We argue that the paranoia expressed by post-modern conservatives is the symptom of a collective anxiety in an increasingly global society. The paranoia expressed by post-modern conservatives is often directed against a nefarious alliance bent on their destruction, an amorphous enemy against which they have no recourse. The character of post-modern right wing paranoia is such that the world of “others,” which includes everyone from elites to terrorists, is conspiring to dismantle the paranoiac’s world. This world of cultural tradition, stability, and order—and the identity at home within it—must be defended at all costs. [...]
On one hand, the foreign other can be regarded as an invader who must be destroyed, yet the root of this fear goes deeper than mere unfamiliarity. The real problem is that the foreign “invader” threatens to reveal that our “big other,” the watchful guarantor of our mores and traditions, is a local construction. For example, being confronted with Muslims who accept the validity of their religion on “faith,” threatens to expose the fundamental contingency of the Christian worldview. How might we reject the argument of Muslims, who accept the validity of their religion on “faith,” and yet maintain that our Christian values are unassailably true if they’re based on similarly contingent commitments? If we choose not to face such a reality—which would require no less than a reordering of the world itself—we may instead signify “the Muslim” as an antagonist from which nothing can be learned and against which “we” must defend ourselves at all costs. The paranoiac worldview of post-modern conservatives is a reactionary defense against all things “other” due to the profound anxiety caused by the possibility that the world might be more complex than their psychic construction.
To maintain the coherence of their worldview, post-modern conservatives transform the foreign/cosmopolitan/wealthy “others” into a unified enemy. The enemy, somehow, emerges from their rhetoric as a bizarre alliance of refugees with the global elite, opposing political parties, and cosmopolitan celebrities, the purpose of which is to infiltrate, steal from, disenfranchise, or terrorize “us.” Many liberal critics correctly show that the logic of post-modern conservative positions is contradictory, yet itself a symptom rooted in something immune to logic and far more valuable: to wit the coherence of the world and one’s identity therein.
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