Conservatism is Atheism
Predictions for 2028.
In 1969, Alan Ginsburg’s poem “Howl” was broadcast on Finnish radio, Yleisradio. The poem itself was written in 1954. It had already been published in Parnasso, a Finnish magazine, without legal action. But the public broadcast of the poem caused an uproar. 83 out of the 200 members of the parliament signed a complaint. A criminal investigation began in Helsinki to investigate “offense to modesty and decency.” No charges were filed.
In 1972, just three years later, George Carlin performed his famous "Seven dirty words" sketch.
In 1973, he was arrested for publicly performing this sketch under the guise of “disturbing the peace.” Carlin’s act, much like Ginsburg’s poem, did not cause any violence. The term “peace” here refers, in a deceptive manner, not to physical violence, but to the “mental” peace of religion.
The religion in question was Christianity. The first two of Carlin’s seven dirty words, for urine and fecal matter, could be pre-Christian taboos. In the western world, the taboo against human waste may have become specifically pronounced during the medieval period, when human waste filled the streets. In contrast to these city dwellers, the aristocracy lived in the countryside with estates where they could avoid being surrounded by putrid smells. With the gradual invention of toilets in the 17th century onwards, this relationship inverted as the wealthy came to congregate in cities, leaving the countryside to the “country bumpkins,” who were then re-associated with manure and outhouses. While cities were once thought of as dirty, it then became rural farmers who were associated with dirtiness. In both cases, the ability to hide human waste was highly associated with class.
Carlin's five other words are all sexual. The Christian prescription of monogamy required that husband and wife be strictly confined to marriage. Since humans are not naturally monogamous (unlike swans), the best way to reduce fornication was to eliminate all mention of sexuality from society.
Today, George Carlin and Alan Ginsburg are respected in popular culture and in the towers of academia. What is not tolerated falls under the opprobrium of cancel culture.
If cancel culture had seven deadly sins, they would be as follows:
Racism
Sexism
Homophobia
Transphobia
Xenophobia
Chauvinism
Pseudoscience
Like Christianity, cancel culture is fighting human nature. Just as human sexuality must remain taboo in order to enforce monogamy, cancel culture creates a series of taboos and “unpleasantries.”
When Christianity was morally hegemonic, Christian behavior was considered high class, while the opposite was considered low class. The relation is the same under cancel culture.
If George Carlin was alive today, would he be a conservative Trump supporter? Probably not, although stranger things have happened. Eldridge Cleaver, leader of the Black Panther Party (1967-1971), admitted to raping white women as part of a "guerrilla war" against the white race. But just a decade later, the same Black race warrior became baptized as a Mormon in 1983 and ran for public office as a conservative Republican. [5 years later, he was arrested for burglary, tested positive for cocaine use, and continued to get in trouble with the law until 1994, when he was too old and ill to continue. By 1995 he seemed to return to his leftist roots.1
I digress. Whether or not Carlin would embrace Trump is less relevant to the point. Instead, it can be acknowledged without controversy that the conservative movement of today desperately wishes that Carlin *would have* become a conservative, had he been given a chance.
Why would George Carlin, a radical leftist in the 1970s, become a flag waving, Trump supporting, MAGA voting Republican? According to conservatives, it is because “the left has gone insane.” The celebrity leadership of the conservative movement, ranging from Eric Weinstein, Roseanne Barr, Jordan Peterson, and Dave Rubin all claim that, in Carlin’s time, they would have been considered liberals. But following the election of Obama, something “insane” happened. It wasn’t Black Panthers raping white women in the 70s, nor was it Alan Ginsburg pushing the legalization of pedophilia, nor was it the Rosenberg conspiracy to deliver nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. None of that constituted sufficient “insanity” to sway the likes of Weinstein, Peterson, or Rubin.
A cynical perspective on these “liberals turned conservatives” suggests that the intergenerational shift away from Israel is actually the most significant act of “insanity” by the left. MLK, despite his radical associations with communists, was a strong supporter of Israel. American hippies, on their way to smoke ganja in Kabul, often stopped to work on Israeli Kibbutzim in the 1970s. Even during the presidency of George Bush, there was no strong partisan divide on Israel. In 2008, George Bush went as far as to visit Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, a completely unthinkable act in today’s political climate.2 It wasn’t until Obama’s presidency that a strong partisan divide visibly emerged over Israel, especially as concerned Iran.
Obama had a foreign policy toward Iran not unlike Nixon’s approach to China. Both were hostile (potential) nuclear powers, with fanatic anti-western ideologies. But through diplomacy, China was separated from the Soviet Union, ending the cold war 17 years later. This “realist” approach by Obama sought to separate Iran out from its regional allies (Syrian, Yemen, Lebanon, Palestine) in exchange for economic cooperation. Despite arguments from the Likud wing that this was Obama’s plan to “wipe Israel off the map,” this was actually a plan to secure Israel’s existence by dividing and conquering her enemies through economic cooperation. As in China, it would take years to accomplish, but if Nixon could end the Cold War in 17 years, then maybe Israel could see peace by 2025. This was also essentially the plan put forth by Jewish progressive philanthropist, George Soros.
Within Israel, peaceful rapprochement with Iran was unacceptable. The atmosphere within the Likud party could be compared to the anti-communism of Joseph McCarthy or Barry Goldwater. Peace was unacceptable; no deals could be made with the enemy; infiltrators and subverters were everywhere; weakness meant death; compromise or negotiation represented complicity in a grand conspiracy against the nation. Obama’s plan was flatly rejected, and Obama became cast as a villain, alongside a caricature of the archvillain, George Soros.
In a coordinated attack, Alex Jones, Dinesh D'Souza, Glenn Beck, and Ann Coulter all denounced Obama and George Soros as unpatriotic, anti-Israel, antisemitic, and so on. In 2010, Beck claimed that George Soros was a secret Nazis who killed Jews during the Holocaust, despite the fact that in 1945, he was only 15.3 Beck, Jones, D’Souza and Coulter could all be considered “far right conspiracy theorists,” but the partisan divide on Israel was also represented in the mainstream.
Dennis Prager, Sheldon Adelson, and Jared Kushner can all be described as relatively socially liberal, yet align strongly with Likud on the issue of Iran. The candidacy of McCain and the bashing of Soros represent the initial attempts to “lean in” to the growing partisan divide over Iran.
On Fox News, talk of the “Iranian Mullahs” dominated the airwaves between the Irish Catholic talking heads, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. With the failure of Romney in 2012, the Likud-aligned faction, through its connection to Jared Kushner, began strategizing for the return of a former presidential candidate, Donald Trump.
In 2000, when Trump floated the idea of a presidential run, he proposed Colin Powell as his Secretary of State and John McCain as his Secretary of Defense. This was long before Ivanka met Kushner in 2005. In comparison to George Bush, Trump was secular and socially liberal. In comparison to Al Gore, Trump’s cabinet was hawkish and aggressive, almost identical to Bush’s in terms of foreign policy.
Therefore, Trump’s socially liberal, neo-conservative views cannot be said to originate with Kushner. Rather, it may be the other way around: Trump orchestrated an arranged marriage of his daughter into the Kushner family in order to solidify a previously established alliance with the neo-conservative movement. Trump’s issues with Bush, prior to 9/11, centered on balancing trade and introducing universal healthcare. Immigration had no relevance.
Trump’s public “awakening” to becoming a conservative began in 2011, when he supported “birther” conspiracy theories against Obama.4 A year prior, Trump had already set the stage. In order to appear like a late comer to an already existing conspiracy theory, Trump assigned Michael Cohen to plant false stories about Obama’s birth in tabloid news.5
Trump’s dedication to neo-conservative policy was what resulted in his attacks on Obama. His hatred for the Bush family had less to do with their hawkish foreign policy and more with the fact that they were “losers.” The Bush family criticized Israel over Palestine in an unacceptable way. They failed to manage public perception of the war, and associated it with “religious fundamentalism” and “sexual puritanism” rather than a populist message. Had Trump been elected in 2000, he would have overseen the War on Terror with Oprah Winfrey as his vice president. The Trump plan for the War in Iraq would have involved Clinton-style bombings, a quick decapitation of Saddam, and another quick withdrawal, leaving Iraq in ruins with no semblance of a government. At the very least, Trump would have “taken the oil.”
Bush was too much like Obama for Trump’s liking. Too soft, too humanitarian, too friendly to the Palestinians, not vicious enough, not populist enough. Trump’s “revelation” between 2010 and 2015 that “the left has gone insane” parallels exactly the course of many other former liberals, who were willing to compromise (vaguely) with conservatives on everything — abortion, LGBTQ, tax cuts, the war on Christmas, immigration, reverse racism. But the one issue they never changed on, before or after their conversion, was the issue of Israel.
Conservatives themselves have a laundry list prepared to explain their “coming to Jesus”: drag queen story house, critical race theory, transgender pronouns, BLM, political correctness, woke universities, polyamory, all summed up as “wokism.” Indeed, the period after 2014 did see an acceleration in the public-facing nature of these obscure leftist fetishes.
Summary
Christianity developed and maintained taboos against sexual promiscuity, which were prohibited in five of Carlin’s “seven dirty words.” After two decades of open defiance coming from an anti-Christian vanguard, the 1970s made anti-Christianity mainstream. The “aftershock” or second religiousness of the Evangelical movement was goofy, stilted, and ineffective, although it limps on to this day.
The year 2000 represented “peak Evangelical” in terms of political power, at which point it entered a steep decline. As Christianity began to die in the 1970s, a new religion of “political correctness” arose with its own seven deadly sins: sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, chauvinism, and pseudoscience. Political commentators made fun of this new religion as “political correctness,” but this had no suppressive effect on its success.
The Handmaid's Tale came out in 1985, and seemed foreboding at the time. But the period from 2000 to 2008 represents the decline and fall of the Evangelical movement, and all of the dire predictions of a “coming theocracy” have fallen flat. In the power vacuum left by Christianity, “cancel culture” has taken its place.
The psychology of the left today is no longer a vanguard or revolutionary. Rather, most leftists are natural born conformists. When we ask, “what happened to the Christians? Where did they go?” The answer is that they became leftists — not by their own will or their own design, but simply as a consequence of crowd following behavior. This explains, almost entirely, the growing partisan gap between men and women. As liberal ideas become more hegemonic and socially-central, they become more female-coded, as women have higher levels of social conformism.
The backlash to social liberalism has been entirely controlled, coopted, and lead by neo-conservatives. The neo-conservative movement of 2000 had two branches: the social conservative branch, led by Bush, and the socially moderate branch, led by figures like McCain and Trump. Bush won in 2000 and 2004, but figures like McCain and the Mormon Romney ultimately represented a decline in the Evangelical coalition which supported Bush. As a result, Trump coasted to victory in 2016, with the defeated Evangelicals submitting to his authority as a Cyrus or Caesar.
Since 2016, Evangelicals have attempted a desperate syncretism between Trump’s secularism and their own fantasies. Qanon is a holograph, a projection of Jesus Christ onto the face of Trump. The fanatical, tortured, and logic bending conspiracies of “the storm” mutate as quickly as they can be disproved. They are the prophetic seizures and thrashings of a dying organism.
Conservatives (neo-conservatives) are now, effectively, atheists. They hate the woke left, and want to kill its God in the same way that George Carlin killed Christ. But instead of “returning to tradition,” these conservatives offer, in place of “wokism,” a return to George Carlin. For conservatives, George Carlin has become a prophet. “He warned us about the dangers of political correctness! The left has gone insane!”
Conservative anxiety about “leftist insanity” is the neurotic response of an atheist. Conservatives have no Gods, nothing worth dying for. Martyrs are “insane,” passion is “insane,” faith is “insane.” Conservatives have all the snarky, reddit-tier “fact checking” to disprove, dismantle, deconstruct, and dissect the inner contradictions of the left. So not only is conservatism atheistic, it is also post-modernist.
No matter how hollow or empty atheism is, that does not validate the wager of Descartes. Just because atheism is wrong doesn’t make Christianity true, and just because conservatives are hollow and empty, that doesn’t make Wokism true. Rather, Christianity and Wokism represent real religions, each of which has its own life cycle, its own conditions of birth and conditions of death. Christianity lasted 2,000 years. How long can Wokism last?
Rather than look at Wokism as a “genuine religion,” it should be seen as akin to many of the heresies and heterodox sects which populated Europe and the Middle East following the Axial Age. Mithraism, Essene asceticism, Stoicism, Cynicism, Epicureanism, Neo-Platonism, Aristotelianism, Unitarianism, Arianism, and Manichaeism all rose and fell during this period. Pre-Nicaean Christianity (or more accurately, Messianic Judaism) looked very different from Christianity in medieval Europe.
The sins of Wokism each have a long heritage in Christianity, will likely outlast it. Racism and xenophobia are opposite to the values of empires, which promote universalism and xenophilia. Sins of gender and sexuality (sexism, homophobia, transphobia) are also likely here to stay, at least until the human population reaches a self-sustaining steady-state or develops new means of reproduction. The sin of pseudoscience is hopefully here to stay, given the power of science, although one could say that the charge of “pseudoscience” is used by “pseudoscientists” to defend themselves from “real science.”
Lastly, the sin of Chauvinism. I believe this will be the first sin to fall in the Wokist religion, and it is already cracking with Trump. The Swedish value of anti-Chauvinism is an echo of Christian humility. This sort of humility, “don’t be that asshole,” is groaning under the weight of imperial bloat.
The cliche of the “nice guy” is ultimately derived from the “nice Christian boy” or the “nice Jewish boy.” In other words, it is a fundamentally religious and moralistic concept. If Wokism is inherently misogynistic and anti-male, it will produce a large population of cucks who get no reward for their submission, but also, through sheer pressure, it will produce a glut of chauvinists like Trump, Andrew Tate, and Dan Bilzerian. If Wokists wanted to maintain a stable population of “nice guys,” they would need to reinstitute monogamous marriage. Instead, incels are going to destroy the “sin of chauvinism” — far before any successful backlash against racial or sexual religiousness.
How could America get any more chauvinistic than Donald Trump? The answer is that the Democrat party, which has so far maintained a guise of respectability and humility under Biden, will be pressured to react and respond with a Gordon Gecko of their own. Gavin Newsom fits the bill, but some other openly self obsessed narcissist may steal that mantle.6 This sort of “narcissist versus narcissist” politics will break the American civil religion, and lead to constitutional crisis. There will be no “normalcy” to return to.
Other candidates would include Mark Cuban or Jeff Bezos. If Biden holds out through 2024, we could see these types of candidates in 2028. Currently, the field is empty. In 2020, Biden won 51.7% of the primary vote, and Bernie won 26.2%. Elizabeth Warren, in third place, won only 7.7%. Assuming Bernie doesn’t run again at the ripe old age of 87, there will be no old white or Jewish man to fill in for Biden as the “moderate placeholder” of the Democrat party. Essentially, 2028 for the Democrats could end up looking a lot like 2016 did for the Republicans — a huge field of boring candidates, offering business as usual, disrupted by a maniacal, malignant narcissist who threatens to go third party if they don’t get their way. Personally, I hope it’s Taylor Swift.
In his 1995 address, at 17:20, he praises the United States of America as the greatest country on earth, and the Constitution as the greatest document ever written. “That’s what we need to go back to!” Spoken like a true conservative — just after witnessing an African unity twerk session.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17966535
His father set the precedent later followed by Obama:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-lonely-little-george-h-w-bush-changed-the-us-israel-relationship/
https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/glenn-becks-remarks-about-soros-and-holocaust-offensive-and-over-top
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/11/29/puppetry
https://www.foxnews.com/story/glenn-beck-making-of-the-puppet-master
https://www.politico.com/story/2011/03/donald-trump-birther-051473
“In 2010, at Cohen’s urging, the National Enquirer began promoting a potential Trump presidential candidacy, referring readers to a pro-Trump website Cohen helped create. With Cohen’s involvement, the publication began questioning President Barack Obama’s birthplace and American citizenship in print, an effort that Trump promoted for several years, former staffers said.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/national-enquirer-hid-trump-secrets-safe-removed-them-inauguration-n903356
If George Santos were a Democrat…