(What) Does the American Right Think?

Abstract

This article considers the ongoing culture wars in American higher education as an occasion to think about the durability of xenophobic worldviews. Straining against the notion that right-wing politics is fueled primarily by the resentments of those left behind by decades of inequality under neoliberalism, it suggests that xenophobia derives its durability from philosophical commitments that materialist and culturalist analyses fail to fully understand. It draws out the implications of taking such commitments seriously through an interpretation of US Vice President J. D. Vance’s narrative of his conversion to Catholicism.