By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, August 11, 2025
There was a time when you could open the latest issue of National
Review or, especially, The New Criterion and have a very good chance
of seeing a serious, literate, and often enough vicious takedown of some trendy
French academic or intellectual fad sweeping the English departments and the
journals: Michel Foucault, of course, and Jacques Derrida, the epigones of
Jacques Lacan, the ghost of Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard,
post-structuralism, deconstruction, with most of that dog’s-breakfast being
lumped together (accurately or not) under the heading “postmodernism.” This was
less an idea than a creed: that there is no truth, no single authoritative
account of anything—not in literary interpretation or art criticism, not in
language itself, not in science or history or economics, and certainly not in
journalism or anything else associated with mass media.
(The antidemocratic attitude toward mass media was one of
High Postmodernism’s few redeeming qualities.)
The contempt for these ideas on the intellectual right at
the time was intense, and, in spite of these notions having worked up a good
head of steam from the 1970s through the early 1990s, they petered out toward
the end of the 20th century, not because of the many admirable
vivisections of the ideas and their authors’ reputations by conservative
intellectuals, but because the economic boom of the Clinton years and the
technological revolution that began in earnest in early 1995 (Netscape
Navigator, the first commercial web browser, was released in mid-December 1994)
transformed the culture in a way that left these sour, paranoid,
anti-capitalist notions poorly fitted to the demands of the time. It is very
difficult to be a celebrity (and Foucault et al. were celebrities first and
foremost, not philosophers) and be out of step with the spirit of the time.
Brooding, Gauloises-smoking linguists were out, and billionaire techno-utopians
who wanted to talk about yoga and mindfulness were in. Members of both
political parties talked seriously about recruiting Bill Gates to run for
president, with a bipartisan solicitousness that had not been enjoyed by an
American public figure since Dwight Eisenhower. There was a degree of clarity
and consensus and a mood that was libertarian and, at times, libertine: Nobody
except a few contemptible and comical crackpots thought the ayatollahs had a
point and that Salman Rushdie (who came out of hiding to appear on
stage with U2 in 1993) should have avoided giving
offense to the fanatics in Tehran, professional moral scolds such as Tipper
Gore were scoffed at as embarrassing reminders of Reagan-era moral hysteria,
“Just Say No” went out of fashion, Americans were following the stock market
like sports scores, and the few Marxists still wandering around on the campuses
were regarded as something like those Japanese soldiers still defending remote
Pacific islands in the 1950s, either not having heard that the war was over or refusing
to accept their loss. It was, indeed, a glorious time, and the big ideas of
postmodernism were kind of crammed into an intellectual Tupperware dish and
stuffed into the back of a fridge in a faculty lounge somewhere, forgotten,
moldering and festering and putrefying until a few unhappy souls—including more
than a few of those old right-wing intellectuals!—discovered the ghastly mess
and decided to start serving it up.
In a terrific 1989 New Criterion essay on Baudrillard, Richard Vine catalogued what he called the
“seven commandments of contemporary social analysis.” These were meant as an
indictment of postmodernism’s radical relativism, its intellectual flabbiness,
and its fundamentally conspiratorial style. But with only a few minor
emendations, one could apply them productively to the Trump-and-Twitter-era
right, with its “do your own research” nonsense, its contempt for expertise and
factual consensus, its rejection of historical and scientific truth, and its
paranoid, thoroughly Foucaultian insistence that the media and “elites” are in
cahoots in creating a “narrative,” the purpose of which is not to provide
information or perspective but to control community life—politically,
intellectually, morally, medically, economically—through a variety of schemes
and techniques designed to exclude the hidden truth apparently known only by
junkie crackpots like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a few game show entrepreneurs
and cable television hosts.
Vine’s commandments include: “Disdain quantitative
measures and hard evidence. Spin elaborate theories out of a few anecdotes,”
advice taken to heart by everyone from Tucker Carlson to Victor Davis Hanson.
“Sensationalize your language. When in doubt, be murky. When stating the
ludicrous, be melodramatic,” i.e., do your best interpretation of Donald Trump
himself. “Dissociate yourself from conventional life, capitalism, and the
vulgar bourgeoisie, preferably by discovering in the unlikeliest places half-hidden
machinations of repressive control,” like J. D. Vance, Marjorie Taylor Greene,
or that Liver King guy. “Purport to extend and correct the prevailing vanguard
position,” which is Steve Bannon’s apparent mission in life. “Systematically
invert—or ‘transvalue’—all major tenets comprising the dominant doctrine of the
previous generation,” which is Sohrab Ahmari’s business model. “Find inventive
new applications for some standard postulates from today’s master disciplines,”
anthropology and structural linguistics when Vine was writing, but evolutionary
psychology, pop economics, and bro science today.
Who knew postmodernism would turn out to be so right-wing?
And what does the modern populist right demand? Only what
Vine saw as the postmodernist creed all those years ago: “absolute childhood—a
craven exemption from thinking, responsibility, and physical effort.”
Intellectual currents proceed in unpredictable ways.
Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation inspired The Matrix, which
in turn provided the new (new new) right with its master metaphor, the red pill
and the blue pill. But as with any ordinary stream, the easiest way to move is
downhill. As Vine wrote in 1989:
Imagine, then, Monsieur
Baudrillard in a restaurant. He peruses the menu fastidiously, selecting at
last, with the waiter’s recommendation, medallions of veal accompanied by
lightly buttered haricots verts, followed by a simple green salad, fruit and
mixed cheeses, espresso, and a sliver of apricot tart—complemented by a
delicate Chablis and, to finish, a noble but little known Armagnac. Then,
without a quiver, and without so much as having seen any food, Baudrillard
languidly calls for his check, says a gracious farewell to the maitre
d’hotel, and departs, having “consumed” the signs of a satisfying repast
and fulfilled all the essential requirements of symbolic exchange.
Vine’s cartoon version of the semiotician’s excesses is
wry, but the absurd situation it imagines is in a way much more substantial
than the reality of current political discourse: Presumably, the maitre
d’hotel is a real person, whereas half of the voices on social media today
are not; the restaurant is a real place, and one could, if one were inclined,
at least finish off the Armagnac. Compared to reading vague moral meaning into
somebody’s like of a retweet of a meme, Baudrillard’s symbolic dinner is
practically Thanksgiving at Martha Stewart’s house.
Of course, we must assume that Republicans as a
corporation and much of the conservative movement have fallen into the
postmodernist view—that discourse is only a front for power—out of pure
self-interest: Republicans have now twice elected a pathological liar (and
serial adulterer, and quondam pornographer, etc.) as president of these United
States, and there are a lot of people on the right whose business models and
mortgage payments depend on being able to convince a critical mass of morally
stunted rubes that they are doing everything in their power to defend Trump.
Trump’s attacks on the notion of truth are fairly unsophisticated—the Stalinist
firing of that BLS executive over insufficiently rosy employment
reports, maintaining that his net worth depends on how he is feeling about
himself that day, etc.—and the ladies and gentlemen who fill the role of
conservative intellectuals today (and while Tucker Carlson may have for some
inexplicable reason dived headlong into a bottomless well of fortified
cretinism, he is Rabindranath Tagore compared to Sean Hannity, whose brainwave
activity reads somewhere between that of Joe Biden and the late Hulk Hogan) barely
expend any more effort cooking up intellectual pretexts for the president’s
lies, his other abuses, his ignorance, and his breathtaking stupidity.
The thing about Baudrillard and the gang was that they
started with a point, albeit a trivial one. The linguist Ferdinand de Saussure
spun an entire, elaborate theory around the banal observation that there is no
inherent connection between the sound of a word and its meaning—English
speakers could have used “cat” to refer to the good kind of pet and “dog” to
refer to the other kind, but they did the opposite for reasons now lost to
philology. The “arbitrariness of the linguistic sign,” as the Saussureans call
it, is a real thing. It just doesn’t mean very much, and it is not as though
there were some great linguistic edifice based on the opposite assumption—a
rose by any other name and all that. Similarly, the signs we use for numbers
are more or less arbitrary (although one can trace some of them back to
non-arbitrary hashmarks, i.e., the Roman numerals I, II, III, and the much
older Brahmi numerals for the same, which look like the Roman ones having a
nap) but math and physics still work, however arbitrary the signs used
in E = mc2. Likewise, conservative complaints about things such as
media bias or double standards in social media moderation are not based on
nothing—they just explain a lot less of how the world works than the people who
have to follow Republicans around with an intellectual shovel and broom pretend
that they do. If Donald Trump were caught on camera raping a platypus on the
South Lawn tomorrow, what would Hannity say? “The biased media would never make
such a big deal about raping a platypus on the South Lawn if it had been Barack
Obama. And who is to say that Obama didn’t? I’m not saying Barack Hussein Obama
did that. I’m just asking questions. Do your own research.”
There are, of course, gross financial factors at play.
What Fox News seems to have learned from the Dominion lawsuit is that it can
afford to lie to its viewers more readily than it can afford not to lie to
them. But it also seems to me that a great many on the right have genuinely
taken those dusty old postmodernist notions to heart—that they actually believe
this baloney, that they can somehow turn the humiliating defeat of the 2020
presidential election into a resounding victory, that Trump’s actions following
that defeat were not an attempted coup d’état but honest and decent
actions resulting in that “patriot purge” Carlson rants about in such imbecilic
fashion. You see some of this in the self-help swill from the men’s movement,
i.e., the belief that pretending to be a confident, high-status man is practically
speaking the same thing as being one.
Of course, a lot of this is something Jonah Goldberg
talks about frequently: ideas that are trailing indicators rather than leading
indicators, intellectual fig leaves and window dressing for events and social
developments that came to pass before the ideas vindicating them were decocted
from current events. Some of it is Christians looking for a way to exempt
themselves from the rule about “bearing false witness,” as in the case of J.D.
Vance and
those fictitious cat-eaters in Springfield, Ohio. But
there has been a real shift, of a kind, too. There are plenty of smart people
who know that Trump is lying to them—a few of them work directly for the man.
But people such as Vance and Trump’s top advisers have decided that the truth
just doesn’t matter. Vance justified lying about black immigrants in
Springfield on utilitarian grounds: “If I have to create stories so that the
American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people,
then that’s what I’m going to do,” he
said.
But, having abandoned long-held principles such as
limited government, free trade, the rule of law, etc., why not abandon truth,
too? I cannot imagine this will be good for the intellectual and moral health
of the right. But, then, the right does not seem to care very much about
intellectual or moral health right now—just don’t get them started on seed
oils.
And Furthermore …
It is amazing to remember how much prestige the French
still had back in the 1990s—not only French intellectuals but also French
politicians and French political culture. When Bill Clinton was being run
through the wringer over his sexual relationship with a White House intern and
the many lies and acts of obstruction he engaged in to cover it up, his critics
were treated to endless dismissals that the sophisticated French would never
get so worked up by the appetites of a great man. Only we puritanical Americans
care about that sort of thing.
(That they thought Clinton was a great man was pretty
funny, too.)
And Furtherermore …
On truth and goodness (and beauty), you might enjoy this
essay by Thiago M. Silva published by the C.S. Lewis Institute.
Words about Words
Above, I wrote about baloney—the metaphorical
kind, not the fried-on-a-sandwich kind. (Fried-baloney sandwiches on Mrs.
Baird’s bread were a thing when I was growing up, and maybe they still are.
Fried Spam sandwiches, too.) It is easy enough to see how the pronunciation of
Bologna sausage, named for the Italian city that is home to the Western world’s
first university (founded in 1088) might have been corrupted into baloney,
but what about the meaning? How did the poor man’s mortadella end up indicating
nonsense? A reader recently asked me to look into it.
The answer is, as it sometimes is: Nobody really knows.
The most popular theory is that as baloney came to be known as a cheap,
mass-produced lunchmeat, it was understood to be composed of disparate, sundry,
and disreputable bits of this and that. (Here, the Pennsylvania Dutch scrapple
is more straightforward, having the word scrap right in there.) So a
claim or an idea that was based on a mess of disreputable stuff became known as
baloney.
Asked why Robert F. Kennedy (the McCarthyite attorney
general, not his son, the crackpot junkie HHS secretary) always refused to
appear on Firing Line, William F. Buckley Jr. replied:
“Why does baloney reject the grinder?” Clare Luce Booth, writing in 1943, characterized Henry Wallace’s glib internationalism as “globaloney.”
Political discourse: We have the meats.
In Closing
That Richard Vine essay ends with a banger:
The gimmick-mongers of
contemporary French thought are guilty of many logical and factual errors, but
these are as nothing compared to their fundamental moral dereliction. For their
infatuation with the indeterminacy of texts, the decentralization (and denaturing)
of the authorial subject, the provisional quality of every explication, etc.,
yields a Vichy interpretation of literature—wishfully proposing a world in
which no particular individual is responsible for any particular act, in which
the capitalist system ruins lives day and night, while no upstanding leftist
intellectual, whatever his views, could possibly be accused of complicity in
the slaughters of the Khmer Rouge or the admissions policies of Soviet
psychiatric hospitals.
For twenty years now we have
suffered the ascendancy of the congenitally evasive. They have taught us their
fear of social virility, their horror of virtù.
The horror of virtù remains very much with us. It
is strange how excessive admiration for the will to power brings out the servility
in so many men.
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