ABSTRACT
Dick Armey’s apology should be interpreted with reference to three right-wing discourses, emanating from the Religious Right, neoconservatism, and the new racism. The new racism reproduces traditional racist exclusions but legitimates racism as the natural expression of fixed cultural differences; it overlaps and intersects with Religious Right moralism and neoconservative positions on the welfare state, immigration, education and law and order issues. The meanings of the terms "multiculturalism" and "color blindness" do nevertheless remain quite elastic, for they can accommodate the parasitic reinterpretations by the Religious Right, neoconservatism, and the new racism. The Religious Right’s appropriation therefore parasitically draws upon the neoconservatives’ redefinition of the common good. The moral authoritarianism of the American Religious Right is so profound that its hegemonic strategies reach a limit with homophobia; its pseudoinclusions extend only as far as the poor, right-wing women, blacks, and Jews. In any event, hegemonic discourses can gain a tremendous degree of normalization and institutionalization while remaining profoundly self-contradictory.
