Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Reactionary education in the USA

2021; Wiley; Volume: 29; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/1469-8676.13056

1469-8676

Catherine Tebaldi,

Discourse Analysis in Language Studies

Reactionary education in the USAAre the American right free-speech warriors battling the 'woke armies' of 'cancel culture' as they claim?Are they leveraging attacks on 'political correctness' to destabilise and undermine truth?We might look not just at what these right-wing claims are but at what they do.In my research I explore how the digital right sees itself as 'speaking post-truth to power', borrowing the language of critical pedagogy in the service of reaction.The right engages in playful post-truth to support post-war capitalist values -to make suburban living edgy, to make misogyny into rebellion.As the National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesh explains, conservatism is the new punk rock -and traditionalism is the new postmodernism.As the term 'civil war II electric boogaloo' suggests, this is a metapolitical project not just a truth claim.Russian traditionalist Aleksandr Dugin describes the project as a fascist embrace of postmodernism, in the service of attacking liberal modernism but also with the aim of building a new modernity (Sullivan and Fisher-Smith 2020).This is less an attack on truth than an imagined battle between egalitarian and identitarian knowledge, values, societies.I know this conflict intimately; I teach a course on appreciating diversity at a large American public university, but was raised by an identitarian -a believer in 'white culture' and white superiority -a woman who supports flat-earth and fascism, biblical gender and biological race.The right describes itself as an alternative to a nihilist, meaningless modernity, but the meaning they seek to restore is hierarchy, white male supremacy.The Intellectual Dark Web embraces evolutionary psychology in the service of misogyny.Misogynist incels, involuntary celibates, revive phrenology to explain their solitude.Race science is renamed social biology, while Alt-Right women use anthropology to invent 'white culture' and Aryan ancestors.Etymology becomes destiny in discourses that show how nation comes from the Latin word for birth.Educators on the right speak of restoration, finding hidden realities, a discursive knitting together of culture and race to remake a nation.The right is not anti-intellectual, just anti-egalitarian.Reactionary intellectuals say equality is a lie told to you by elites, a faux-populism made possible by a demonisation of higher education -as when millionaire Tucker Carlson calls Republican Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (a former bartender) a totalitarian educated elite on US's Fox News.These discourses position the university as at once neoliberal and cultural Marxist, training students in corporate HR newspeak.This corporate communism isn't just far-right idiocy; universities offer a brief introduction to the vocabulary of critique without time for deep analysis of power, corporations offer woke ad campaigns and rainbow capitalism, and neoliberal parties have money for bombs but not student debt.The disconnection of the language of equality from