Deep
on page 546 of his 1,839-page budget, Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker
tucked in a crucial idea. He proposed to strip a principle from the
mission statement of the University of Wisconsin, a school that attracts
students from all over the nation and from 131 foreign countries. From
the core philosophy that has driven the university since the turn of the
last century Walker wanted to hack out the words: “Basic to every
purpose of the system is the search for truth.” Rather than serving the
people of the state by developing intellectual, cultural and humane
sensitivities, expertise, and “a sense of purpose,” Walker prefers that
the state university simply “meet the state’s workforce needs.” In the
face of scathing criticism, the governor backtracked and, despite a
trail of emails that led to his office, tried to claim the new language
was a “drafting error.”
But
Walker’s attempt to replace the search for truth with workforce
training was no error. Since the earliest days of Movement Conservatism
in the 1950s, its leaders have understood that the movement’s success
depends on destroying Americans’ faith in the academic search for truth.
For two generations, Movement Conservatives have subverted American
politics, with increasing success, by explicitly rejecting the principle
of open debate based in reasoned argument. They have refused to engage
with facts and instead simply demonized anyone who disagrees with their
ideology. This is an astonishing position. It is an attack on the
Enlightenment principles that gave rise to Western civilization.
Make no mistake: the attack is deliberate.
The
Enlightenment blossomed in the wake of the religiously-inspired Thirty
Years War of the seventeenth century, when thinkers horrified by the
war’s carnage set out to break the fetters of superstition and tradition
that had prompted the strife. Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Jefferson and
other thinkers advanced the idea that if people could listen to reasoned
arguments, weigh them against evidence and choose the soundest ones,
progress would follow. The Enlightenment revolutionized science, culture
and politics, and gave rise to the modern world.
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Enlightenment
ideals prompted America’s founding and reigned for generations as
Americans searched for the best ways to manage the economy, changing
demographics and international conflict. But in the 1950s, the idea of
progress through reason presented a problem for wealthy businessmen.
They hated New Deal legislation because it regulated business and
protected workers. The boom years of the 1920s had been good ones for
them, and they believed that the continued success of their enterprises
depended on their complete control over their businesses and the workers
they employed. They believed that government meddling in their affairs
would disrupt natural economic laws. And with their downfall would come
the downfall of the entire American economy, and with it, the nation.
But
the problem was that the New Deal was extraordinarily popular. After an
economic free-for-all of the 1920s that had pitched the nation into the
Great Depression, Americans embraced the government regulation that
reined in shady business dealings and protected workers. How could
businessmen make inroads against such a popular program?
In 1951, a
young William F. Buckley, Jr. articulated a strategy for opposing the
consensus that supported New Deal policies. Buckley’s “God and Man at
Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom’” was a sophomoric diatribe
by the Catholic son of a wealthy oil magnate, published by the small
right-wing Henry Regnery Press. In it, Buckley rejected the principles
that had enabled social progress for centuries and laid out a
mind-boggling premise: The Enlightenment, the intellectual basis of
Western Civilization, was wrong.
Rational argument supported by
facts did not lead to sound societal decisions, Buckley claimed; it led
people astray. Christianity and an economy based on untrammeled
individualism were truths that should not be questioned. Impartial
debate based in empirical facts was dangerous because it led people
toward secularism and collectivism—both bad by definition, according to
Buckley. Instead of engaging in rational argument, Buckley insisted,
thinkers must stand firm on what he called a new “value orthodoxy” that
indoctrinated people to understand that Christianity and economic
individualism were absolute truths. Maintaining that faith in reasoned
debate was a worse “superstition” than the Enlightenment had set out to
replace, Buckley launched an intellectual war to replace the principle
of academic inquiry with a Christian and individualist ideology.
Buckley’s
radical idea didn’t go far at first, but Wisconsin Senator Joseph
McCarthy provided a new rhetorical tool to advance the Yalie’s
intellectual premise. In the early 1950s, McCarthy revealed the power of
the outrageous lie. He sought to gain power by claiming to defend
Christianity and individualism from the secret plots of the godless
Communists in the American government. Since he had no evidence to
support his crusade, he replaced substantiated arguments with outrageous
accusations designed to grab headlines and rile voters. There were 205
Communists in the State Department, he trumpeted, or maybe there were 57
“card carrying Communists” there: after newspapers reported his
attacks, McCarthy quickly moved on to new accusations. By the time
fact-checkers condemned his statements, new headlines made the
corrections old news. McCarthy’s hit-and-run smears suggested that a
compelling lie could convince voters so long as it fit a larger
narrative of good and evil.
In the same year that McCarthy
self-destructed in front of a national TV audience during the
Army-McCarthy hearings, Buckley and his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell
turned Buckley’s ideological stand against academic inquiry into just
such a narrative. In their telling, a few brave men were standing
against an evil majority trying to destroy America. Their “McCarthy and
His Enemies” (1954) conflated Soviet-style communism with the popular
New Deal consensus. They claimed that Liberals—a name they capitalized
to suggest an organized political group—were forcing communism on
America. Opposing this cabal were “Conservatives,” who stood for God and
individualism. Until they converted it into a capitalized label,
conservatism was understood to be a political philosophy that embraced
popular programs that had been proven to work–like the New Deal— and
rejected radical political experiments based on ideology. Movement
Conservatives coopted the word “conservative” to do exactly what
traditional conservatives opposed: advance a radical program. “Movement”
Conservatives rejected the American consensus. They wanted to purge the
country of the Liberals who made up the majority and create a new
“orthodoxy” based on the ideology of strict Christianity and
individualism.
To press this radical political program, Buckley
launched the National Review in 1955, announcing that government
activism “must be fought relentlessly.” He railed against President
Dwight Eisenhower, who had modified the New Deal consensus into his own
“Middle Way.” Eisenhower’s policies just proved that a dangerous cabal
controlled both parties under “such fatuous slogans as ‘national unity,’
‘middle-of-the-road,’ ‘progressivism,’ and ‘bipartisanship.’” Such
moderation was socialism, he insisted, and, although the American
economy was booming, he insisted that the American consensus was
destroying both economic growth and liberty. With the election of JFK,
the National Review harped so furiously on the communism snaking into
American society at his direction that, after Kennedy’s assassination,
even the Republican Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren begged
Movement Conservatives to stop their hateful rhetoric. Once again,
Buckley spun language around, insisting that the troublemakers were the
Liberals who were engaged in an “orgy of lynch excitement against the
American Right.”
In 1960, a new voice added anti-intellectual
populism to Buckley’s rhetoric. Political operative Phyllis Schlafly
wrote “A Choice Not an Echo” to support Barry Goldwater’s quest for the
presidential nomination. In her world, correct political decisions were
simple: The nation was engaged in a great struggle between good and
evil, and educated Eastern Elites who insisted on weighing the realities
of a complicated world had enlisted on the wrong side. Elites
complained that Goldwater “had one-sentence solutions” for complicated
problems, she wrote, but simple solutions were the answer. Communism was
bad, so anyone advocating government activism was evil. Elites arguing
for government action were parasites. All they really wanted was money
from government contracts, paid for by hardworking regular Americans.
This
Manichean worldview led Barry Goldwater’s candidacy to grief in 1964 as
voters recoiled from its aggressive irresponsibility, but with Ronald
Reagan the Movement Conservative program gained the one new piece it
needed to sell its ideology: a warm narrative. Reagan pushed
Christianity and individualism with both lies and anti-intellectualism,
but he did so with folksy stories and charm. He described a world of
hardworking individuals threatened by “a little intellectual elite in a
far-distant capitol,” and pushed policies that dramatically rolled back
New Deal reforms. When opponents noted that his stories had little basis
in fact and that his policies didn’t work as he claimed, he accused
them of being haters and rallied supporters against the “Liberal media.”
Journalists and opposing politicians first laughed but then looked on
aghast as voters backed his warm fantasies over fact-based policy.
By
the time of the George W. Bush administration, Movement Conservatives
had constructed a post-modern political world where reality mattered far
less than the popular story of Conservatives standing firm against the
“Liberal agenda” of godlessness and communism. As a member of the Bush
administration famously noted to journalist Ron Suskind, “the
reality-based” view of the world was obsolete. It was no longer viable
to believe that people could find solutions to societal problems by
studying reality. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,”
this senior advisor to the president told Suskind. “We are an empire
now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re
studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating
other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things
will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left
to just study what we do.”
Buckley’s intellectual stand had won.
Facts and argument had given way to an ideology premised on Christianity
and the idea of economic individualism. As Movement Conservatives took
over the Republican Party, that ideology worked its way deep into our
political system. It has given us, for example, a senator claiming words
he spoke on the Senate floor were “not intended to be a factual
statement.” It has given us “dynamic scoring,” a rule changing the way
the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the economic
impact of tax cuts, to reinforce the idea that cuts fuel economic growth
despite the visibly disastrous effects of recent tax cuts on states
such as Kansas. And it has given us attempts in Oklahoma, Texas, North
Carolina and Colorado to discard the A.P. U.S. History framework and
dictate that students learn instead the Movement Conservatives’ skewed
version of the nation’s history. Politicians have always spun
information to advance their own policies. The practice infuriates
partisans but it reflects the Enlightenment idea of progress through
reasoned argument. Movement Conservatives’ insistence on their own
version of reality, in defiance of facts, is something different
altogether.
When Governor Walker replaced “the search for truth”
with “meet the state’s workforce needs” in the charge to the University
of Wisconsin, he did not make an error. He was articulating the
principle that has driven Movement Conservatives since their earliest
days: Facts and arguments can only lead Americans toward a government
that regulates business and supports working Americans, and they must be
squelched. The search for truth must be replaced by an ideology that
preserves Christianity and big-business individualism. Religion and
freedom for mega-business, Movement Conservatives insist, is what
America is all about.
Scott Walker, Jack Nicholson in "A Few Good Men," Ted Cruz (Credit: AP/Mark Humphrey/Tristar/Reuters/Lucas Jackson/Photo montage by Salon)
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