Comments on: Right-Wing Postmodernism Again

By: Ted Barlow

Ted Barlow — Mon, 08 Sep 2003 15:08:16 +0000

Having slept on it, I’m still kind of astounded. She seems to be openly arguing that this widely shared misperception is good for the team, and therefore A Good Thing. If only Fox hadn’t trademarked the phrase “Useful Idiots.”

By: Barry

Barry — Mon, 08 Sep 2003 11:52:18 +0000

It’s not post-modernism; it’s the same old same old of the elites lying and employing professional liars, while their followers (who think that these elites are on their side) cheerfully repeat the lies. A better phrase would be ‘people of the lie’.

By: Walt Pohl

Walt Pohl — Mon, 08 Sep 2003 04:08:06 +0000

The reason people don’t criticize the postmodernists more is that they are so inconsequential in the real world (unless you’re hoping to be an English professor). It’s the Republican party who is putting the central tenets of postmodernism into practice.

By: SteveMG

SteveMG — Mon, 08 Sep 2003 02:36:15 +0000

Right wing post modern what? More gibberish from you guys on the left to explain away your failings. My gawd, we’ve have 25 years of the left embracing Foucault and Derrida in the academy – producing volume after volume of gibberish and nonsense – and liberals have just been absolutely silent about this intellectual fraud. And then some obscure person makes an offhand comment on National Review Online and it’s emblematic of the entire rightwing embrace of subjectivism and relativism? What? The point is correct about the woman’s absurd comment on NRO. But in the vast constellation of postmodern nonsense, this is but a grain of sand. Steve

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Mon, 08 Sep 2003 02:12:53 +0000

I don’t know that I agree with Quiggan that this kind of simplified postmodernism-for-dummies approach that the cultural right in the US and elsewhere so gleefully deploys to license their readings is in retreat everywhere else, or is now just a right-wing sin, but I do agree very much with his basic observation (which, as he notes, he’s made before) that the cultural right is deeply indebted to postmodernist strategies of reading and rhetoric, and is in some ways the best example of the dishonesty and bad faith that those strategies permit.