A tough question. I’ve been trying to think through an answer with the help of people like Hegel, Rorty, and Kuhn. How do norms change such that what counts as true changes dramatically in a short period of time, generally, and what is happening in our current realignment?
From a standard progressive perspective, this change of norms — the loosening of the eye — is often good, since the eye can be oppressive and exclusionary. So Enlightenment events, like the French Revolution or the Civil Rights movement, realign norms in a way that is positive. In these cases, however, the conservatives are the norm defenders, the keeper of the eye. I’m thinking of Edmund Burke here, who turned out to not be entirely wrong, since the Terror horrified supporters of the Revolution of Hegel’s generation, and Hegel saw very clearly that freedom and terror were linked.
What we’re seeing now is different, an attack on — rather than a maintenance of — norms by the right. This comes out clearly in “The Flight 93 Election,” the inflammatory screed penned (under a Roman pseudonym — the nerve!) by Trump adviser Michael Anton, which called on conservatives to set aside their values in the short term in order to preserve them in the long term — because there was no other way. The turn from mere revanchism to revolution happens in this paragraph:
If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere — if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe — mustn’t they? — that we are headed off a cliff.
In the next paragraph, Burke himself is mocked, and Anton pursues his syllogism to the conclusion that if you believe we are headed off a cliff, then you must stop the train by any means necessary. This move from the right, unprecedented in my lifetime, is completely destabilizing to bipolar politics — a sort of judo move — since now the defenders of normativity have joined its critics, leading to the collapse of the eye we are now seeing as the left splits between advancing its critique of norms or defending norms to uphold past gains. That is how we have arrived at this place of such mobility between the center and the periphery.
