All hail palliative ‘solutions’

benfell

Substantively, Zoe Strimpel’s answer to intensifying political polarization in the U.S. is moderation. She supports (the neoliberal) Hillary Clinton. She decries extremism and offers a false equivalence[1] between a Left I agree has, in some cases, gone too far (suffers youthful excess) and an increasingly monolithic white Christian nationalist Right[2] that she acknowledges threatens reification[3] of The Handmaid’s Tale.[4] I had written my reply even before I’d seen her article:


One problem here is the imagination of a mythical “golden mean” as the answer to extremism. That remains as incoherent as ever; there is still no and there never will be an actual logic to the “golden mean,” and so, as we see with the Democrats, such an approach to policy, hopelessly beset by contradiction, fails miserably.[5]

Another problem is a conservative privileging of what they think “should be” over what actually “is,” the naturalist fallacy.[6] In traditionalist conservative thinking, the former is eternal while the latter is temporal and therefore to be discounted.[7] In my dissertation, I observed that what traditionalists made explicit, other conservatives took as implicit: Whether it be market ideology, (a selective reading of) the Bible, “tradition,” or something (anything, desperately) else (like conspiracy theories), conservatives inevitably prefer it to actual reality,[8] in effect, abusing a valid post-modernist challenge to the concept of truth.[9]

But the appeal to a “golden mean” is no better. It substitutes palliatives for any substantive solutions to the real problems that real people in the real world face.

  1. [1]Zoe Strimpel, “America is headed for another civil war where one side has to vanquish the other,” Telegraph, June 25, 2022, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/06/25/america-headed-another-civil-war-where-one-side-has-vanquish/↩
  2. [2]David Benfell, “My 2024 forecast,” Not Housebroken, June 11, 2022, https://disunitedstates.org/2022/03/10/my-2024-forecast/↩
  3. [3]Zoe Strimpel, “America is headed for another civil war where one side has to vanquish the other,” Telegraph, June 25, 2022, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/06/25/america-headed-another-civil-war-where-one-side-has-vanquish/↩
  4. [4]Margaret Atwood, Handmaid’s Tale (New York: Anchor, 1998).↩
  5. [5]David Benfell, “Democrats and contradiction,” Not Housebroken, January 20, 2022, https://disunitedstates.org/2021/11/18/democrats-and-contradiction/↩
  6. [6]David Benfell, “Conservative Views on Undocumented Migration” (doctoral dissertation, Saybrook, 2016). ProQuest (1765416126).↩
  7. [7]Russell Kirk, Conservative Mind (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2001); Richard Weaver, Visions of Order (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1995).↩
  8. [8]David Benfell, “Conservative Views on Undocumented Migration” (doctoral dissertation, Saybrook, 2016). ProQuest (1765416126).↩
  9. [9]Grant Kien, “Postmodernism Trumps All: The World Without Facts,” Qualitative Inquiry 27, no. 3-4 (2021): 374-380, doi: 10.1177/1077800420918892↩