DEMOCRATIC THEORY, NEO-CONSERVATIVE IDEOLOGY AND THE DEFENSE OF HIERARCHY
DEMOCRATIC THEORY, NEO-CONSERVATIVE IDEOLOGY AND THE DEFENSE OF HIERARCHY

Summary/Abstract: Democracy has a new rival. With the abeyance of communist theory and systems and the fertile hybridization of socialist and democratic ideals, what is left are post-modernist revivals of monarchism and social hierarchialism. Although Jean Bethke-Elshtain in her essay, ‘Democracy on Trial’ attempted to stem the tide of certain post-modern trends threatening democratic institutions, she did not fully anticipate this one. One of the leading neoconservatives in America, Francis Fukuyama, in his work, ‘The Great Disruption’, describes the revolutionary period, 1789-1989 as a historical anomaly with its egalitarian ideals and political victories – as a disruption, the great disruption. That its ‘corrections’ are to be corrected in due course. He makes a socio-biological argument for the institutionalization of social hierarchies, for superiors and inferiors, for subordination and differentiation of rights and privileges and opens the door for new ontological arguments for this.[...]

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