Deconstructing Dennis

Last week, my dad forwarded me an email from a right-wing friend of his featuring a link to this video of conservative pundit Dennis Prager speaking at some event at the University of Denver.  He wanted to know my take on what Prager was saying.  So I watched it and replied thusly:

Well, I watched the clip, and I can’t say that I’m surprised.  He offered an articulate, if disturbing, statement of the conservative/authoritarian view of the country and the world.  He explicitly identifies himself as a paleoconservative (and also perhaps a Palin-oconservative), which is not a Republican archaeologist, but someone who believes in the (mythical) purity of pre-modern life, and seeks to reshape society back into that mold (or is it a corset?).  He blames our current problems on “European professors” who came to US universities “a hundred years ago”, and the foreign, dare I say, French, ideas that they brought with them.  Now that I think about it, he’s fighting the royalist/aristocratic  position in the French Revolution: against the separation of church and state, and in favor of the concept of a (divinely mandated) hierarchy of inequality.  He even goes farther back than that: with his statement that governments that enact policies that benefit their citizens and bring them happiness are immoral, he echoes mainstream medieval thought going all the way back to Augustine in late antiquity, that human happiness is impossible and that trying to bring it about in this world is a sinful deviation from the true path.  He believes that early America somehow embodies this medieval ideal, never minding all the European Enlightenment ideas written into the Declaration and Constitution.  On this illusory basis lies his concept of American Exceptionalism: because we, or at least Republicans, are on the true path, all that we, conservatives, do is inherently good.  So thus the Iraq war was not a war of criminal aggression for oil, strategic position, genocide, profit, and the frail ego of a spoiled alcoholic brat trying to be better than his father, it was about “fighting evil”.  It follows then, that if the US is uniquely good, then everyone else is bad.  He predictably beats up on a number of foreign countries, as well as presenting a false duality between the US and the UN.  In a distorted reflection of Bush’s “you’re either with us or against us” statement, he implies that the only choices available in the world are the US and UN, when there are quite a variety of political, social, and economic orientations from which to choose.  

All in all, this is pretty typical far-right stuff, some of which can be confronted or rebutted on a factual basis, but the heart of which is metaphysical.  Is a modern society in which laws explicitly written by human beings apply to all human beings equally, preferable to a pre-modern society with a legal hierarchy of privilege in which the law, based on arbitrary and unchangeable religious dogma, written by a few elite human beings for the sake of the few elite human beings, applies unevenly by design?  Progressives, heirs of the Enlightenment, would say yes, modern society for all its flaws is better because we control it, and are masters of our own destiny.  Espousal of this view requires a certain tolerance for imperfection and mistakes, as well as the belief that the venture can be successful in improving the lives of humanity from their present state.  Conservatives obviously disagree.  Such happiness as they allow themselves comes from order: obeying strong authority and dominating those weaker than themselves.  To say that these views are incompatible is to say that one should not mix sodium and water, for the inevitable result is a violent conflagration.  And that is where I think people like Mr. Prager are leading us.