Confidence and Conservatism: Integrating Affect and Ideology in the Critique of R eactionary Politics

• Published in: New formations Vol. 112; no. 112; pp. 51 - 69
• Main Author: Conway, Philip
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Lawrence & Wishart 01.03.2024
• Subjects: Affect Theory; Conservatism; Critical Theory; Ideology Critique; Positive Thinking
• DOI: 10.3898/NewF:112.03.2024
• ISSN: 0950-2378

Affect and ideology are concepts easily associated but rarely thought through in their interrelation. Likewise, confidence and conservatism may have an intuitive connection but lack theorisation. Drawing on the works of Brian Massumi, Lauren Berlant and Louis Althusser, this article seeks to conceptually and politically rearticulate affect, ideology, confidence and conservatism, reflecting particularly upon USA presidential politics from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, as well as the cultural and historical circumstances of these administrations. Beginning from the QAnon conspiracy theory, and then Norman Vincent Peale's 1952 book The Power of Positive Thinking, the article subsequently examines Reagan's politics of confidence, as interpreted by Massumi. Berlant's provocation that 'affect theory is another phase in the history of ideology theory' is then considered, particularly via Althusser's formal-structural theory of ideology, before examining the recent conservative moral panic concerning Critical Race Theory. On this basis, the affective constitution of conservatism is argued to depend upon the interplay of confidence and anxiety. Meanwhile, affect and ideology, taken politically, are considered distinct but inextricable, constituting the dispositional and propositional sides of the same problem: that of the hierarchical structure of collective identification, which, for conservatives, is a relation of obedience to be reinforced.