Conservative Critics Research Articles

Doing social science with conservation: co-reflexivity on the project model in conservation

Abstract The conservation sector increasingly values reflexivity, in which professionals critically reflect on the social, institutional and political aspects of their work. Reflexivity offers diverse benefits, from enhancing individual performance to driving institutional transformation. However, integrating reflexivity into conservation practice remains challenging and is often confined to informal reflections with limited impact. To overcome this challenge, we introduce co-reflexivity, offering an alternative to the binary distinction between social science on or for conservation, which respectively produce critical outsider accounts of conservation or provide social science instruments for achieving conservation objectives. Instead, co-reflexivity is a form of social science with conservation, in which conservation professionals and social scientists jointly develop critical yet constructive perspectives on and approaches to conservation. We demonstrate the value of co-reflexivity by presenting a set of reflections on the project model, the dominant framework for conservation funding, which organizes conservation activity into distinct, target-oriented and temporally bounded units that can be funded, implemented and evaluated separately. Co-reflexivity helps reveal the diverse challenges that the project model creates for conservation practice, including for the adoption of reflexivity itself. Putting insights from social science research in dialogue with reflections from conservation professionals, we co-produce a critique of project-based conservation with both theoretical and practical implications. These cross-disciplinary conversations provide a case study of how co-reflexivity can enhance the conservation–social science relationship.

The Most Iniquitous Lobby: The Committee for Constitutional Government and the Shaping of American Politics, 1937–1955

AbstractThis article examines the Committee for Constitutional Government, a conservative organization that spearheaded a novel form of mass-based mobilization and direct-mail propaganda to counter New Deal reforms from 1937 to the late 1950s. I argue that the members of the committee offered a supple and variegated response to New Deal liberalism, one with deep roots in the American past. Organizationally, the committee differed from other conservative groups of the period in the vastly greater reach of its propaganda, the small-donor financial base of its operations, and its extensive cultivation of a grassroots movement committed to right-wing reform. The committee was a critical political actor from 1937 to 1955, systematically shaping legislation and countering the trend toward social democracy in America. The ultimate result of its campaigns was to retard the growth of the administrative state and help formulate a cogent conservative critique of reformist liberalism.

COPSRO: An Offline Empirical Game Theoretic Method With Conservative Critic.

This article studies how to learn approximate Nash equilibrium (NE) from static historical datasets by empirical game-theoretic analysis (EGTA), which provides a simulation-based framework to model complex multiagent interactions. Generally, EGTA requires plentiful interactions with the environment or simulator to estimate a cogent and tractable game model approximating the underlying game. However, these exploratory interactions often suffer from low data utilization efficiency and may not be feasible in risk-sensitive applications. To address these problems, this article investigates a new EGTA paradigm for offline settings and introduces a novel algorithm called conservative offline policy space response oracle (COPSRO) to identify NE from fixed datasets without active data collection. COPSRO initiates by extracting a set of strategies from the offline dataset to construct an overcomplete strategy population, achieving an approximation to the policy space of the original game. Then, COPSRO integrates the conservative critic (CC) to tackle the challenge of overestimation inherent in offline learning scenarios. Additionally, it devises the offline NE solver to iteratively compute approximate NE. Consequently, COPSRO can ascertain equilibrium strategies without real-world interaction, markedly enhancing its utility in risk-averse settings. This article provides both theoretical analysis and empirical evaluation to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of COPSRO across various real-world tasks in the offline setting. Our method surpasses existing approaches in terms of convergence and exploitability, especially when the coverage ration of dataset is low (20% or 10%).

STITCHING POLITICS AND IDENTITY ON TIKTOK

Though a relative newcomer among social media platforms, social video-sharing platform TikTok is one of the largest social media platforms in the world, boasting over one billion monthly active users, which it garnered in just five years (Dellatto, 2021). While much of the early attention to the platform focused on more frivolous elements, such as its dances and challenges, the political weight of TikTok has become ever clearer. In the 2020 US election, Donald Trump’s plan to fill the 19,000-seat BOK Center in Tulsa was stymied by young activists who reserved tickets with no intention of attending, organized largely on TikTok (Bandy & Diakopoulos, 2020). In the years since, political discourse on TikTok has continued to emerge from everyday users and political campaigns alike (see Newman, 2022), even as TikTok itself has become an object of political contention: calls for banning the app in the United States–citing security concerns influenced by xenophobia, given the app’s Chinese ownership–began in the Trump presidency (Allyn, 2020) and have recently culminated in state- and federal-level bans on the app for government-owned devices in the U.S. (Berman, 2023). While some studies have navigated limited data access and the platform’s relative infancy to offer an examination of political TikTok (see Literat & Kligler-Vilenchik, 2019; Medina Serrano et al., 2020; Vijay & Gekker, 2021; Guinaudeau et al., 2022), there remains a significant need for more analysis and theorization of how TikTok can become both a site for political discourse and a feature caught up within political mobilization. This panel seeks to bring together emerging work that deals with political participation on TikTok, in order to share current wisdom and forge future research directions. The presented works specifically focus on the relationship between political participation on TikTok and political identity for three primary reasons. First, as a video-based and thus embodied platform (Raun, 2012), creator identity is more prominent and easily perceptible in the visual and auditory elements of TikTok videos than in the primarily text-based posts on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Second, TikTok relies more heavily on its recommendation algorithm for content distribution than its competitors traditionally have (Kaye et al., 2022; Cotter et al., 2022; Zeng & Kaye, 2022; Zhang & Liu, 2021), leading to the creation of “refracted publics” (Abidin, 2021) or Gemeinschaft-style communities (Kaye et al., 2022) around users’ common interests, which may include and/or be heavily informed by identity. Third, TikTok has long prioritized and found success with Generation Z and younger users more broadly (Zeng et al., 2021; Vogels et al., 2022; Stahl & Literat, 2022), which has made generational identity extremely salient on the app, while also implicating political identity, as young people tend to hold political beliefs more cognizant and accepting of diverse identities than older generations (Parker et al., 2019). The papers in this panel consider a wide range of identity characteristics of TikTok users and how these identities shape and are shaped by political discourse on TikTok. Paper 1 builds on TikTok’s targeting of Gen Z, considering the identities of age and generation through a content analysis of political remix on TikTok to uncover how younger users use TikTok for political activism as compared to their older counterparts, and finding evidence that TikTok is a powerful site of collective action. Also building from TikTok’s appeal to GenZ, Paper 2 presents a digital ethnographic analysis of the Trad-Wife phenomena on TikTok, offering that TikTok quietly (and thus insidiously) offers space for the cultivation of Christian Nationalist, ‘gentle fascisms’ within GenZ women, often without mention of ‘politics’ at all. Paper 3 offers a computational content analysis of political posts on TikTok with a focus on the interactions between identity and partisanship, and particularly the ways in which creators of marginalized identities on the right act as identity entrepreneurs, offering conservative critiques of their identity groups in ways which find popularity among conservative audiences of hegemonic identities. Finally, Paper 4 looks at differences in how TikTok users respond to male and female politicians’ TikTok videos using a combination of computational and qualitative methods, with exploratory analysis suggesting that male politicians receive more neutral and positive comments than female politicians. By focusing on identity and political discourse on TikTok, we recognize the wide range of political activity occurring on a platform often denigrated as frivolous, and foreground the importance of identity characteristics to the technological and social shaping of these dialogues.

Conservation at a crossroads: governing by global targets, innovative financing, and techno-optimism or radical reform?

Biodiversity conservation is at a crossroads. A number of trends are converging with the potential to transform our understanding of nature and how we conserve it. First, conservation policy makers are advocating increasingly ambitious global biodiversity targets, such as the agreement to protect 30% of terrestrial, inland water, and of coast and marine areas by 2030 made at the December 2022 Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. Second, recognizing that governments do not have sufficient resources to reach these ambitious targets, they are turning to private finance and innovative financing mechanisms for help. Third, technological advances are enabling new ways of surveilling people, species, and ecosystems, measuring conservation outcomes, and targeting funding. Finally, long-standing concerns over the alienation of Indigenous Peoples and local communities from land and resources, and the colonial legacy of conservation, have been amplified by widespread contemporary awareness of racism more generally. Nascent critiques of conservation are incorporating but also moving beyond calls for participatory or rights-based approaches to conservation to push for the complete decolonization of conservation, alternatives to capitalist approaches to conservation, and other radical reforms. Collectively, these shifts are both reinforcing traditional conservation practice and power relationships and opening up space to expand understandings of collaborative management, environmental caretaking, and sustainable livelihoods and dramatically reform conservation. In this article, we draw on decades of research studying conservation governance in sites that range from villages to international meetings in order to examine this critical historical moment in conservation politics. We argue that conservation is at an ontological and epistemic moment during which the meaning of biodiversity, how to know it, how to conserve it, and who should conserve it is being fundamentally transformed. As transnational movements seek to transform our political economic system and to decolonize conservation, the consolidation of elite power among actors in finance, technology, governments, and big nongovernmental organizations abstracts conservation from localized contexts, drawing attention away from ensuring effective conservation on the ground and failing to challenge the root causes of biodiversity loss. Thus, continued vigilance is needed to keep equity, rights, justice, and livelihoods at the forefront of conservation.

CONCERNING THE ROLE OF UNIVERSITIES IN THE FORMATION OF CATHOLIC CONSERVATISM IN THE USA

The article deals with the analysis of the main aspects of universities’ influence on the foundation and modern development of the ideology of Catholic conservatism in the US. Introductory part defines two basic strategies of defining and constructing Catholic education’s identity: countercultural and adaptive. The former implies a strict student’s upbringing according to the norms of Catholic morality, the latter - acquisition of skills that allow to assume leading positions in country’s politics and economics. It is stated that their genesis and development were caused by the unique political and cultural circumstances of the USA, in particular, the church-state separation and hostile protestant culture. The first section offers the classification of modern Catholic universities based on the degree of their integration in secular culture and global economic. Five models are proposed: pluralist, dialogical, conservative, formational and exclusivist. The section demonstrates how universities’ institutional structures represent the main currents of the modern Catholic conservatism. The second section argues that the differences between modern Catholic conservative critique of the secular universities and its mid-twentieth century version point to the fundamental transformation of the ideology of Catholic conservatism itself. The main difference consist in a realization of a connection between moral and economic aspects of university, which manifested itself in the populist critique of the meritocratic principle in higher education. This ideological shift allows to explain the reason for growing dissatisfaction of conservative voters and politicians with a government funding of institutions of higher education which are being perceived as hostile and dysfunctional.

Memory of the Present

Memory of the Present Elana Gomel (bio) Carter F. Hanson. Memory and Utopian Agency in Utopian/Dystopian Literature: Memory of the Future. Routledge, 2020. xvii + 199 pp. $160 hc. Utopia is about the future; memory is about the past. This seems so self-evident that the notion that memory can play a constitutive role in utopia appears far-fetched. If utopia is a vision of an ideal future, then it has to reject the less than ideal past. In many utopian texts, historical and individual memory is treated as a danger that must be regulated, contained, or expunged. Dystopia, utopia's dark twin, is generally hostile to memory, as in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), where the repression of historical memory is necessary to maintain the oppressive regime of Ingsoc. But can utopia and memory be reconciled? In this interesting book, Carter F. Hanson makes a case that they can. If I am not entirely persuaded by his argument, I still believe it opens up a new field of inquiry. Citing cognitive research, Hanson argues that memory is intrinsic to anticipation: "the conscious imagining or subconscious wish-dreaming of a better future must also draw on memories of our pasts" (xv). Thus, he posits that "memory is fundamental to and constitutive of utopianism, and that within the more specific domain of literary utopias, memory and forgetting often function as vital and complex components of a text's utopian impulse" (xvi). Of course, arguing that memory is constitutive of utopianism is not the same thing as showing that memory is an issue in literary utopias. Hanson's book does an admirable job of the latter, situating literary utopias in the context of the "memory wars" of modernity, in which individual and collective memories are contested by emerging ideologies. The claim that memory is necessary for utopia is more problematic, however, running into the thorny thicket of definitions and historical periodization. The book is wide ranging in its scope, covering texts from Thomas More's Utopia (1516) to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974), Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Lois Lowry's The Giver (1993), M.T. Anderson's Feed (2002), and Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013). Not only are these texts written in different countries and in different historical periods, but they also embody incompatible views of what constitutes a perfect society. Bellamy's industrial and regimented socialism would be seen as a nightmare in Piercy's pastoral communitarianism; Le Guin's "ambiguous utopia" is saved by science, which dooms humanity in Atwood. [End Page 160] Moreover, half of the texts Hanson discusses are dystopias, presenting a future society that is considerably worse than the present. It seems that at least implicitly he adopts the view of Krishan Kumar, who argues in Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (1987) that the two genres are structurally the same, and that dystopias offer a critique of the utopian vision based on an anti-utopian ideology. Later in the book, however, Hanson distinguishes between utopia and the utopian impulse, which is an open-ended desire for something different from the present state of the world. The problem is that all the novels he discusses are utopias and dystopias in the formal sense: texts that represent a blueprint for the future rooted in a specific ideology. The book is somewhat uneasily poised between utopia and utopianism, just as it is uneasily poised between memory as a psychological faculty and memory as a collective praxis. To adapt Donald Spence's distinction between narrative and historical truth, the book deals with memory as cultural narrative, while conflating it with the cognitive ability to retain information about the historical past. In his discussion of Thomas More's Utopia, Hanson acknowledges that social perfection requires suppression or regulation of cultural memory: "Utopia largely dispenses with history and thus with the contingencies of memory" (19). This juxtaposition of history and utopia is a frequent claim in conservative critiques of the utopian project, as in Emil Cioran's History and Utopia (1960). Indeed, Nineteen Eighty...

Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature

Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature

Biodiversity Economy and conservation territorialization: a pyrrhic strategy in Kwazulu-Natal

Post-apartheid Kwazulu-Natal is in the midst of ecological and social crises related to land ownership, resource control, minerals extraction, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. The environs of the Hluhluwe-Imfolozi National Park are a violent environment, where the immediate violence of an anti-poaching 'war' waged over fears of Rhinoceros extinction, is counter-posed to the slow violence permeating the lives of marginal rural residents affected by the externalities of coal mining. A range of struggles are waged against these challenges, but a hegemonic 'Biodiversity Economy' intervention has arisen, attended by projects aimed at territorializing conservation space and multiple-win scenarios. Based on four years of intermittent research in the area, this article critiques the territorialization of conservation, project outcomes, and commercialization efforts within the Umfozi Biodiversity Economy Node (UBEN). I contend that a biodiversity economy nodal approach extends neoliberal conservation strategies, and functions as a spatial aggregator to reterritorialize conservation land use over space and time. However, the findings suggest that, despite years of energy and investment there have only been limited individual successes in the UBEN, and a range of frustrations, compounded by COVID-19 complications. The analysis also highlights further costs and externalities of the initiative: as the UBEN exacerbates underlying tensions in Kwazulu-Natal's uneven conservation geography, and it aligns with problematic and often unrepresentative traditional authority structures and related accumulation networks. It is also complicit with the production of sacrificial spaces at the conservation-extraction nexus.In this context, I argue the UBEN is pyrrhic; that is, an outcome or goal strived for/achieved at too little reward and too high a cost. The article extends political-ecological critique of neoliberal conservation and the green economy to incorporate the framing and implementation of biodiversity economy nodal approaches – and their uneven and pyrrhic effects – in contested, crisis-ridden conservation contexts.

The Contentious Rise of the New Civics: Contending With Critiques of New Civics as a Leftist Enterprise

Background/Context: New Civics scholars and practitioners aspire to move beyond curricula focused on voter participation and knowledge of government structures and mechanisms to instead prepare youth to act upon their values in ways that lead to systemic change. Critics of New Civics argue that this approach is a form of pervasive leftist politics on campuses that seek to train youth activists with particular political agendas. Purpose and Research Questions: New Civics scholars must contend with conservative critiques as they envision curricula and programs to encourage greater civic action and engagement universally. Because these curricula and programs embrace nontraditional notions of civic action, they must garner some modicum of public trust to gain broad traction in schools and nonprofit organizations. Opponents of New Civics frame it as exclusively leftist, “politically correct,” and hostile to alternative views. These accusations may convince an already skeptical public that New Civics advances a particular political agenda, rather than modes of civic action and engagement in a democratic and pluralistic society. We analyze the extent to which these critiques have merit. Research Design: Our approach explores the curricula, programs, and social movements associated with New Civics. We contextualize these critiques within historical campus culture wars that portray the university as an echo chamber of liberal politics lacking intellectual diversity, with special attention to contemporary debates about free speech and identity on campus. Finally, we consider the extent to which a conservative New Civics practice is possible and whether New Civics needs to embrace a more inclusive ideological stance to mitigate critiques. Findings/Results: We discuss the possibility of scholars and practitioners transcending the culture-war framework to pursue their cardinal goal of preparing all youth to initiate and engage in action that leads to social change.

Objects of Empathy

Objects of Empathy

Getting the Story Right: Reader Critiques of “The Last Days of Joe McCarthy”

The conservative critique of mainstream media that has fed increasing levels of media distrust originated in anti-communist publications in the 1930s and was cultivated by various interests on the right over the next two decades. National Review was an influential purveyor of this critique in the late 1950s and used the publication of “The Last Days of Joe McCarthy” by political journalist Richard Rovere in 1958 to highlight it. An analysis of reader responses to Rovere’s article reveals that this conservative media critique resonated with many on the right and provides evidence that National Review had begun to establish itself among conservatives as a trustworthy alternative to the mainstream media.

Trump and the “deep state”

ABSTRACT Donald Trump and his loyalists invoked the concept of the deep state when confronted with resistance to the president’s agenda. The hazy concept of the deep state was tied to the long-standing conservative critique of the administrative state and the growth of the federal bureaucracy. Together, they conveyed reproach that Trump was subverted by a shadowy network of unelected bureaucrats that illegitimately holds the levers of real power in the United States. But there is no deep state. The conflict between the bureaucracy and Trump underscores a conflict between liberal and populist conceptions of democracy; between, utilizing Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation,” an ethic of responsibility and an ethic of conviction. The bureaucracy’s commitment to liberalism and instrumental rationality butts up against the Caesarist authority claimed by a leader on the basis of his presumed plebiscitary electoral mandate. Trump’s rhetorical accusation of a deep state undermined confidence in government and the legitimacy of the state.

A critical review of the compassionate conservation debate.

Compassionate conservation holds that compassion should transform conservation. It has prompted heated debate and has been criticized strongly. We reviewed the debate to characterize compassionate conservation and to philosophically analyze critiques that are recurring and that warrant further critical attention. The necessary elements of compassionate conservation relate to the moral value of sentient animals and conservation and to science and conservation practice. Although compassionate conservation has several nontraditional necessary conditions, it also importantly allows a degree of pluralism in values and scientific judgment regarding animals and conservation practice. We identified 52 specific criticisms from 11 articles that directly critique compassionate conservation. We closely examined 33 of these because they recurred regularly or included substantial questions that required further response. Critics criticized compassionate conservation's ethical foundations, scientific credentials, clarity of application, understanding of compassion, its alleged threat to conservation and biodiversity. Some criticisms, we found, are question begging, confused, or overlook conceptual complexity. These criticisms raise questions for critics and proponents, regarding, for example, equal versus differential intrinsic moral value of different sentient animals (including humans), problems of natural and human-caused suffering of wild animals and predation, and the acceptability of specific conservation practices within compassionate conservation. By addressing recurring and faulty critiques of compassionate conservation and identifying issues for compassionate conservation to address, this review provides a clearer basis for crucial ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue about ethics, values, and conservation.

Conservative politics and Whig colonial government, 1830–41

Abstract This article explores Conservative critiques of Whig colonial rule in the 1830s. Its case is that imperial administrative and constitutional issues occupied a more prominent place in the Tories’ politics of opposition during the ‘decade of Reform’ than historians have assumed. Conservative writers and politicians styled themselves as vigorous defenders of imperial integrity, colonial constitutions, and the colonial church, against the incoherent centralizing and liberalizing innovations of the Whigs. These arguments rested on wider assumptions about the inherent failings of Whiggism, Reformed government and the pernicious global consequences of ‘liberalism’. The article asks how these claims affect our understanding of Conservative politics after the Reform crisis, and reflects on the emergence of new forms of political engagement with issues of colonial government in early nineteenth-century Britain.

«Философия социал-дарвинизма... она не устарела»: консервативная критика либерального «социал-дарвинизма» (2000-е годы)

This article looks into the conceptual and rhetorical repertoire of conservative critique directed against social Darwinism. Having borrowed the ideologically and emotionally charged concept of social Darwinism from the vocabulary of Soviet propaganda, Russian conservatives actively used it in order to conceptualize the political and economic reforms of the 1990s and their consequences. According to the author, the idea of a Malthusian substrate of classical social-darwinism, which was adopted from the Marxist tradtion by conservatives and allowed to bring social Darwinism closer to the ideology of the free market, was placed into new contexts around the turn of the 1990s and 2000s. These contexts were, on the one hand, conditioned by the fall of the USSR and, on the other hand, by the processes of globalization. The article shows how the critique of contemporary social Darwinism becomes the language for discussing global and local inequality, also influencing the traumatic mode of the conservative narrative about the “1990s disaster” on the one hand and the populist conservative rhetoric of the 2000s and the 2010s on the other.

Making the World Safe for Patriarchy: Trump and the Zombie Apocalypse

Abstract Both Donald Trump in the White House and zombies in American fiction, movie, and television serials, highlight changes in American social structures, especially marriage and childbirth. Instead of a critique of such structures, however, the zombie genre largely reinforces traditional norms. To be sure, Trump himself is not a zombie, although his followers are often represented the living dead in American political cartoons. What is the connection between the two? In the first place, zombie fiction can be viewed as culturally conservative in orientation, because of its emphasis (whether intentionally or not) on the traditional nuclear family. Second, zombies, almost by definition, do not have a leader, except that the genre deliberately toys with this theme in one recent television series. This paper discusses the two themes – crowds that become like zombies and leaders who create zombie-like followers – in the context of the genre’s overall conservative critique.

Probability, Presumptions and Evidentiary Burdens in Antitrust Analysis: Revitalizing the Rule of Reason for Exclusionary Conduct

The conservative critique of antitrust law has been highly influential and has facilitated a transformation of antitrust standards of conduct since the 1970s and led to increasingly more permissive standards of conduct. While these changes have taken many forms, all were influenced by the view that competition law was over-deterrent. Critics relied heavily on the assumption that the durability and costs of false positive errors far exceeded those of false negatives. Many of the assumptions that guided this retrenchment of antitrust rules were mistaken and advances in the law and in economic analysis have rendered them anachronistic, particularly with respect to exclusionary conduct. Continued reliance on what are now exaggerated fears of “false positives,” and failure adequately to consider the harm from “false negatives,” has led courts to impose excessive demands of proof on plaintiffs that belie both established procedural norms and sound economic analysis. The result is not better and more reasonable antitrust standards, but instead an embedded ideological preference for non-intervention that creates a tendency toward false negatives, particularly in modern markets characterized by economies of scale and network effects. In this article, we explain how these erroneous assumptions about markets, institutions, and conduct have distorted the antitrust decision-making process and produced an excessive risk of false negatives in exclusionary conduct cases involving firms attempting to achieve, maintain, or enhance dominance or substantial market power. To redress this imbalance, we integrate modern economic analysis and the teaching of decision theory with the foundational conventions of antitrust law, which has long relied on probability, presumptions, and reasonable inferences to provide more effective means for evaluating competitive effects and resolving antitrust claims.

Conservation and the social sciences: Beyond critique and co‐optation. A case study from orangutan conservation

Abstract Interactions between conservation and the social sciences are frequently characterized by either critique (of conservation by social scientists) or co‐optation (of social scientific methods and insights by conservationists). This article seeks to push beyond these two dominant positions by exploring how conservationists and social scientists can engage in mutually transformative dialogue. Jointly authored by conservation scientists and social scientists, it uses the global nexus of orangutan conservation as a lens onto current challenges and possibilities facing the conservation–social science relationship. We begin with a cross‐disciplinary overview of recent developments in orangutan conservation—particularly those concerned with its social, political and other human dimensions. The article then undertakes a synthetic analysis of key challenges in orangutan conservation—working across difference, juggling scales and contexts and dealing with politics and political economy—and links them to analogous concerns in the conservation–social science relationship. Finally, we identify some ways by which orangutan conservation specifically, and the conservation–social science relationship more generally, can move forward: through careful use of proxies as bridging devices, through the creation of new, shared spaces, and through a willingness to destabilize and overhaul status quos. This demands an open‐ended, unavoidably political commitment to critical reflexivity and self‐transformation on the part of both conservationists and social scientists. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

Why the South Prevailed: Civil Rights, Anticommunism, and the Origins of the “Liberal Media”

ABSTRACTContrary to conventional wisdom, Donald Trump’s public loathing toward the press is not an outlier in conservative political development; rather, he is part of a understudied tradition of conservative animosity toward the press. I examine aggression toward the news media in a broader historical context of the conservative movement by analyzing the origins of the idea of the “liberal media.” I argue that this idea develops in the “conservative countersphere,”a partisan discursive space that developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Based on a content analysis of Human Events between 1955 and 1970, the origins of the “liberal media” emerge during the civil rights movement. I focus on the role of racism, white supremacy, and resentment toward Black liberation and civil rights in the development of conservative critiques of the press, shining light on the past to illuminate the present state of partisan vitriol towards the media.