Right-Wing Postmodernism

I've been thinking about this one for a minute.

In the beginning of Chuck Klosterman's last book he quotes an unnamed Bush administration official saying something along the lines of this: See we act and you try to study that reality. But we create reality. So while you're studying, we'll act again and create another, new reality and then you will study that.

I think the "you" is directed at a journalist, but it could be extended to academia with little problem. What's interesting about the post and the Right in general today is that they have become full-fledged post-modernists.

Now Right and Left are weird terms and I'm not always sure exactly what they mean - but that's for a different post. Right now, let's just go with the broad, general understanding of the terms - meaning the way they are thrown around in popular culture, whereby Noam Chomsky is Left and Bill Buckley is Right.

Okay, so as an academic who identifies with Postmodernism it seems apparent to me that Postmodernists tend to be leftwing. In fact that's almost universally the case because Right Wing people find Postmodernism to be a variation of Relativism and hence immoral and something to fight.

Okay, all that makes sense except for the way the two sides use Rhetoric. The Right is using a far more sophisticated PoMo rhetoric and has been, at least since the Bush administration - basically since I've been following politics closely. By that I mean they embrace the idea that language does not simply describe reality, it produce reality. They have often taken a Left-Wing academic model and used it on a political level.

See the Left Wing academics, people like me, have often said things like we need more voices in the canon of literature. We have too few people of color and women speaking. Now nobody thinks we should throw out the greats - they just mean we should add to the list. Make it more inclusive. (I like most people get tired of this argument if it ever suggests that diversity for diversity's sake should be incorporated. But I don't actually hear people in my world making this argument - I just hear it described that way by people not in my world)

Anyhow, so the Right started using the let's-include-more-voices when it came to things like Global Warming - issues that don't have a lot of disagreement among experts.

But the Left-Wing Politicians (as opposed to Academics) do not embrace Postmodernism. Instead, they all sound like Enlightenment Rationalists. Believing that Truth is out there and if it's just described well enough - in the form of Policy - that people will change their minds. However, that aint how minds change.

And one would think the exact opposite - that The Right - to combat Relativism would seek Truth, instead of believing it can be created linguistically. However, it seems the two sides have somehow flip-flopped.

This is weird and bad for The Left. The Right continues to understand Rhetoric better and the outcome cannot be good if you're a Leftist. If you're on The Right. Keep it up. You're winning.