The main focus for some of us was the size and reach of the managerial state, which ruled over us in an increasingly arbitrary manner. We began exploring how this transformed state acquired its moral authority as well as its unsupervised power. While addressing those questions, we unavoidably trampled on some already obligatory sensitivities by taking a critical view of the civil rights revolution. Something, we assumed, had gone drastically wrong with our constitutional republic. What’s more, this deformation was becoming more and more acute, and it was centered on a governmentally led war against “prejudice” and “discrimination.”
A widening crusade against racism, legally and socially recognized gender distinctions, and finally gender itself had come to characterize this post-constitutional regime, both here and in other Western countries. American government, together with its media allies and academic priesthood, had set out to redeem us from our anti-egalitarian past. This redeemer bureaucracy and its judicial enablers were combatting, or so we were told, the allegedly false consciousness produced by a reactionary past. As soon became painfully clear, these projects “victimized” most heavily those who held the lowest victim card, namely white straight male Christians.
Chronicles (later joined by The American Conservative) was the Buchananite paleocon opposition to Buckley's neocon Conservative Inc.