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This thread has induced a moment of clarity for me about the Christian right. It seems quite a lot of their fear is essentially that LGBT people will treat them the way that they treated LGBT people for, well, ever. Take Rod; The Benedict Option reduces to fear of gay revenge. https://twitter.com/willchamberlain/status/1347639551683145740
Hasn't this been THE dominant leitmotif in his journalism for years now? Don't his recent delusions about a coming social credit system partake of this same pattern? Who exactly is it that is enforcing "soft totalitarianism" for Rod, if not the drag queens reading in libraries?
(I realize I am exaggerating a little in that last line).
It also isn't fair to pick on Rod. He's not alone. This seems to be a major social fantasy in a lot of conservative discourse these days. It's on display, in a particularly racialized way, in the above quote tweet. A white man is comparing himself to black people under Jim Crow.
What's particularly telling here is the implicit transformation of conservatism from an ideological position, subject to rational persuasion, into a quasi-racialized identity. Obviously there are black conservatives; I am not erasing them. Just commenting on the discourse here.
We see here a certain ideological axis. One pole is fear of the revenge of the oppressed (if I were in a Freudian mood I'd say this was a politics of the uncanny); the other is a politics of self-justified white grievance. This is also the other chief leitmotif of Rod's writing.
I suspect this fear of oppression by the recently-oppressed is stronger in Christians because of eschatological fantasies at play in US Christian culture since the late 80s at least, from Left Behind to QANON.
This fear of oppression will be promoted by the powerful precisely because it is generated by and generates martyrs; this makes it politically useful in the extreme. Political victims and martyrs, regardless of affiliation, always become powerful tools of mobilization.
Haven't we seen this tendency already in Hawley crying foul about his book deal falling through? Haven't we seen it (prosaic but Hydra-headed) in Dreher's "reader letters" for years now? Remember Kim Davis?
I'd like to back up a sec and also note that in the contemporary (post-1960s US), eschatology has become political and our politics have become eschatological. No doubt the specter of species death and nuclear winter did much to motivate this.
The new millennium and 9/11 kicked that political eschatology into high gear; it's been a steadily increasing feature of the right's politics ever since.
And what does Christian eschatology hold? Persecution, reversals of the "natural" order, foreign threats, deceptions from charismatic leaders, the covert hand of the demon everywhere. This is the imaginal matrix in which this politics percolates, regardless of individual faith.
That's why an Orthodox convert like Rod still lives and breathes this stuff. It's become so much a part of the Christian right's imaginaire that they can hardly think of a future in which they lose power without it.
I think there's a measure of this on the left too, but the liberal-left's religious base is so diverse and so fractured as to be unable to coalesce around, much less effectively deploy, a stable eschatological imaginaire.
It would be interesting to try to trace the same dynamic in other parts of the West. In Britain, I suppose the most notorious example of this politics I can think of is Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech, and even that isn't Christian so much as classicizing (and classed).
It's also not just an Evangelical thing. One of my (many) frustrations with the Catholic Right, including in its Integralist form, is a seeming incapacity to imagine any kind of political fear other than fear of the Church's oppression.
And perhaps this is the heart of the matter. This double politics - fear of oppression by the oppressed, and self-justified white grievance - necessarily cuts off encounter with the Other. It makes their grief and their fear illegible. It is, in a word, profoundly dehumanizing.
While it's true that there are similar forces at work on the left, what's unique about the right version of this dynamic is its relation to historical power-structures. The right's imaginaire here specifically rests upon a reversal of power dynamics it seeks to conserve.
Your view of that political imaginaire will thus be largely determined by both your own moral reasoning (is the existing power structure a just one?) and your own positionality within it (how does it construct my identity in relation to other identities? how does this affect me?)
(This is, incidentally, another reason that the much-vaunted "primacy of the speculative" among Integralists is so bad; it dismisses political experience a priori. You don't like the Papal state taking away your children? Too bad - wrong answer. A "doubtless very different" PC)
Anyway, I am a historian, and when I comment on political theory I realize I often look like a not very bright man speaking on a conversation he has only half-heard.
I suppose I will conclude by saying that I suspect the fantasies of oppression are only going to get worse. They've been election fodder for decades now, and Wednesday showed us that enough people believe them to storm the capitol and attempt to overturn the democratic process.
