Howling Against Democracy: The Cultural Roots of the Authoritarian Right
By Jim Miller
Last week in my American Literature II class at City College, I taught “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg as I always do at this point in the semester. Ginsberg, as incendiary as his work was in the 1950s, has long been part of the established canon of contemporary works, occupying a space in the iconic Norton Anthology and widely taught across the country. In sum, in literary circles, Ginsberg, like him or not, is a non-controversial part of our cultural history.
During class, we note that the irony of the famous Beat poet’s rebellion is how quickly and thoroughly it was commodified. I address the contradictions and complexities of the ways the Beats address race, gender, sexuality, drug use, madness, and social marginalization. Ginsberg’s work offers an interesting precedent to the emergence of the sixties counterculture, the big societal changes that followed in its wake, and the emergence of a conservative reaction to those changes.
For many years of my career, this was an interesting intellectual exercise for students who were rarely shocked or disturbed by “Howl.” Indeed, frequently it was necessary to rigorously contextualize the poem to underline why it was a big deal at the time. But, of course, I teach an extremely diverse student population in urban Southern California where even the most extreme aspects of Ginsberg’s work were often met with a shrug.
In recent years, however, the poem has begun to strike a nerve with students who have come to see it through the lens of the present. It is a kind of “aha” moment that helps them understand the early roots of the great backlash. Suddenly, with the war on “wokeness” taking center stage, the rollback of abortion rights, and the new-found hysteria over gender and sexuality, Ginsberg’s “Howl” against the forces that left “the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” makes perfect sense again.
And it is hard not to notice that there are lots of people in America who would be happy to stop my students from reading the poem even in college, ban the book itself, and perhaps even criminalize its teaching. Indeed, there is a large segment of the country who never stopped freaking out about the cultural changes that “Howl” helped produce and who would love to make them go away by any means necessary.
Coincidently, the same day that I taught Ginsberg in my class, Thomas Edsall published an insightful piece in the New York Times on “The Republican Strategists Who Have Carefully Planned All of This” on the ongoing threats to American Democracy from an increasingly extremist right wing. After outlining how groups like the Proud Boys and other reactionary forces have deeply infiltrated the Republican Party across the country, Edsall surveys reactions from a range of scholars on the origins of this long march towards authoritarianism on the right.
Rachel Kleinfield, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, observes that the support of violence in the service of cultural backlash against the forces of liberalism is no longer a fringe idea on the right. Why? Kleinfield goes straight to the heart of it: “Fear is a major cause of violence. As America undergoes immense change, from a fourth industrial revolution to remaking the concept of gender, many Americans are struggling to understand why they feel unmoored, anxious and behind.”
Thus, the backlash against the cultural shifts of the last 50 years has, in some quarters, only intensified as the landscape of gender and sexuality has been definitively transformed. This has led to a politics where the rich who have immensely benefited from growing economic inequality have joined forces with this fearful Republican base to fight a desperate rearguard action as their demographic strength fades.
As scholar Jacob Grumbach notes in the Edsall piece, this has created an anti-democratic force par excellence:
[T]he two major elements of the Republican Party — “extremely wealthy individuals in an era of high economic inequality” and “a voter base motivated by cultural and demographic threat” — have a “hard time winning electoral majorities on the basis of their policy agendas (a high-end tax cut agenda for the elite base and a culturally reactionary agenda for the electoral base), which increases their incentive to tweak the rules of the game to their advantage.”
Edsall then cites Harvard political scientist Pippa Norris who argues that the non-college educated whites, evangelical Christians, and other right-wing forces of backlash are correct in seeing their position as threatened by a genuinely democratic system where the majority rule:
Since the early 1980s, on issue after issue — from abortion; secular values; civil rights; racial, homosexual and gender equality; gun control; cosmopolitanism; and environmentalism — the pool of social conservatives adopting traditional views on these moral and social identity issues has been shrinking in size within the U.S. national electorate, from majority to minority status. They are running down an up escalator.
Hence the fury of the fight and the ease with which Republicans have embraced undermining democratic elections to protect against majority rule through a wide range of measures. As we head into 2024, it is becoming clearer and clearer that the American right understands that its political success hinges on fear, cultural backlash, and a desperate desire to roll back the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. And all of it is cynically funded by those whose raison d’etre is not cultural conservatism, but tax cuts for corporations and the billionaire class.
This is our contemporary version of the dreaded “Moloch” that Ginsberg’s poem rails against. Moloch “whose blood is running money! . . . Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! . . . Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!”