PERFORMING VIRTUAL WHITENESS: GEORGE GILDER'S TECHNO-THEOCRACY

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, US conservatism has achieved a dominance by symbolically reconciling two historical strains that are, in reality, marked by contradictions: the social gospel of traditional values and the economic gospel of the free market. While this movement has often been characterized as irrational because of its emotional language, in fact, conservative activists were brilliantly rational in their deployment of a symbolic logic organized by the metaphor of Spirit. Drawing on resources already available from the history of religion in the USA, Spirit was also directly reconnected with the imperialist Spirit of Enterprise. But though its terms are drawn from nineteenth-century white supremacist hierarchies, this constellation is resolutely postmodern in its use of media and technology; as a result, whiteness is displayed so overtly that it has become all the more difficult to counter precisely because of that display. This essay will show how white masculinity has been translated into the language of the digitalized frontier by the cyberspace guru, George Gilder, who hails from an old New England family but reconnects the North to a strong Southern theocratic belief in the natural law of God and the markets. Next, the essay analyses a talk by George Will, in which white supremacy comes to be defined as meritocracy in a rebuttal to Toni Morrison. And finally, the display of whiteness will be analysed in terms of appearances on cable TV talk shows of The Blondes: the right-wing political commentators Laura Ingraham, Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, Ann Coulter and the late Barbara Olson.

Keywords:

• Gilder
• Whiteness
• Theocracy
• Us Conservatism
• Imperialism
• South