Conservativism as Postmodernism

For many years there was a refrain that the Left had become a bunch of postmodern relativists and skeptics. Naturally conservatives worried the loudest about how the bogeymen of regular Marxism had been nefariously replaced by the pronounless bogeypeople of postmodern neo-Marxism. But liberals and even a fair share of leftists lamented the slide into what David Harvey called “militant particularism” and identity politics over universalism and rationalism. Plenty agree with Terry Eagleton in The Illusions of Postmodernism that the leftist shift from not reading Lukács and Sartre to not reading Derrida and Spivak was a disaster. 

But since the advent of the first Trump administration, it's been hard to shake the feeling that the conservatives themselves are the new postmodernists. From Trumpists like Rudy Giuliani declaring that “truth isn’t truth” to Jordan Peterson regularly veering perilously close to “it depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is” to Curtis Yarvin calling for everyone to get “Tolkienpilled,” the Right is increasingly shaped by the parameters of postmodern culture.