at the very least, disorienting, similar to the feeling one gets when traveling to a foreign country and finding that the toilets have foot pedals instead of flush handles. But then, so would the average Nazi upon hearing the constant references of Western political material to the somewhat isomorphic concepts of liberty, democracy, and fascism. For an example closer to home, consider the reaction of the average American ‘liberal’ (I’ll dispense with my usual scare quotes from here on out; just keep in mind that, contrary to my usual practice, all terms are to be taken in their usual American senses) to Newt Gingrich’s “secular socialism” routine.

Can an isomorphic example, of a conservative reaction to a sound bite applying the liberal ideography, be constructed? It is possible to come close, with, for example, the constant charges of racism leveled at just about every conservative figure and movement, but there is one crucial difference: liberals don’t respond emotionally to “secular socialism”, but conservatives most definitely do to “racism”. In fact, as the conservative line on affirmative action demonstrates, “racism” is just as much a part of the conservative ideography as the liberal one. And, for that matter, the white supremacist one: David Duke uses it.

Pretty pervasive ideograph we have here, if a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan uses it to deliver the exact same emotional load as Tim Wise. They both agree that racism is a Bad Thing; the only difference is in the definition. Duke wants to apply it to Wise, and vice versa. Any debate between the two (ignoring that, in reality, at least one of the two would have to be carted off by security five seconds in) would almost certainly consist mostly of redefinitions of the term, and other ideographs common to the American political arena. These semantic games are common: witness the attempt of Roger Scruton, one of the few conservatives with two brain cells to rub together, to split the positions he disagrees with that can be supported by the positive ideograph “liberty” into a new, negative ideograph, “license”, instead of rejecting the ideograph altogether.

It is clear, then, that in addition to the conservative ideography, there exists an ideography shared by just about the entire American political arena, which I will call the American ideography. Its contents include, on the positive side, liberty, equality, freedom, democracy, progress, fairness, and justice, and on the negative side, racism, fascism, and anything related to Hitler.

The astute reader will, by now, have picked up on an omission: nowhere have I mentioned liberal ideography. There is a reason for this omission: there may be a few minor differences, but at least on the major points, the liberal ideography is the American ideography. Most ideographs used by liberals are also used by conservatives, and with the same intended effect. (This is less so on the alt-right; one of the many instances of convergent evolution between Mencius Moldbug and the European New Right is their explicit refudiation of that ideography.)

Now consider the history of the American ideography. Its terms’ associations have changed consistently, and in a consistent direction: leftward. Equality under the law became equality of opportunity, and is now becoming equality of outcome. Freedom from the tyranny of a single, unelected, overactive monarch became freedom from fear and want, and is now becoming freedom from any sort of moral judgment of all but the most repulsive forms of libertinism. And so on. Considering the structure and history of this ideography, and its identification with ‘Americanism’, there can be no American Right. The American ideography does not hold promise for conservatives, and yet they do not challenge it; in fact, they do the opposite, and in doing so, sign their own death sentence.

That is the failure of conservatism.