Rights and Regulation in Bush's America; or, How the New Right Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Equal Rights

Abstract

This chapter explores how the George W. Bush administration, New Right intellectuals and ordinary, resentful Americans all embrace a particular conception of equal rights. It argues, moreover, that their celebrations of equal rights champion a traditional figure in the American imagination: the 'forgotten Americans'. The chapter describes that conservative rights-discourse is a major force in the contemporary retrenchment of American politics. It discusses the prominent conservatives championed a contrary version of equal rights beginning in the early 1960s. The nationalistic, regulatory dimension of contemporary conservative rights-discourse is even more paradoxical. To argue that political debates over rights take place in a theatre of culture war is thus to argue that they take place in a cultural environment that elevates normative and nationalistic anxieties over concerns of practicality or expediency. Conservative rights-discourse seeks to discipline already socially-marginal Americans, to entrench their powerlessness by labelling attempts to overcome it as violations of the equal rights of all Americans.