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The Wire
07-07-2025
- Politics
- The Wire
The Constitution and Its Discontents: Ambedkar, Marx, and the Sangh's War on Equality
There's a classic paradox from vaudeville. Someone says to Emanuel Ravelli, 'I used to know an Emanuel Ravelli who looked exactly like you.' Ravelli replies, 'I am Emanuel Ravelli!' The other nods: 'No wonder you look like him' (Animal Crackers (1930) Movie Script). Circular logic dressed as insight – not unlike the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's approach to the Indian Constitution. The RSS says, 'We don't like this Constitution.' The marginalised reply, 'But it guarantees equality and religious neutrality.' The RSS responds, 'Exactly – that's why we don't like it.' Their posturing has all the guile of a child hiding behind its fingers, convinced no one can see it. I like their innocence. It is so transparent, so childish. It lacks even the cunning of a Gandhi or the sinister depth of a Heidegger. They seem to believe – in all seriousness – that Ambedkar fought to become an untouchable again, to proudly become what he was born into. That the child made to pull the bullock cart himself – then left bleeding by the roadside when it overturned – was not resisting caste, they say, but merely asking to be abandoned more politely. For a gentler fall. A more dignified humiliation. That the man who was denied water, dignity, and humanity wanted a cleaner corner on the school floor, not the annihilation of the system that put him there. That the Constitution he drafted was not a weapon against graded inequality, but a kind of accommodation letter – a folded note of apology to Hindu society. 'One should become what one was!' – that seems to be the RSS's dream for Dalits, Adivasis, and minorities. A return, not to dignity, but to assigned place. I'm not sure what the philosophical term is. Hegel 's teleological becoming? Or Heidegger 's authenticity? Or just ritualised regression dressed up as destiny? Ambedkar stuffed and displayed This is not misreading. This is a ritual purification of revolt, recasting fire as submission and rage as obedience. This is ideological taxidermy – hollowing out Ambedkar and stuffing him with docility. They preserve the external form (his image, his name, maybe a quote or two), but remove the substance – his radical anti-caste, anti-Hindu, pro-Constitution stance – and replace it with something completely tame and unthreatening. A lifeless, decorative version of a revolutionary. I like their child-like innocence. But a woman in a Malayalam film tells a man having a child-like naivety, "If you had even a little bit of intelligence, I would have called you dumb-witted.' Maybe the RSS can't figure it out – but we, of course, know exactly why they have a problem with secularism and socialism. They have nothing to do with either. Of the six Sarsanghchalaks who have led the organisation since its founding in 1925, five have been Brahmins, mostly Maharashtrian – and the one exception, Rajendra Singh, was a Rajput, hardly a rupture in the varna ceiling. Not even a token Tamil, Malayali or Bengali Brahmin, let alone a Dalit, Adivasi, woman, or backward-caste Hindu. No Muslim, no Christian, no Buddhist, no Parsi – no one outside the tight, hereditary fraternity of the upper-caste Hindu male has ever been allowed within arm's reach of that ideological throne. What socialism? What secularism? The RSS's house has no room for them. The 'Hindu Rashtra' they fantasise about is not founded on equality – it is designed around obedience. And their disdain for the Constitution isn't philosophical – it's deeply familial. It comes from a quiet, generational certainty: this document was not written for them. Not for their kind of control, not for their inherited stature, not for the world they wish to restore. They have long declared – publicly with smug confidence, and privately with inherited conviction – that reservation is not just unnecessary, but actually harmful to Dalits and Adivasis. Because in the utopian ballroom of their imagined Hindu Rashtra, those same Dalits and Adivasis, who bled their way into institutions of power, could have simply moonwalked in – not as equals, of course, but as graceful, grateful slaves. Slaves, yes, but with excellent choreography. No rights, no law, no self-respect – just a dazzling routine of obedience and folded hands. In this fantasy, all a Dalit ever wanted was proximity, not power; access, not agency; a foot in the door, never a seat at the table. Reservation is offensive to them, not because it fails, but because it works. Because it insists on dignity where they prefer dependence, and creates citizens where they are comfortable only with subjects. The Constitution horrifies them precisely because it refuses to let people remain 'in their place.' In their moral universe, servility is harmony, hierarchy is culture, and equality is pure, unthinkable chaos – a cosmic error in need of correction. Inclusion as ornament Their standard response is a familiar one, almost rehearsed: We made a Dalit, an Adivasi woman, the President. We've appointed Backward-caste Prime Minister/Chief Ministers. We don't believe in caste distinctions – it's you who keep bringing them up. I like their child-like reasoning. But the woman in the film says, 'If you had even a little bit of intelligence, I would've called you dumb-witted.' Because yes, they have indeed made Dalits, Adivasis, women, and Backward-castes visible – but always within a frame constructed by the Constitution they secretly resent. In the frame of the RSS, these people are not representatives of power – they are luxuries, ornaments, brief intermissions in a structure otherwise built for upper-caste Hindu male supremacy. When they invoke these appointments, they are not asserting a belief in equality – they are borrowing someone else's grammar of justice to decorate their own ideology of control. That's not inclusion. That's appropriation with a straight face. It is in the Constitutional posts that they have appointed Dalits, Adivasis, women, and Backward-castes, not in their Nagpur office. And they want us to believe that it is because of the castelessness in their mind that this happened. I love this line of reasoning. The Constitution – and more importantly, the arithmetic of elections in a Constitutional democracy they barely tolerate – forced their hand. Now they parade these compulsions as moral triumphs. And the timing is always impeccable – the moment a Dalit or Adivasi or woman enters a high office, often through constitutional mechanisms they oppose, they rush to showcase it as evidence of their inclusiveness, while their ideological fortress in Nagpur remains sealed tighter than an orthodox Hindu kitchen during eclipse. The RSS doesn't open doors – it hangs portraits of the door-breaker after someone kicks them open. They didn't build the house, but they're now offering guided tours and collecting rent. They project their constitutional and electoral compulsions as if they were spontaneous moral impulses – as if Dalit/Adivasi presidents and backward-caste chief ministers just bloomed naturally in the fertile soil of Sangh ethics. They insist that even without the Constitution, nothing would change. 'We are,' they seem to claim, 'innately casteless, instinctively democratic, and born tolerant – we just happen to be carrying the Manusmriti for bedtime reading.' If that's the case, one wonders: why do they tremble before a written Constitution like vampires before a crucifix? Why fight so hard to dismantle a document that merely affirms what they claim is already in their blood? Unless, of course, it's not blood – it's varnashrama dharma that's running inside. Their argument boils down to this: trust us, we would have done all the right things – even without being forced to. It's like a pickpocket demanding praise for returning your wallet – after CCTV footage caught him in the act. Or more precisely, it's like a squatter claiming ownership of a house he didn't build. A house designed by Ambedkar, drafted with pain and vision, meant to shelter the historically displaced – and now illegitimately occupied by the very forces that once rejected its architecture. They didn't just fail to build it – they actively opposed its construction. But now they sit comfortably inside, offering guided tours, hanging portraits, quoting its clauses with patriotic flair, all while secretly chiselling away at its foundations. Others have called it appropriation. But this is more than ideological theft. This is encroachment in plain sight – occupation without authorship, entitlement without ethics. The state that abstracts and the state that doesn't obey In On the Jewish Question, the young Marx identified with astonishing clarity the very contradiction that haunts the Sangh: that the modern state is built on abstraction – a universal citizen stripped of caste, creed, or community – while actual human beings live as situated, embodied identities, shaped by history, culture, exclusion. The liberal state says: you are equal in law. But outside that frame, people live not as citizens but as Brahmins or Dalits, Muslims or Hindus, men or women. But unlike these megalomaniacs, Marx could think. He understood that the contradiction was not just between this or that policy, this or that religion. He saw it as a structural problem – the failure of the state form itself. The modern liberal state, for Marx, emerges as an abstract entity, declaring universal equality while presiding over a society fractured by material and historical inequalities. It treats people as 'citizens' in the political sphere, but leaves them as Jews, Christians, property-owners, workers, or, by extension, Brahmins and Shudras – in the social sphere. The Sangh's unease with the Constitution, however, isn't born of such dialectical insight. They're not worried that the state is abstract; they're worried that it isn't Brahminical. Their problem isn't that the state treats everyone as equal in theory – it's that it tries, however feebly, to act on that premise in practice. Marx asked how the state abstracts. The Sangh asks why the state doesn't obey. Marx did not believe the solution lay in tweaking the machinery of the state – he believed the machinery itself was the problem. The modern state, in his view, is not some neutral tool waiting for moral hands to steer it; it is structurally rigged to preserve domination. It pretends to be universal by abstracting individuals from their material and social conditions – caste, class, labour, gender, religion – and compressing them into a single fictitious figure: the 'citizen.' But this abstraction is not innocent. It reduces everyone to 'one,' and in that reduction, smuggles the bourgeois subject in as everyone. It doesn't erase inequality – it airbrushes it, then frames the result as fairness. For Marx, the goal was not a more inclusive or intersectional state – not a secular-socialist-Bahujan-feminist patchwork on the same old scaffold – but the withering away of the state form itself. You don't ask for better ventilation in a burning house; you expose the architecture as arson. That's what the Sangh cannot process. They think secularism failed because it can let in too many Muslims and Others. Marx knew it failed because it lets in the bourgeois only – it replaces real people with ideological silhouettes. The Sangh wants to rewrite the Constitution to reflect varna, to erase even the pretext of equality. Marx wanted to abolish the Constitution because bourgeois equality was always a mask. The Sangh wants to abolish it because even the mask offends them. The state Between Manusmriti and Maitri But this is where Ambedkar's insights are truly original. Like the young Marx, he grasped with piercing clarity the schism between the political state – that abstract theatre of rights and laws – and the actual state of lived inequality. He understood the contradiction not just as a philosophical dilemma but as a daily reality carved into the skin of Dalits, burnt into wells they could not drink from, etched in temples they could not enter. Yet unlike Marx, Ambedkar knew that the withering of the state in India wouldn't lead to liberation – it would lead straight into the waiting arms of the Hindu order. Marx imagined the state melting away into a classless community. Ambedkar knew better: here, the state does not dissolve – it reverts. The secular state, for all its hypocrisy and half-measures, is at least a barricade. When it is torn down, what emerges is not freedom but the ancient scaffolding of varna, varnished in modern lies. Strip away the Constitution, and you don't get Marx's commune – you get Manusmriti's kingdom. The State of affairs does not vanish; it metastasises into a state of the varna mind – a condition more enduring than any political form, encoded not in law but in custom, in ritual, in gaze. Ambedkar did not romanticise the outside. He knew that beyond the brittle shell of the liberal state lies not utopia but a caste unconscious, waiting to be reinscribed as common sense. Unlike Marx, Ambedkar did not seek to throw the bourgeois baby-state out with the dialectical bathwater. He did not trust the Hindu community to wither into justice. Ambedkar was a believer in macro-structures, in constitutional machinery, in strong Union power that could restrain provincial caste tyrannies. He did not romanticise the state, but he understood its potential as an instrument. For him, the abstraction of the 'citizen' was not a deception to be exposed, but a fiction to be realised – through rights, law, and representation. He was not interested in dismantling the idea of citizenship; that is a luxury affordable only to a potential citizen. He was trying to make it do its job. Marx wanted to abolish the abstract individual. Ambedkar wanted the abstract individual to finally include those who had never been permitted the dignity of abstraction – the despicable, the destitute, the untouchable, the invisible. For them, the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity were not bourgeois flourishes – they were oxygen masks. Without them, the social air remained unbreathable. Even after writing a Constitution with unmistakable socialist and secular underpinnings – and what else are the Directive Principles, the abolition of untouchability, the fundamental rights, if not structural acts of defiance against caste and capital? – Ambedkar was not content. He knew the Constitution was only half the battle. Law, no matter how progressive on paper, is just ink in the wrong hands. And Ambedkar, unlike his more naïve successors, was under no illusion about the character of those hands. If the wrong people got hold of the document – and they almost always do – they wouldn't reinterpret it; they'd implode it. He had no faith in the paper fortress. What ultimately mattered to him was not just the rights protected by the iron hand of law, but the emergence of individuals capable of recognising the other – living in maitri and karuṇā, driven by an internal moral order, not external compliance. Like Marx, he understood that individuals do not live inside the abstract circuitry of the state – they live in the immediate, in the sedimented power of the everyday. The gaze of the Savarna is not produced by Parliament; it is nursed at home – in the family photograph that features only 'our kind', in the wedding ritual where caste is never named but always enforced, in the kitchen where cutlery is segregated for guests without announcement, in the househelp's separate glass at the edge of the sink, in the lower tone used to pronounce a surname, in the celebratory school WhatsApp group that goes silent when a Dalit student excels, in the temple's unspoken rules of access, in the euphemisms for caste that pass as 'culture', in the jokes that are 'just jokes', and in the silence that follows when someone actually names the system. It is performed not through declarations, but through gesture, arrangement, omission – in the aesthetic of inclusion without equality. Caste is not maintained through ideology alone; it is rehearsed in habit – casual, constant, coded. It is in these micro-rituals that disdain is inherited, caste is rehearsed, and hierarchy is made to feel natural. This Savarna mindset remained perfectly intact as power passed from the Mughals to the British to the Indian Nation. The tricolour may have fluttered differently, but the inner flag of caste stayed hoisted in the psyche. This is the unconscious Ambedkar turned to in his final years – the one no election can unseat, no statute can repeal. That is why he turned to Buddhism. Not for peace, but for war – a moral war against the architecture of the caste mind. Not just a new faith, but a new aesthetic of equality, a new discipline of compassion – one that no Constitution could impose, but which alone could make its words true. The RSS is galaxies away from that Ambedkar. Not the statue they garland every April, but the thinker who saw the Constitution not as a destination but as a fragile beginning – one that required daily nurturing through karuṇā and maitri, not khaki drills and conch-shell nationalism. If they had understood even a fragment of Ambedkar – just a sliver of his sorrow, his clarity, his moral imagination – they would not treat the Constitution like a ritual object to be smashed ceremonially under the pretext of restoration. They would have tried, at the very least, to impart the virtues he called for – empathy, friendship, a shared human dignity. Instead of digging beneath mosques in search of buried Hindu grandeur, they might have invited Muslims into their homes and into their hearts, into their festivals. Instead of watching the Manipur violence from a safe, clinical distance – as if pain were a political weather report – they might have walked into the ruins with medicine. Instead of branding Rohith Vemula an anti-national for daring to exist with pride and intellect, they might have mourned him. Instead of weaponising 'love jihad' and anti-conversion laws to police whom people marry, whom they pray with, and whom they dream beside, they might have remembered Ambedkar's call for inter-caste and inter-faith solidarity as the path to annihilate hierarchy itself. But that would require a worldview not built on domination, on obedience, on eternal debt. It would require what Ambedkar called a moral revolution. And the RSS, despite all its rhetoric, has never been interested in revolution. Only restoration – of a past where the wounds of the lower castes were called duty, and the silence of minorities was mistaken for peace. Folding the Mundu for a stream that's miles away In the final analysis, this onslaught on the Constitution – because it dares to be socialist and secular – is not born of moral conviction but of sheer, unvarnished cowardice. There is nothing principled about it. Both socialism and secularism rest on a radical and terrifying idea: equality – not as decoration, but as enforcement. And that is precisely what frightens them. Not because the field is level – far from it. The ground is already tilted so steeply in their favour that it resembles a ritual slope slick with centuries of privilege. Generations of temple wealth, landholding, English education, administrative entry, and capital consolidation have been quietly hoarded in the upper-caste vault – and they still panic at the faintest mention of a level playing field. Their terror is not rooted in the present, but in a future that might arrive – perhaps five hundred years from now, if the winds of justice ever dare to blow that long. They are rattled not by equality today, but by the distant scent of its possibility. It's like watching a Malayali fold up his mundu to cross a stream that hasn't even appeared on the horizon – comically premature, yet somehow deadly serious. They quake before a principle whose real consequences might not touch them or their descendants in this century or the next. And yet, they must kill it – in thought, in law, in symbol – just in case. They proclaim with astonishing volume what should be a whispered confession: We cannot compete, even on a field tilted for us. We want the tilt made sacred. We want the generational advantage to be declared merit. We want our accumulated spoils protected not as a remnant of history's injustice, but as a civilizational right. Behind all the saffron rallies and Vedic declarations lies the most fragile creature of all: an ideology that cannot survive equality – not even the idea of it – and knows it. Anilkumar Payyappilly Vijayan is a Professor of English at Government Arts and Science College, Pathiripala, Palakkad. Under the name a/nil, he is the author of The Absent Color: Poems. A/nil's book, Is There a Dalit Way of Thinking?, is forthcoming from Navayana.
Hindustan Times
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Kristin Chenoweth mesmerises fans with ‘Star Spangled Banner' at NBA Finals Game 7
Kristin Chenoweth always wanted to play basketball but couldn't due to her 4-foot-11 height. She still somehow made it to the NBA Finals. Kristin Chenoweth performs during the 54th annual Songwriters Hall of Fame induction and awards gala on Thursday, June 12, 2025, at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York.(AP File) The Oklahoma native and unabashed Thunder fan was the pick to perform 'The Star-Spangled Banner' before Game 7 of the title series between the Thunder and the Indiana Pacers on Sunday night. Kristina Chenoweth's performance aired live on ABC at 8 PM EDT, shortly before tipoff of the NBA Finals Game 7. Watch the performance here: Who is Kristina Chenoweth? Kristina Chenoweth is an award-winning actress, singer, and inductee into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. Born on July 24, 1968, Chenoweth was adopted by Junie Smith Chenoweth and Jerry Morris Chenoweth, both chemical engineers from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, a suburb of Tulsa. She was then just a 5-day-old baby. She graduated from Broken Arrow Senior High School, where she participated in school plays. Chenoweth then attended Oklahoma City University, where she earned a bachelor's degree in musical theatre in 1990 and a master's degree in opera performance in 1992. Kristin Chenoweth started singing early and performed regional plays while studying at OKU. She also participated in several singing contests and was cast in the 1993 Paper Mill Playhouse production of the musical Animal Crackers as Arabella Rittenhouse. Chenoweth won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her performance as Sally Brown in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown on Broadway. She was nominated for a second Tony Award for originating the role of Glinda in the musical Wicked in 2003. Her notable television roles include Annabeth Schott in NBC's The West Wing and Olive Snook on the comedy drama Pushing Daisies, for which she won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 2009. Kristin Chenoweth husband Kristin Chenoweth is married to musician Josh Bryant, who is 13 years her junior. The couple got married in 2023. Kristin Chenoweth's net worth According to Celebrity Net Worth, Kristin Chenoweth is worth $16 million. She has several music albums and has worked in theatre, TV, and movies. Her music blends musical theatre, pop, and gospel and showcases her versatility as a singer.
Yahoo
07-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Born Against
Where I part company with Daniel McCarthy—one half of our recent Dispatch debate on Trump's kooky Cabinet picks—is at the very beginning, with his premise that the conservative movement could use more figures such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard because they are 'skeptics.' But they aren't skeptics—they are cranks. Kennedy is not nearly as skeptical as he should be about every imbecilic new-age health fad and conspiracy theory to come in over the transom, whereas Gabbard could stand to be a bit more skeptical about the foreign-policy analysis of, say, Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin's sundry factota on the American right. As McCarthy notes, the 'conservative movement was born in the 20th century in a bout of populist skepticism.' I think of the first issue of National Review, the cover of which advertised, among other offerings, Of Thee I Sing author Morrie Ryskind's anti-psychotherapy broadside, headlined 'They'll never get me on that couch!' The article got better billing than pieces from Frank Meyer, James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, and Russell Kirk, whose work is nonetheless better-remembered than is Ryskind's political journal, though Ryskind also wrote Animal Crackers and A Night at the Opera—so he didn't have much to prove. William F. Buckley Jr. was a funny kind of anti-elitist—I mean the kind who played Bach preludes on his harpsichord on his yacht and wintered at a chateau outside Gstaad where he entertained everyone from Princess Grace to Iggy Pop. But he also was the man who famously declared that he'd prefer to live under the rule of the first 2,000 people to appear in the Boston phone book than under that of the 2,000 members of Harvard's faculty. In spite of its evangelical and at times apocalyptic character, American conservatism is not so much born again as born against. Whereas most national traditions of conservatism have been directed at the maintenance of the social consensus and its major organs—think of the British Tories and the monarchy—American conservatism was born at the end of World War II and has made a career out of opposition to the status quo: It is, in that sense, the baby boomer of political movements. In 1955, when Buckley and his fellow travelers launched National Review (long the flagship American conservative magazine, where I was an editor and writer for 15 years), their project began with differentiating themselves from those who were comfortable with the social and political consensus of the time, in particular from the New Deal and from those Republicans who had made their peace with it, especially Dwight Eisenhower. Borrowing (perhaps unintentionally) slang that was bubbling up just then from the jazz world, of all places, Buckley declared: 'Our principles are round, and Eisenhower is square.' His first order of business, as he wrote in a letter to the writer Max Eastman, was to 'read Dwight Eisenhower out of the conservative movement.' Buckley did not think much of Donald Trump, whom he accurately identified in a 2000 essay as both a 'narcissist' and a 'demagogue.' But it is impossible to miss certain parallels in their careers: Both found their first political success not in besting Democrats but in plaguing Republicans who were, in their judgment, insufficiently radical: Beyond recognizing the value of the publicity running for office would bring (something else he had in common with Trump), Buckley ran for mayor of New York City in 1965 not in order to defeat the Democratic nominee but in the hope of delivering the race to the Democrat by cannibalizing votes for John Lindsay, the despised liberal Republican candidate. Trump, in a similar way, won the hearts of the angry and adversarial right by heaping scorn on relatively moderate figures such as Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor. And Trump had, as a matter of curious fact, been a campaign donor to Hillary Clinton, his eventual opponent in the 2016 general election. (Amusingly, Trump also was a donor to Kamala Harris when she was California's attorney general.) With two important exceptions—Ronald Reagan in 1984 and, ironically, Dwight Eisenhower in 1956—National Review has never offered its endorsement to an incumbent Republican president, and it has at times endorsed against them, e.g., preferring John Ashbrook to Richard Nixon in 1972. Whereas British conservatives have a literal establishment to defend—the established church, the monarchy, etc.—American conservatives have always been fundamentally anti-establishment. And American conservatism is, paradoxically, a relatively new thing: As Peggy Noonan noted in her obituary of Buckley, prior to the 1950s there was hardly any self-conscious American conservatism at all, only something that had 'been calling itself 'voting Republican' or 'not liking the New Deal.'' Understanding the adversarial character of the American conservative movement—the people Buckley called 'radical conservatives' in opposition to 'the well-fed right'—is the key to understanding the continuities between the conservatism of Buckley and Reagan and the rightism of Trump, J.D. Vance, et al. And there are important continuities. There are fundamental breaks, too. Ironically—forgive the repetition, but the word is necessary—the creed of the right in the Trump era is not opposition to the New Deal but opposition to opposition to the New Deal, including an adamantine refusal to consider urgently needed reforms either to Social Security, the most significant New Deal entitlement, or to Medicaid, the most important New Deal echo in Lyndon Johnson's so-called Great Society. The limited-government, libertarian-leaning philosophy of Buckley's anti-New Dealers is derided in today's Republican Party as soulless neoliberalism, Davos-ism, or Paul Ryan-ism. In that sense, today's Republicans sound a little like those disappointed progressives who lambasted the corporate-friendly policy and rhetoric of the Bill Clinton years. (One of those disappointed progressives was Bill Clinton, who complained that he was a hostage to the bond market and that he was, in effect, serving out Eisenhower's third term.) The bit about 'not liking the New Deal' has gone by the wayside, and only the 'voting Republican' part remains. The adversarial character of American conservatism, particularly in its more populist expressions, is useful in understanding the current Republican attitude for crankery and crackpottery, which has seen Trump elevate such figures as television quack Mehmet Oz and anti-vaccine conspiracy kook RFK Jr., while reaching into the worlds of Fox News and professional wrestling for other high officers. It is worth noting that this isn't the first national convulsion we've had over fluoride—the excitable gentlemen of the John Birch Society made an issue of it in an earlier epoch, and their paranoia about the state of their 'precious bodily fluids' was satirized in Dr. Strangelove in 1964, when it already was old news. And while the political lines are not always straightforward, Elon Musk's interest in 'Pizzagate,' a conspiracy theory about Democratic pedophile-Satanists operating a torture chamber beneath a Washington-area pizza shop, is very much of a piece with the 'Satanic panic' of the Reagan era, which included both earnest congressional testimony about preposterous, bloody fictions and, of course, money-grubbing hackwork such as The Satan Seller, a hoax memoir written by evangelical activist Mike Warnke, whose tales of high government officials engaged in child-abusing Luciferian conspiracies are the blueprint for today's digital Trumpism. The same evangelical milieu that nurtured phenomena such as the John Birch Society in the Eisenhower years and the Satanic panic in the Reagan years has, no great surprise, proved fertile ground for the conspiracy-addled Trump movement. Evangelicals are to the mainstream Protestant churches as Trumpists are to the Republican Party: an alienated faction that eventually grew to be much larger and more important than the mainstream entities from which it had been estranged. The two inevitably go together. And from that we have the marriage of the adversarial—whatever Eisenhower and the other 'square' characters support, the radical conservatives must oppose—to the apocalyptic. The bestselling nonfiction book in the decade leading up to Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 wasn't The Conscience of a Conservative or The Road to Serfdom—it was Hal Lindsey's pop-Apocalypse sensation, The Late Great Planet Earth. And if I may be forgiven one final use of the word 'ironic,' I cannot think of how else to describe the fact that the dysfunction of modern American conservatism, with its I Love Lucy nostalgia and its detestation of 'globalists' and 'cosmopolitans,' arises from the our conservatism's being spiritually and historically deracinated. Unlike its British counterpart, American conservatism does not have institutions such as a national church or monarchy to which to cling; unlike the man who in my mind has a good claim to being the founding father of American conservatism, John Adams, and the other men of his generation, most contemporary evangelicals and political conservatives do not have a coherent political philosophy rooted in a meaningful classical education or the benefit of an intellectually rigorous religious life in which to ground themselves—it is a very long fall from New England's Puritans to today's megachurch populists. And so they have become 'conservatives' who are in no way conservative. Instead, they have taken up a kind of low right-wing revolutionism, flitting from enthusiasm to enthusiasm as they flit from enemy to enemy, with opposition as their only constant and disgust as their north star. And it is opposition and disgust, not 'skepticism,' that have made right-wing stars of Kennedy and Gabbard. I do not know what to call that, but 'conservatism' cannot be the right word.
