ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the George W. Bush administration, New Right intellectuals and ordinary, resentful Americans all embrace a particular conception of equal rights. It argues, moreover, that their celebrations of equal rights champion a traditional figure in the American imagination: the 'forgotten Americans'. The chapter describes that conservative rights-discourse is a major force in the contemporary retrenchment of American politics. It discusses the prominent conservatives championed a contrary version of equal rights beginning in the early 1960s. The nationalistic, regulatory dimension of contemporary conservative rights-discourse is even more paradoxical. To argue that political debates over rights take place in a theatre of culture war is thus to argue that they take place in a cultural environment that elevates normative and nationalistic anxieties over concerns of practicality or expediency. Conservative rights-discourse seeks to discipline already socially-marginal Americans, to entrench their powerlessness by labelling attempts to overcome it as violations of the equal rights of all Americans.
