The American Right Hits Its Hippie Phase

The greatest festival of the year at Hierapolis fell at the beginning of spring, when multitudes thronged to the sanctuary from Syria and the regions round about. While the flutes played, the drums beat, and the eunuch priests slashed themselves with knives, the religious excitement gradually spread like a wave among the crowd of onlookers, and many a one did that which he little thought to do when he came as a holiday spectator to the festival. For man after man, his veins throbbing with the music, his eyes fascinated by the sight of the streaming blood, flung his garments from him, leaped forth with a shout, and seizing one of the swords which stood ready for the purpose, castrated himself on the spot. Then he ran through the city, holding the bloody pieces in his hand, till he threw them into one of the houses which he passed in his mad career. The household thus honoured had to furnish him with a suit of female attire and female ornaments, which he wore for the rest of his life.

— James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, 1914

T he Republicans are having a Dionysian moment. Who’d’ve thunk?

In ye olden days when American intellectuals wrote provocative books that people read and sometimes fought over (Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve may have been the last genuine American intellectual scandal of its kind), the dissident feminist Camille Paglia published a fascinating study called Sexual Personae, in which she introduced a new generation of readers to the Apollonian–Dionysian dichotomy that had been of so much interest to Friedrich Nietzsche. The Apollonian–Dionysian dichotomy understands much of art and life as a struggle between the rational, orderly, formal (Apollonian) elements and the passionate, wild, chaotic (Dionysian) elements. There are virtues on both sides, but virtues that do not often coexist in peace — consider, for example, the Catholic Church’s struggles in harmonizing the order of its liturgy and hierarchy with the ecstasy of the mystics and militants.

Politics and tragedy are not entirely unrelated, and the Apollonian–Dionysian split shows up in the democratic agon, too.

From the beginnings of organized American political conservatism in the 1950s through the turn of the century, the Republican Party was overwhelmingly — though not exceptionlessly — the Apollonian party, and what the conservative movement understood itself to be principally opposed to was chaos. (Tyranny, which is arbitrary government, is understood by conservatives to be a particular species of chaos that typically arises from or descends into ordinary, familiar chaos.) This Apollonian–Dionysian dynamic was most dramatically displayed in the 1960s, when the political Left and the anarchic counterculture made more or less consistently common cause for a decade.

It is tempting to read the Apollonian–Dionysian dichotomy of the 1960s as a straightforward exercise in power politics: In this view, the partisans of order and tradition were those who already had power and were anxious about losing it, while the partisans of upheaval and chaos were those without power seeking to establish, through personal and political radicalism, a zone of autonomy, with the hippies and the Merry Pranksters and all such acting as shock troops for the more politically serious movements that would advance alongside them, from the civil-rights movement to what used to be called “women’s liberation.” There is some truth to that, of course, but it isn’t quite correct, because the 1960s counterculture was very much the product of young people who were the heirs of the ruling class. It was not a rising of the proletariat, but a rising of well-off college kids.

The politics was only one part of a much more comprehensive cultural split that came with its own vestiary signifiers and tonsorial markers: the Goldwater gang with their crewcuts and neckties vs. the hippies with their long hair and outlandish outfits, William F. Buckley Jr.’s wit vs. Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Even the rusticated Lyndon Johnson grew his hair long in retirement as an act of protest against the conservativism that was ascendant at the end of his days. As in our own time, politics was best understood as a constituent of — dread word — lifestyle.

The 1960s counterculture was big on performative filth, performative poverty, and, ultimately, performative madness. And it was a performance, even if some of it was genuine, too. Just as the partisans of order imitated paragons of order as they imagined them to be (hence conservatives’ double affectation of aristocratic refinement and John Wayne masculinity), the liberationists set about transforming themselves into lowlifes as they imagined them to be. In this they were led by such pioneers as William S. Burroughs, the Harvard-educated beneficiary of a St. Louis adding-machine fortune who became a Greenwich Village drug-dealer before retreating with his parents to Palm Beach, a fallen angel of the Midwestern patriciate. Burroughs’s banner was taken up and raised higher by such children of the High Bourgeoisie as Bill Ayers, the son of the chairman and CEO of Commonwealth Edison, and Squeaky Fromme, the daughter of a well-off Santa Monica family who sought fame dancing on the Lawrence Welk Show before taking up with Charles Manson and trying to assassinate Gerald Ford. These figures were typical of a generation of jumped-up champagne radicals whose taste for transgression blasted past sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll all the way to terrorism, political assassinations, and mass murder: Charles Manson and his addled Bacchae were pure Dionysian ecstasy — supported in part by trust-funders such as Sandra Good, who apparently remains a committed Mansonite to this day.

The 1960s began as “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Five years later, it was “Helter Skelter.” It was not a long and winding road — it was a short one.

There was not much Dionysian action on the right in those years. The Right was interested in order, tradition, and property. (Denouncing materialism was a good way to make money in the 1960s and 1970s, and it was not until the pop-culture triumph of hip-hop that Americans embraced the notion that great wealth could be put into the service of genuinely anti-establishment patterns of life.) The Left despised these things or affected to despise them. The immediate forebears of the people who today lecture passersby about what “the science says,” “evidence-based” politics, etc. — and, in some cases, the very same people — were only a few decades ago howling along with Allen Ginsberg, joining cults in Big Sur, engaged in “yogic flying” with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, seeking their bliss in LSD, etc.

My hunch is that a great deal of what is presently going on with the Right — and it won’t do to pretend it is just a tiny fringe — is an echo of that 1960s counterculture. Republicans have evolved out of their Apollonian sensibility and adopted a Dionysian one just as Democrats have, by and large, made the opposite journey. Today among progressives, it’s “experts say” and “science says,” but not long ago it was, “Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives, and then eating a meal in the same room, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson,” in the words of Bernardine Dohrn, who went on to marry Ayers and become a professor of law at Northwestern as well as a benefactor of Barack Obama.

Democrats’ overall approach to politics right now is to associate their party and its members with high-status authority figures and to denounce Republicans as insufficiently reverent of these figures, and insufficiently deferential to them. The response of many Republicans has been to subject those authority figures and their institutions — and, in some ways, the idea of authority itself — to ridicule and scorn. They desire to be both outraged and outrageous, high on rage themselves and a source of rage and anxiety in others. Like those of the hippies and, later, the punks, this right-wing tendency is largely outward-focused rather than the expression of some intimate individual sensibility: If the hippies and the punks had been driven by some kind of anarchic individualism, they wouldn’t have all looked alike and listened to the same music. The point wasn’t originality or authenticity — it was to freak out the squares, to vex and offend the mainstream of society, the ’60s and ’70s version of “owning the libs.”

The leftist radicals of the 1960s were willing to engage in genuinely self-destructive behavior as a sacrifice to the idols they had constructed for themselves. They held science, reason, the government, the business establishment, organized religion, and much else in disdain, along with such notions as compromise, moderation, and cooperation. The contemporary Right also hates the government, the business establishment, much of organized religion, compromise, etc., but instead of LSD and Transcendental Meditation it has hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, absurd mask politics, election trutherism, anti-vaccine activism, 1,001 conspiracy theories, and QAnon. It even has its own version of the Manson murders, the five dead after the January 6 sacking of the Capitol only one unborn child short of the six dead at Roman Polanski’s house — both episodes of violence meant as theater for public consumption. This is self-harm, but it is also communicative. It is ceremonial outrage directed at the foundations of respectability per se, a reaction to what many on the right — and here I include myself — experience as an ever-narrower corridor of thinkable thoughts and sayable sentences. In some cases, those who are on the outside looking in discover that they are better pleased to be on the outside looking out — but others prefer to smash the windows, or to perform obscenities in front of them to shock and disgust those seated comfortably inside.

Obviously, this kind of histrionic, ecstatic, Dionysian politics is ultimately incompatible with conservatism properly understood, though it goes easily hand-in-hand with a particular kind of right-wing revolutionism. Hence the contemporary Right’s promises of revolution and of a Dionysian frenzy presaging a return to innocence, from Ron Paul’s “Revolution” to the Tea Party to “Make America Great Again,” which, as far as right-wing slogans go, at least has the good taste to be properly reactionary. Hence also the cultishness of Republican politics circa 2021: the fever-dream hysteria, the idolatry, the mad quackery and pseudoscientific enthusiasms, and — lest we forget — the violence. In 2000, the “Brooks Brothers Riot” was a joke — in 2021, the riot was for real, and some on the right are starting to get a taste for it.

Where and how this ends, I do not know. But if there were such a thing as stock in cults, I’d be long on those and short on most of what we understood to be conservatism until the day before yesterday.