The Slow Road to Immediacy, Part I

Waiting on a new book, revisiting an old one

Listening to John Ganz's wide ranging rap session with Max Read on, well, all things under the sun, I was struck by Read's mention of Anna Kornbluh's Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2023). I ordered it.

Until it gets here, I'm reading reviews, and Compact Magazine hates it, which is an endorsement. The time waiting (how apt) allows me to spin up my own ideas about the thesis, such as I grasp it by my fingernails right now, and that's how I like it.

I suspect I'll understand very little of Kornbluh's examples from literature and art, even pop culture, because I’m old, live in Kansas, do not keep up with high culture, and have middlebrow tastes, but I find myself wanting to unpack the notion of immediacy a little, so see what it yields for me before Kornbluh tries to imprint me like Konrad Lorenz's colorful galoshes.

Here's Kornbluh’s notion (emphases mine), per Bruce Robbins' review in The Baffler :

Immediacy, Kornbluh tells us, means the denial of mediation. And what is mediation? It’s a difficult Hegelian concept, and Kornbluh shows respect for her readers in hanging her argument on it. In layman’s terms, mediation refers to the process by which you collide with that which seems to oppose and obstruct you. These forms of seeming otherness get in your way, but (so it turns out) you have to take them on or go through them, Hegel says, in order to get anywhere worth getting to.

Examples are various, and in this book they spray out in different directions. They include the material world, both natural and socially produced; other people; generalization and abstraction; media platforms; art (which would seem like special pleading for a literary scholar, except for all those recent forms of art which try to deny they are art); and institutions like unions and universities. It’s tempting to want to skip over these obstructions on the premise that you yourself are all the real you need. But they are not as alien as they seem. And trying to skip over them in favor of the immediately available is a, or the, characteristic post-postmodern pathology.

I have some nascent thoughts about this, about how the opposite, or at least complement, of immediacy—“mediacy,” mediation—involves a check on the bad kind of populism we see today, but the rabbit hole of pondering sans book led me back about half a century to mediating structures and watchdogging the Right.

Berger and Neuhaus

Imagine a society in which there are only two poles: the massively powerful—nay, totalizing—State, and well…you, the atomized, alienated individual. In this vision, there are no families, no relationships, no clubs, no churches, no unions.

Such was the specter that cleric and writer Richard John Neuhaus held up as bogeyman when he and sociologist Peter Berger wrote in praise of mediating structures in 1977 with their short book/essay To Empower People: The Debate That Is Changing America and the World. These structures—the family, voluntary associations, neighborhoods, and religious communities—serve as buffering layers between the individual and the state, provide outlets for enriching activity and the cultivation of life-sustaining meaning in people's lives.

These small, local institutions, praised since de Tocqueville as crucial in making American democracy possible, stood between the massive structures of public life and the humble individual in his private sphere, lessened and made sense of the friction between macro and micro, lubricating the gears of their enmeshment and translating meaning upward from the small scale to the larger.

It was in the small places like church congregations, family ties, bowling leagues, and block parties that individuals forged meaning in their lives, then saw how that meaning fit into or clashed with the larger structures of society as these groups overlapped and contributed to society, sometimes cross-cutting among secular and religious, partisan and socio-economic identities to complicate the texture of civic life and make it more granular, more localized, more securely nested in the overlapping spheres of "authority" that made up more sterile concepts like federalism.

Maybe mediating structures prevent us from becoming alienated, empty isolates. Maybe they also prevent our society from becoming totalitarian. That's kinda been a mechanistic theory of how mediating structures work and why they're important for a long time. Picture the isolated, atomized, existentially adrift individual and the iron fist of the uncaring, mass-society, all-powerful State as two pieces of hard, crusty bread on the sandwich all must gnaw on: mediating structures provide the yummy contents of the sandwich that make it palatable, even occasionally delightful.

This "stuff in the middle," those things between flailing, solitary me and, well, Stalinism or whatever, were, in 1977, arguably concentrated in some of the structures Berger and Neuhaus highlighted. They argued that the mediating structures they cared about (family, church, neighborhoods, voluntary orgs) were endangered by encroachment by the welfare state, bureaucracy, regulation, and what they viewed as narrow church-state separation interpretations.

Structures of a Lost World

What gets me the most is how dated this all seems, and yeah, it is nearly 50 years old. But the American Enterprise Institute republished the original text of To Empower the People in 1996, a 20-year anniversary edition, along with a passel of essays from admirers mostly from conservative think tanks. They loved the idea of taking public dollars and dispersing them to private entities—sometimes via individuals who would “choose in a market”—with few to no strings attached. It’s libertarian, of course, and because it’s wrapped in a Tocquevillian ode to small associations that give people meaning, it appeals to traditionalist conservatives who resent what would become the woke mobs of the PMC. Let us have our peculiar folkways and habits, our exclusive worldviews and moral strictures against our fellow citizens, but let us dip from the public trough of money to fund our works, because we’ll be offering pro-social aid to those (er, those we choose to serve, per our imposed strictures) in need.

In 1977, conservatives fretted about welfare, the "underclass," dependency, crime, and, of course, race. Rereading To Empower People is almost quaint in some ways, if you refrain from reading between the lines and forget all that came after. The stuff on neighborhoods as mediating structures glares the most, I think, at least for me in small town America. It reeks of the Big City, of ethnic neighborhoods that did not want busing or school integration. Or, well, just Black folks. Why is this Big City stuff? Because, he said, speaking in Small Town Kansan, you kinda need enough “ethnic” people to constitute a neighborhood.

The paeans to voluntary organizations and churches hinges on a lack of regulations, because regulation implies professionalism sticking its elitist or government-capturing fingers into the lives of well-meaning and faith-driven folks who just want to help, but we've been through a lot since the late 1970s, even made some movies about that stuff, haven't we, Cardinal Law?

Probably the most depressing part of To Empower People is the logic laid out for how to interpret church-state separation, which has colonized the thinking of the Supreme Court as it revised First Amendment law this last decade or two to pretty much resemble what Berger and Neuhaus laid out: if a religious organization is (or says it is) advancing a legitimate public end, it can be publicly funded, and if it proselytizes or discriminates in the provision of its service, well, it can’t be denied public money for that reason. Doing so becomes—somehow—the state trying to single and stamp out religion.

People derive meaning and cultivate values from mediating structures like the family, the church, the neighborhood, the voluntary orgs they participate in. Okay, fine. But it’s 2025, and the elephant in the room is the internet, and it has changed everything. Online, we can still get plugged into lots of the things that make life worth living: books and movies and board games and pets and hobbies and the niche things folks are into, and of course, inevitably, the communities of like-minded people who share those interests and appreciate them.

And we can still go out. To bars and worship services and Bible studies and events and concerts. A lot of us still do. Meat-space interaction hasn’t ceased by any means, but let’s be honest, isolation and anomie have increased. “Way too online” is a thing now, and if Berger and Neuhaus’ mediating structures factor in, it’s usually as an indicator of how badly our phones have turned us into solitaries, often prey to the worst tendencies of manipulation and disinformation, which supposedly would be tempered if we still sat down to jaw over coffee or a brew with a cross-cutting sample of the melting pot like, er…we used to?

Just four years after AEI’s anniversary re-publication of To Empower People, Robert Putnam's published Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Not without its critics, Putnam’s book at least eschewed the simplistic Individual-versus-the-State lens that so possesses conservatives throughout the 20th century. He chalked up decreases in civic/community/social participation (which he described and sampled much more broadly than Berger and Neuhaus) as stemming from pressure from work and two income households, time binds from geographic sprawl and commuting, electronic entertainment’s individualizing and atomizing effects, and generational shifts, leaving a goodly chunk unexplained. Factors all debatable in degree, but also none that really fit too well into movement conservatism’s war on evil government and the “we know better” snobs in its professional ranks who want to impose their values on the rest of us.

Who was more right? Hmm. In 1977, Berger and Neuhaus pooh-pooh’d the decline of religious affiliation of the late seventies by noting that it was based on a comparison to the heyday of church-going in the 1950s:

It is worth noting that in recent years the alleged decline of religion has been measured by comparison with the so-called religious boom of the late 1950s. The comparison with that unprecedented period of institutional growth offers a very skewed perspective. But, even when the vitality of religion is measured by that misleading comparison, it is notable that in the past few years the indexes are again on the upswing. Church attendance, claimed affiliation, financial contributions, and other indicators all suggest that whatever decline there was from the apex of the late 1950s has now stopped or been reversed.

But today, we have the rise of the Nones, perhaps one in three Americans in 2023. And we have the following:

• 58% of U.S. adults consider themselves lonely

• Mental health startup funding hit $5.5 billion in 2021

• Sports betting apps grew 44.5% in 2023

• AI companion apps are now a $196.6B market

These most recent indicators are not signs of the tyrannical federal government encroaching more and more insidiously into regular folks' daily lives. And they are not indicators of woke professionals having captured the levers of the state to force kindly grandma volunteers who just want to babysit at the parish hall to learn to respect pronouns.

No, they're the product of a hypertrophied Silicon Valley, venture capital, digital capitalism…something Berger and Neuhaus barely spent a half second contemplating¹. The capitalism part, I mean. It's not cricket to fault them for failing to predict 50 years of Internet depravity and psycho-social effects, but it is fair to bash AEI for continuing to mash the Individual vs. the State button with their 20th anniversary reissue, just as it’s more than fair to call out this same, damn tired tactic in the year 2025.

Even When They’re Right, They’re Wrong

As I rummaged in this time capsule, I did find one more relevant gripe: the mindset of the managerial class.

The reasons for present pluralism-eroding policies are to be discovered in part in the very processes implicit in the metaphors of modernization, rationalization, and bureaucratization. The management mindset of the megastructure-whether of HEW, Sears Roebuck, or the AFL-CIO-is biased toward the unitary solution. The neat and comprehensive answer is impatient of "irrational" particularities and can only be forced to yield to greater nuance when it encounters resistance, whether from the economic market of consumer wants or from the political market of organized special interest groups. The challenge of public policy is to anticipate such resistance and, beyond that, to cast aside its adversary posture toward particularism and embrace as its goal the advancement of the multitude of particular interests that in fact constitute the common weal. Thus, far from denigrating social planning, our proposal challenges the policy maker with a much more complicated and exciting task than today's approach. Similarly, the self-esteem of the professional in all areas of social service is elevated when he or she defines the professional task in terms of being helpful and ancillary to people rather than in terms of creating a power monopoly whereby people become dependent clients.

I, too, shake my head at the tendency of bureaucrats in both business and government to lay down blanket policies with either no wiggle room or wiggle room that is so off-puttingly byzantine that no one bothers to seek out available accomodations.

But Berger and Neuhaus pull a neat trick here. They start with a legitimate critique of the one-size-fits-all policy-making that presumes it can predict any and all "legitimate" exceptions and establish procedures to accommodate them, or else policy-making that just doesn't give a shit and slaps down a blanket rule irrespective of known exceptions in the population (usually to score political points).

But then they insist that the only way this ever changes is through “resistance” from the market or “organized special interest groups.” (Boo!, Hiss!) The poor churches, neighborhoods and families are unarmed and unable to exert any influence at all.

Wow, has that changed!

Then follows a soft-focus portrait of a bureaucracy that isn't like any bureaucracy ever before invented: one that embraces particularism. We need policies, but when we encounter particularist exceptions, we need to be able to depart from those policies, or make them flexible enough to serve the particular applicants.

I’m cool with that. But cue job security (public unions) and liability concerns, especially from grievance-fueled assholes who hire the Alliance Defending Freedom to sue for discriminating against the able-bodied when some bureaucrat is given discretion to make a particularist exception to help out a disabled person.

To hear Berger and Neuhaus tell it, however, licensing, regulations, tax and budgetary scrutiny to police misappropriation of public funds, background checks, minimum qualifications, etc.—these are the sorts of things that Big Government and The Professions use to ensure that particularism conforms to unitarianism, and so must give way.

Um…hang on a sec.

So, we should give tax money to charter schools via vouchers, and they won't have to educate all comers. They won't have to hire qualified teachers, because teacher qualifications are set by either the state or by professional associations. The paraprofessionals at the schools won't need qualification or training or background checks because they do this low-paid work or volunteer because of the deep meaning of their role, not for grubby paychecks. To require otherwise is the tyrannical hand of the State dictating how precious particularist structures conduct the business that is so essential to democracy.

Seeds of the Paradox of Tolerance

What gets me just as much in Neuhaus and Berger is the treatment of “identity” and “tribalism,” which they don't see as any kind of pejorative.² Let a thousand identitarian flowers bloom!³

But of course, they have to toss in one small caveat, that of minimal standards of socially sustainable behavior (emphases mine).

Beyond providing the variety of color, costume, and custom, pluralism makes possible a tension within worlds and between worlds of meaning. Worlds of meaning put reality together in a distinctive way. Whether the participants in these worlds see themselves as mainline or subcultural, as establishment or revolutionary, they are each but part of the cultural whole. Yet the paradox is that wholeness is experienced through affirmation of the part in which one participates. This relates to the aforementioned insight of Burke regarding "the little platoon." In more contemporary psychological jargon it relates to the "identity crisis" which results from an "identity diffusion" in mass society. Within one's group-whether it be racial, national, political, religious, or all of these-one discovers an answer to the elementary question, "Who am I?" and is supported in living out that answer. Psychologically and sociologically, we would propose the axiom that any identity is better than none. Politically, we would argue that it is not the business of public policy to make value judgments regarding the merits or demerits of various identity solutions, so long as all groups abide by the minimal rules that make a pluralistic society possible. It is the business of public policy not to undercut, and indeed to enhance, the identity choices available to the American people (our minimalist and maximalist propositions throughout).

Here they are, these theocons, going pretty much full relativist:

Every world within this society, whether it calls itself a subculture or a supraculture or simply the American culture, is in fact a subculture, is but a part of the whole. This fact needs to be systematically remembered among those who occupy the world of public policy planning and implementation. The subculture that envisages its values as universal and its style as cosmopolitan is no less a subculture for all that. The tribal patterns evident at an Upper West Side cocktail party are no less tribal than those evident at a Polish dance in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. That the former is produced by the interaction of people trying to transcend many particularisms simply results in a new, and not necessarily more interesting, particularism. People at the cocktail party may think of themselves as liberated, and indeed they may have elected to leave behind certain particularisms into which they were born. They have, in effect, elected a new particularism. Liberation is not escape from particularity but discovery of the particularity that fits. Elected particularities may include life style, ideology, friendships, place of residence, and so forth. Inherited particularities may include race, economic circumstance, region, religion, and, in most cases, politics. Pluralism means the lively interaction among inherited particularities and, through election, the evolution of new particularities. The goal of public policy in a pluralistic society is to sustain as many particularities as possible, in the hope that most people will accept, discover, or devise one that fits.

Again, this can sound aspirational—if you haven’t been alive in America both before and especially after Berger and Neuhaus wrote. This reminds me of Karl Schmitt, to be honest, and his hatred of liberalism itself—which To Empower People positions itself as defending and rehabilitating. Liberalism is poison to Schmitt (assuming we can take anything the Nazi said in anything resembling good faith) because either

• it fails to be fiercely particular enough (basically, nationalistic enough, constituting an Us that opposes all of Them out there who would destroy it), or

• it becomes totalitarian by insisting that its subcultural particularist values are, in fact, universal, and then proceeds to impose them on everyone, crushing any and all dissent from other subcultures (like, say, those who reject fundamental premises of liberalism, such as “all people are equal and entitled to equal rights”)

Liberal universalism is just another particularity, another subculture within America (or any community). It should not be privileged over and above other particularities who might disagree with its precepts. To do so would be unfair and anti-pluralistic, you see? It would undermine democracy. Those insufferable, detached coastal elites who make policy? They actually swear an oath to uphold the Constitution and pay fealty to things like the Declaration of Independence. If that’s not a cult, just another religion trying to impose its views on the rest of us, I don’t know what is.

The tell, I guess, is in the weak caveats, drawing on what was, in 1977, perhaps some residual consensus about the basics of decency and legality and norms. Above we saw one: “so long as all groups abide by the minimal rules that make a pluralistic society possible.” They add little to this pollyanna brush-off in 1996:

Possibly, though, we were a bit carried away in our enthusiasm for these institutions, overlooking the fact that some of them definitely play nefarious roles in society. Thus, strictly speaking in terms of our definition, the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan, and the local branch of an organization seeking to get the government to negotiate with visiting aliens in UFOs could also be described as mediating structures. They do, indeed, mediate between individuals and the larger society. It just happens that the beliefs and values thus mediated are criminal, immoral, or plain crazy. We would suggest now that there are (to put it plainly) both good and bad mediating structures and that social policy will have to make this differentiation in terms of the values being mediated. If, for instance, educational vouchers should become part of social policy, they should not be negotiable in schools run by criminals or racist fanatics, nor in schools that would seek to indoctrinate children in a patently lunatic world view. Such discrimination obviously creates certain problems, but they are not insuperable. … Happily, regulation against the pathological is needed only at the margins, since people will, with relatively few exceptions, choose what is best for them and their children. (And the public policy bias should always be toward respecting what people think best.)

Regulation against the pathological is needed only at the margins...

Well, the margins have gotten mighty wide in this here document outlining the American permission structure, boys.

…So long as all groups abide by the minimal rules that make a pluralistic society possible.

Minimal rules like respecting and accepting a loss in a Presidential election. Like, you know, not staging a riot-coup-insurrection that got people killed. Like following the 14th Amendment’s plain meaning. Like letting demonstrable, empirical reality guide both policymaking and judicial rulings instead of phantasms and fantasy and vibes and made-up shit. Like enforcing the law. Like not plainly and openly gaming the systems in blatant bad faith.

Maybe Berger and Neuhaus were just as blind to the many ways a truly shameless and opportunistic reactionary movement could weaponize the things we so took for granted in 1977, in the Constitutional order, in governing norms. Maybe, if you’d put the question to them, they would have said, “Of course the State can and should mandate vaccinations against deadly and debilitating diseases, regardless of particularistic resistance, for the sake of the common good! We’re not madmen!”

But wait. Richard John Neuhaus is kinda the in-house patron saint of the journal First Things, which forged the pseudo-respectability and intellectual scaffolding for the Catholic-integralist and “fuck the separation of church and state” turn of many “serious” thinkers (including a buttload of SCOTUS justices).

Yet by 2020, First Things editor Rusty Reno was rabidly tweeting that mask-wearing was cowardice and unbefitting of real men. As Matthew Sitman wrote:

He is also convinced that our pandemic response stems from a deeper civilizational malaise, one that prioritizes the fleeting material world over the everlasting life that awaits our souls after death. In a missive published in March, Reno declared, “There are many things more precious than life,” and castigated political leaders, especially New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, for leading “an ill-conceived crusade against human finitude and the dolorous reality of death.”

Reno is not alone on the Christian intellectual right in framing the shutdown as part of a grand narrative of spiritual decay. His colleague Matthew Schmitz wrote that, in valuing “health above all, we subordinate the spiritual to the temporal,” adding, “Unless religious leaders reopen the churches, they will appear to value earthly above eternal life.” National Review writer Alexandra DeSanctis caught flak on Twitter for writing, “It’s fascinating to see how the cultural loss of belief in God and eternity so often manifests in an outsized fear of death as the ultimate evil. Human life is beautiful and precious and good, but life on earth isn’t our ultimate end.”

I can’t say anything for sure here. Berger and Neuhaus were certainly leery of social welfare agencies dictating to parents based on “professionalism” and “qualifications.” They professed great faith in the ability of parents (who love their children more than any social worker ever could love his clients) to understand what was best for them. And they were certainly writing before epistemic collapse and lay-pseudo-expertise took over America. Would they have been on Team RFK Jr?

Part of me wants to clone them and run an impossible experiment.

Preserve B&N Prime so they can participate in conservative ideological madness through to the present day. Thaw them out periodically to let them catch up on the trends and comment. Let’s see if they go as batshit as their descendants did.

Meanwhile, B&N Clone goes into cyro-sleep in 1996—or even better, in 1977—to be awakened in 2025 and allowed to survey the landscape. I’d like to think that Neuhaus would smack Rusty Reno upside the head and be like, “WTF dude?”

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Ironies and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

The irony of all this abounds.

Excluding the postmodern market—the most caustic dissolver of “traditional values and folkways”—from all analysis gave a pass to the commercialization and spread of epistemic regimes that utterly obliterated the possibility and attractiveness of finding meaning in mediating structures. The only danger to these structures Berger and Neuhaus could imagine was the encroaching State and its corrupt or myopic client interest groups. Bowling Alone didn’t ignore market forces, the labor market, things like suburbanization and sprawl and long commutes, TV and the internet—and Putnam’s arguments hold up much better.

But I think it gets worse, if we assume that 1977 Berger and Neuhaus were sincere in their concerns for mediating structures and wanted to preserve a pluralism of local particularities. They helped feed movement conservatism fuel to undermine the very institutions they championed, in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In an effort to preserve the local, small, idiosyncratic communities of place and faith and kin, Berger and Neuhaus sounded an alarm against insidious national government. But this call was taken up by movement conservatism (it so neatly fused traditionalism and libertarianism, after all), and became a…meme. While Berger and Neuhaus could claim in 1977, “we suggest that the modern welfare state is here to stay, indeed that it ought to expand the benefits it provides—but that alternative mechanisms are possible to provide welfare-state services” less than a decade later, Ronald Reagan would much more memorably pronounce, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I'm from the government and I'm here to help.’”

Movement conservatism, through its outreach to Catholic intellectuals, often through the pages of Neuhaus’s First Things, took up the cry of localism, of mediating structures, of church and family and neighborhood and, well, let’s face it, neo-parochialism, in both the churchy and the narrow-minded, incurious senses of the word. But this was done in the service of and in explicit reaction to the alleged invasion of “colonialism”⁴ from the elites on the coasts who thought they knew better than the yokels. All to amass greater power at national levels. To play Paul Revere and alert the masses that the Redcoats were coming to take away their guns, their freedoms, their faith, their folkways.

This required the yokels to attend to the coastal elites, of course, so spotlights had to be trained on distant affairs. Every action of every national figure became a sign and signifier of creeping invasion, infection, subversion of family values, wholesome customs, traditional mores. This was by no means new: it was the same old reactionary, far-right wine in newish bottles, but intellectually gussified with one version of Catholic social teaching to buttress it and a long-developed right-wing media infrastructure to promulgate it.

Rush Limbaugh and his imitators poured hours upon hours of rants into the ears of solitaries in their vehicles, highlighting obscure figures in unknown places who supposedly signaled the demise of Western Civilization and all that real Americans held dear. Or national pols who became avatars of the devil out to undermine all that was sacred to regular Americans. Political correctness and its reanimated corpse, cancel culture, specialize in elevating non-issue, nothingburger events at comparative nowhere places that effect no one in the “heartland” into looming fjords of censorious doom and creeping leftist tyranny.⁵

We underestimate the degree to which the nationalization of American politics was fueled by this right-wing culture war, which was waged, in large part, in the name of preserving the small, local, meaning-making mediating structures that were so endangered. To save these smol bean bowling leagues and parishes and PTAs—the family, for God’s sake!—not only did corporate media demand we stop attending to the locally owned newspaper’s humble coverage of the Methodist potluck and turn toward the scoundrels in Washington denounced by syndicated right-wing hacks, but then corporate media ate that newspaper, absorbed it into a hedge-fund-owned chain that would spawn only more and more clones of the same national, both-sides-normalizing dreck. It cut package deals so that we had to have Fox News if we wanted ESPN, and Sinclair in every other living room.

This narrative of Good “Conservatives” Who Battle The Guvmint Run by Evil, Encroaching Libruls helped drive attention, thus interest, thus knowledge, away from local mediating structures and toward national politics. Inevitably—perhaps initially in pursuit of relevance, to keep the pews full—local mediating structures became infected by this narrative, such that now, church congregations, voluntary orgs, the guys at the bar, etc., either focus exclusively on national issues or on the occasional local matters that can be viewed through this Good v. Evil lens of national warfare, taking up without question right-wing framings and topics, tropes and talking points as naturally as breathing. It’s a key identitarian source of bonding and meaning, having replaced whatever amorphous meaning-making values the old, localized mediating structures used to instill and to which Neuhaus and Co. used to write paeans.⁶ In my small-town, red-state circles, a call will occasionally go out for any recommendations for places to spend coin on contractors, restaurants, specialists who are not rabidly MAGA; churches in town are known as MAGA or non-. It’s a plaintive cry, usually fruitless, an effort to steer money, time, and custom away from so many, apparently disparate yet aligned cultists.

Maybe Berger and Neuhaus wanted to alert elites of the wisdom of adjusting policy to accommodate small, mediating structures. What they ended up doing was alerting movement conservatism to the demagogic potential of mobilizing these groups with propaganda pitting their humble works against the Bogeyman State.⁷ They converted those who bought this propaganda into Manichean, nationally-focused partisans, denuding the mediating structures they supposedly cherished of all that made them semi-pluralist patchworks of human endeavors, pathways to discovering meaning in individual lives (unless it was to join the ranks of Holy Warriors aboard what would eventually be known as the Trump Train), and perhaps worst of all, mediation, that elusive yet vital enculturation that serves to acquaint you with the reality of that which obstructs you. (More on this in subsequent posts, if Kornbluh’s book ever arrives.)

It reminds me of iron filings all scattered about—those old mediating structures. Along came the magnet of movement conservatism with its integrated media of organized grievance to align them all in one direction. They may still do potlucks and clothing drives, toy runs and fish frys, but the meanings and values they inculcate have been subsumed by a distinctly recognizable Us vs. Them vibe.

Or for a less-intuitive image, try the idea of uncooking spaghetti: take the tangled, delicious,sustaining mess off the plate, remove the sauce, water and heat until you can line up all the dry pasta into a neat package all aiming the same way…and you get a bundle of stalks, sticks, fasces.

From which, of course, we get the word fascism.

Part Two:

Part Three:

1. Some excerpts showing disinterest in the market:

“For our present purposes, a voluntary association is a body of people who have voluntarily organized themselves in pursuit of particular goals. (Following common usage, we exclude business corporations and other primarily economic associations.)”

“A strong argument can be made that the dynamics of modernity, operating through the megastructures and especially through the modern state, are like a great leviathan or steamroller, inexorably destroying every obstacle that gets in the way of creating mass society.”

2. “…tribe and parochial are not terms of derision. That they are commonly used in a derisive manner is the result of a world view emerging from the late eighteenth century. That world view held, in brief, that the laws of Nature are reflected in a political will of the people that can be determined and implemented by rational persons. Those naive notions of Nature, Will, and Reason have in the last hundred years been thoroughly discredited in almost every discipline, from psychology to sociology to physics. Yet the irony is that, although few people still believe in these myths, most social thought and planning continues to act as though they were true. The result is that the enemies of particularism (‘tribalism’) have become an elite tribe attempting to impose order on the seeming irrationalities of the real world and operating on premises that most Americans find both implausible and hostile to their values. Social thought has been crippled and policies have miscarried because we have not developed a paradigm of pluralism to replace the discredited assumptions of the eighteenth century. We hope this proposal is one step toward developing such a paradigm.”

What’s irksome here is that they’re not entirely wrong. I can see here an anticipation of the feeling that coastal elites “colonize traditional American values” by imposing their PC notions of fairness and decency—which is a real phenomenon, but fueled, of course, by people like Berger and Neuhaus (and all the PC and cancel culture panickers in various guises since Buckley graduated Yale). See footnote 4.

I can also see legitimate criticism of distant, detached policymakers and bureaucrats who are out-of-touch with local constituencies and their actual needs, but this, too, has been fueled by culture war strategies by the Right for decades. It’s also been abetted by compromising and triangulating Democrats who acquiesced to burdensome crap like means-testing instead of fighting for ideas like a universal human right to subsist with dignity.

Finally, you can even see a hint here that what these theocons desire is a return to a kind of pre-Enlightenment paradigm, one that rejects notions of common humanity, common sense, common cause, common decency because these things are far too “particularly” and “parochially” filtered to be universalized. The love of the particular is such a longstanding conservative claim for their side that it still affects folks like Damon Linker, who used to work for First Things under Neuhaus if memory serves, and who continue to use it to dismiss as naive and quasi-dangerous the universalistic ethics of the Left.

If you’d read First Things or anything from The Claremont Institute in the 1990s, however, the idea that “the laws of Nature” are “naive notions” that have “been thoroughly discredited in almost every discipline, from psychology to sociology to physics” is not something you’d find well-represented.

3. When they're talking about the importance of listening to locals about what their actual needs are from public programs, they write, “the people in communities know best what is needed for the maintenance and development of those communities,” I was shocked to hear such leftist, identity-politics 101 coming from these patron saints of the theocons. Of course, they meant the New York ethnics who loved William F. Buckley's run for office and the Bostonians who opposed busing.

4. A Substack Note by John Ganz called my attention to this passage, from the Newsletter Gnocchic Codices:

Paradoxical though it has often seemed to me, one of the central ideological features of contemporary left-right journeys is something that might be seen as an “inner decolonialism.” In this hermeneutic, social liberals and progressives are viewed as something like an alien elite colonizing socially reactionary cultural blocs, marginalizing the rest of the country from their coastal or metropolitan enclaves. For some contemporary thinkers right or reactionary efforts to limit immigration, reintroduce traditional sexual and gender mores etc; are thus a form of "decolonial” struggle, a nationalist resistance to inner empire.

Translation, maybe? Normies or libs move rightward when they encounter the narrative that They (often coastal leftists) are trying to “colonize” heartland values that are often reactionary. Reactionaries can thus see themselves as fighting to “decolonize” their minds from this effort, as brave resistance warriors. They see their reactionary beliefs as products of some native (nativist), faux-indigenous culture that is being erased or overwritten by the encroaching empire. Of course, the reactionary heartland values themselves were often colonial impositions in the first place, so ignorance or willful forgetting of history and cultural anthropology is prerequisite here. Regardless, these reactionary heartland values may be contrary to other “heartland” principles held, or may result in empirically undesirable effects for those who hold them. Again, this may still not be a dealbreaker, if the matter is framed in terms of pride in a “culture” under attack.

5. For the love of all that’s holy, read Adrian Daub’s The Cancel Culture Panic.

6. Take a gander at the opinion section of Crisis Magazine, for instance, this piece, to illustrate how completely the Catholic identity of some has been consumed by Trumpist phantasmagoria.

7. Not that this was new, either. John S. Huntington provides loads of stories of just this sort of thing in Far Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism.