Last week, I published a long guest essay in the New York Times arguing that the American Right — following the broader trends in the rest of the country — is secularizing, replacing “an explicitly biblical focus on issues like school prayer, no-fault divorce and homosexuality” with “questions of national identity, social integrity and political alienation.” This ascendant genre of right-wing politics, I wrote, “is a social conservatism rather than a religious one, revolving around race relations, identity politics, immigration and the teaching of American history.” And while — from the traditional social-conservative perspective, at least — there are real concerns to be had about this development, I argued that it also “has the capacity to dramatically expand the Republican tent,” appealing “to a wide range of Americans, many of whom had been put off by the old conservatism’s explicitly religious sheen and don’t quite see themselves as Republicans yet.”
There have been a few understandably critical responses from the Left — most notably, a polemic from the leftist writer John Ganz on his Substack (a version of which appears to have been reprinted in the New Statesman). Ganz’s piece raises a number of worthwhile points but intersperses them with odd pseudo-psychoanalytic hand-waving (“Hochman is probably embarrassed [to] speak about the centrality of these lurid myths on the right”), throws in a funny reference to “young Mr. Hochman in his blazer over there [at] The National Review” (I’m from Portland, Ore., and don’t fit the bow-tie-wearing College Republican prototype), and concludes an otherwise thoughtful essay with a head-scratcher of an “actually, it’s really all just fascism” paragraph.
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