Anti-Anti-Trump Conservatives Are Paving the Way for Authoritarianism

Highbrow conservative commentators are giving themselves and their readers permission to support Trump by portraying “liberal hysteria” as the real threat: A case study of National Review

Credit: National Review - May 2024 cover

There is one thing Left and Right agree on: It is high time to grapple with the implications of a potential return of Donald Trump to the White House. Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. It is going to be a close election. On the Left and among Liberals, the focus has turned to the detailed plans that have emerged on the Right for what they want to do upon getting back to power – and to the increasingly deranged promises Trump is proudly announcing in his rallies and speeches. Meanwhile, leading rightwing thinkers, intellectuals, and commentators who are identifying as staunchly conservative, but insist they are keeping their distance from MAGA world and the explicitly Trumpist regions of the Republican Party are also assessing scenarios for what the immediate future might bring for Trump and the country.

On March 17, for instance, Rich Lowry, the editor-in-chief of National Review, asked: “How Exactly Would Donald Trump End American Democracy?” National Review is widely regarded as the flagship of serious conservative commentary – it has served as the central organ of modern conservatism since it was founded in 1955. “Let’s think this through,” Lowry invited his readers. Just a few days later, one of National Review’s senior writers, Michael Brendan Dougherty, joined the fray and added his thoughts on “Four More Years of Trump.” Dougherty is someone leading liberal journalists and commentators turn to when they want to get a “serious” conservative perspective. When he was on Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast in December 2022 to discuss the results of the midterm elections, Klein introduced Dougherty by emphasizing he “always found him a sharp observer of the Republican Party.”

Lowry and Dougherty represent that “respectable” spectrum of the American Right the mainstream political discourse consistently asks us to take seriously – those conservative thought leaders with whom we are asked to grapple in earnest. Fair enough. It is indeed instructive to pay attention to what they have to say: Their recent ventilations provide a window into how leading conservative commentators who have often professed their contempt for Trump and certainly would have preferred someone else as the Republican nominee give themselves – and, by extension, their readers and everyone who self-identifies as a serious, respectable conservative – permission to indulge in their disdain for the “woke,” radical Left and support rightwing radicals as a bulwark against the illiberal Liberals and extremist progressives who are supposedly in charge of the Democratic Party.

Normalizing Trump vs “liberal hysteria”

Dougherty opens his investigation into what Trump’s return to the White House might bring by recapitulating what he calls the “high points” of the Trump presidency – “the roaring economy and rising wages of 2019” – as well as what he considers the low points: “the summer of riots and lockdowns.” What Dougherty holds against Trump, crucially, is the fact that as president, Trump allowed emergency Covid measures early in the pandemic and didn’t suppress the George Floyd protests. As Dougherty put it on Twitter, explaining his reluctance to embrace Trump again: “I just can’t forget the summer of 2020, when Donald Trump let his enemies shut us in, and let the rioters run wild.”

This is obviously very different from the liberal case against Trump as a dangerous authoritarian threat to democracy. Such warnings are pure liberal hysteria for Dougherty. Right from the start, he makes it very clear how annoyed he is by what conservatives like to call Trump Derangement Syndrome – a supposedly disproportionate, alarmist, extreme over-reaction to Trump’s presidency that Dougherty presents as at least equally dangerous as whatever Trump may have been up to. Trump’s rise, as Dougherty puts it, “seemed to unscrew the loosest screws” on the Left and “drove some people genuinely insane and inspired outlandish conspiratorial thinking and behavior in opposition to him.”

In this interpretation, Trump was never a real threat to democracy and constitutional government, because of his “limited ability to command criminal fealty or organize a conspiracy that extended beyond a rabble.” And he also will never rise to that level of danger. The scenario Dougherty describes as the most likely outcome for a second Trump presidency is just more of the same “controlled chaos.” Dougherty emphasizes there were “strong limits on Trump’s presidency from the start” and argues the courts and Congress successfully contained him throughout. This wasn’t just the result of Democratic opposition, but also of the Republican Party keeping Trump tethered to established conservative priorities. As a result, Trump basically enacted the “already existing Republican agenda of tax cuts” and achieved “a revolution on the judiciary,” but not much else. As he was – and is – very unpopular, Dougherty assures us that Trump could never plausibly “stage a Viktor Orbán-like campaign of constitutional reforms.”

The least likely outcome of a second Trump presidency, according to Dougherty, is the “Full Trump.” In this scenario, Trump would be more assertive, more able to impose his will – if he “has learned a few things from his first term and will find staff members who execute his decisions.” Crucially, Dougherty doesn’t present the “Full Trump” as a dangerous worst-case scenario, but as something that would constitute “propitious success.” Dougherty is delighted at the idea of actually implementing Trump’s “proposals for spending 2026 in a twelve-month-long, 50-state-wide 250th-birthday celebration for our nation” as a counter to the “woke” assault on national pride – and he wants us to believe this could even “have the potential to achieve some level of political depolarization if blue-state governors decided to play along.” And Dougherty allows himself to dream of a near future in which Trump may “continue to strengthen conservatives’ new hold on the judiciary” and put his “historic stamp on the courts.”

What about the dangers of a “Full Trump” though? Dougherty doesn’t see any, or he won’t tell. The planning operations on the Right, including those led by the Heritage Foundation under the “Project 2025” banner, are briefly mentioned – but we don’t get any concrete information what those actually entail. Trump’s promises to stage the largest mass deportations the country has ever seen or use the Insurrection Act to send troops into blue cities to suppress protests are apparently not worthy of Dougherty’s concern or even a mention.

Instead, Dougherty predicts Trump’s priorities would lie elsewhere: He might “reinstitute the suite of executive orders that brought some control to the border,” we are being told, or “pass a version of Senator Rubio and Senator Lee’s child tax credit or even Mitt Romney’s child-benefit proposal.” Maybe “a partial or full reintroduction of the SALT deductions for affluent blue-state taxpayers”? Or, at the very least, Trump might be “reviving Ivanka Trump’s ideas on paid maternity leave.”

I don’t think the term “normalizing” Trump does justice to the level of deliberate obfuscation we encounter here. What Dougherty offers as the policy agenda for a second Trump presidency is so entirely detached from what Trump himself, those around him, and the entire rightwing planning machine have been telling us about their actual plans and priorities that Dougherty might as well be referring to a parallel universe. The goal is evidently not to provide National Review readers with an understanding of what’s been happening on the Right, but to portray Trump and his political project as so mundane and unremarkable that the liberal reaction to Trump must seem unhinged and hysterical.

To be fair, National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry says “thinking through” the dangers of Trumpism is exactly what he wants to do in “How Exactly Would Donald Trump End American Democracy?” What Lowry actually does, however, is to dismiss any and all concern with regards to Trump, as he unequivocally states that “it is beyond his, or anyone else’s, power to end democracy and establish a dictatorship.” What a relief!

The first of four scenarios Lowry considers is Trump losing in November, in which case he “won’t concede the election and, in all likelihood, will engage in the same kind of pressure campaign to change the result as he did in 2020.” The way Lowry phrases this is indicative of his overall approach: The specifics of the months-long, multi-level campaign to nullify the 2020 election that culminated in a violent assault on the Capitol are obscured behind the abstract idea of a “pressure campaign.” And that, Lowry assures us, was quickly and thoroughly thwarted by Congress and upstanding state officials, and therefore would be thwarted again in 2024/25.

The second scenario: “What if Trump wins and becomes president again?” One might assume that the question of how Trump would use the enormous powers of the presidency deserves a lot of attention – especially considering all the rightwing planning efforts are focusing on how to harness those vast powers and use government as a tool to impose a reactionary vision against the majority of the country. But none of that is even mentioned here. The only question Lowry discusses, the only thing presented to us as a potential danger of Trump being back in the White House: Would he try to “cancel the midterms”? But as Lowry quickly assures us, that is not actually in the cards, as Congress, the courts, and Republican voters – yes, the same Republican voters who have been demonstrating their preference for Donald Trump over everyone else for the past eight years – would simply not allow it. “This is the stuff of a Philip K. Dick novel and, in the right hands, would make a compelling dystopian Netflix series. It’s not remotely plausible,” Lowry explains. I admit this passage made me laugh: It takes guts to publicly present something so unimaginative, so disingenuous, so dismissive and uninteresting as an effort to “think this through.”

Lowry’s unwillingness and/or inability to imagine any future developments that might take a country off a path of “normal” continuation of constitutional politics extends to his third scenario: “Trump, as the incumbent president, running for a third term in 2028? This, too, is a fantasy.” Why does he feel comfortable banning this to the realm of the fantastical? Because the Supreme Court would “surely” not put up with what is “unambiguously barred by the U.S. Constitution.” Well, I guess all those other countries in modern history in which democracy fell weren’t smart enough to have a “Nope, no authoritarianism here” clause in their constitutions.

The fourth and final scenario Rich Lowry offers: “Could he simply stay in office despite the expiration of his term?” Nah! Don’t worry about it. Both parties, Lowry is sure, would reject him (because we have seen so much evidence of Republicans taking a principled constitutional stance and abandoning Trump?), and the military “would shun him and recognize his duly elected successor.”

“So none of the literal ‘ending democracy’ scenarios make sense,” Lowry confidently proclaims. You see, all you have to do to come to that conclusion is to a) restrict your imagination of what it would mean to “end democracy” to an incredibly simplistic, completely arbitrary list; b) judge the likelihood of anything on that list happening based on a parallel-universe interpretation of Trump and the Republican Party; and c) pretend that a functioning democratic system and a healthy political culture would easily defeat any such dangers, as if the fact that we are where we are, with Donald Trump as the presumptive nominee of a fully Trumpified Republican Party, didn’t prove that America doesn’t have such a functioning democratic system and healthy political culture.

What is perhaps most striking about the way Lowry and Dougherty discuss the question of what lies ahead is that they both pretend absolutely nothing has changed since 2016. They are not only ignoring the unprecedented planning efforts on the Right, or only bring them up in the vaguest abstractions. We are also asked to be oblivious to the factors and circumstances that would distinguish a second Trump presidency from the first. Dougherty assures us that “men don’t change, and Trump, after age 78, is the least likely of all men to change.” And, sure, no one assumes Trump is going to wake up tomorrow and decide to live a life of honesty and decency. But politically, Trump has radicalized considerably over the past eight years, and he is now surrounded entirely by extremists. We are being told that Trump would be contained by the Republican Party and overwhelmed by the institutions, especially the courts, just like in his first stint in the White House: “Pretty much every power center in the system would, once again, be hostile to a President Trump,” Lowry declares. We are, however, not dealing with the same Republican Party as we were even eight years ago, but with a fully Trumpified machine; as president, Trump couldn’t count on all the hardcore rightwing federal judges he put in place, and he didn’t have a reactionary supermajority on the Supreme Court; and the power centers of conservatism have drastically radicalized to the Right, as evidenced by the Heritage Foundation’s embrace of Trumpism. Lowry is rejecting as silly fantasy what is already reality. Finally, neither Lowry nor Dougherty wrestle with political violence as a factor: Not the violence that has already happened (remember: January 6 was just a “pressure campaign”); not the fact that the percentage of people – especially on the Right – regarding political violence as justified or even necessary has increased significantly; not the dramatic rise in political violence from the Right that is already shaping the public square, the omnipresent threat of violence against anyone who dares to defy Trump’s claim to power – from Mitt Romney to thousands of election officials across the country.  

The real threat? “The Left”

In spite of their nonchalant dismissal of any concern regarding the dangers of Trumpism, the leading voices of National Review are very much worried about the future of American democracy. But what keeps them up at night is not the radicalizing Republican Party or the MAGA movement. The biggest threat, if we believe Rich Lowry and Michael Brendan Dougherty, is coming from the anti-Trump Left. “The Left,” it is suggested to us here, is an acutely dangerous, unified force that is in charge of the Democratic Party and it is suffering from a lethal form of Trump Derangement Syndrome that may bring the Republic down.

“Much as during the Trump campaign now and the Trump administration in the doldrums of summer 2020,” Dougherty predicts, “we might see a ‘Resistance’ whose legal, moral, and political brinkmanship presents as many threats to American institutions as, or even more than, Trump himself.”

What would that look like in practice? At the very least, Dougherty tells us, we should expect complete obstruction. Democrats would make functional government impossible – and continue their witch hunt: “A Democratic House will find every chance to investigate Trump a worthwhile one. They could try to pick up where other criminal investigations have failed – returning to the events of January 6 or to Trump’s mishandling of classified documents in the first term.” Notice how Dougherty accuses Democrats of future baseless investigations without mentioning the fact that Republicans in the House initiated an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden in September 2023 based on entirely zero evidence. And all the ongoing criminal cases against Trump – he is facing 40 criminal charges in the classified documents case, for which a trial date has been set; and in the federal January 6 case, Trump has been indicted on four charges – Dougherty casually discards as “failed.”

And Dougherty does not stop there. Things might actually get much, much worse in a second Trump presidency. “There is another, hopefully very remote, possibility,” Dougherty ominously proclaims: “that Trump will be elected and never take office.” There absolutely is a scenario, the National Review senior writer wants us to understand, in which America experiences a leftwing coup between the election in November and the end of Biden’s term in January. As a first step, Dougherty outlines, “the Left would foment widespread violence in the cities to punish nonviolent voters.” This would be the beginning of a revolution: “gather a destabilizing mob in the capital city, mobilize global opinion, and then use any resulting instance of violence as an occasion on which to declare the elected government illegitimate and lawless, with the goal of sending its members fleeing for their lives.” Or, maybe, on top of all that or alternatively, we might just see Democrats “holding that Trump is ineligible to run for president and refusing to certify a Trump victory on January 6, 2025.”

At this point, you may wonder what evidence Dougherty can provide that would elevate such proclamations beyond the level of  dark anti-Left fantasizing? Well, he points to two “liberal columnists at The Atlantic” prior to the 2020 election (four years ago!) writing about (not demanding or justifying, not reporting on anything like this being planned, or anyone with access to political power on the Democratic side being involved) the potential for chaos and violence in the streets in case of a narrow Trump victory. And he references one piece by Russel Berman, once again in The Atlantic (that famously leftwing revolutionary magazine!), “boldly reviewing,” as Dougherty puts it, the Democratic options for refusing certification of a Trump victory. What he doesn’t say is that this piece was actually written in February, in anticipation of the Supreme Court’s ruling regarding the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to declare Trump ineligible under the Insurrection Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment. Literally every Democratic elected official in the story – very much including those who said they, personally, saw Trump as ineligible because he was an insurrectionist – emphasized they would accept whatever the Supreme Court decided. As you’ll recall, in Anderson v. Trump in early March, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Colorado decision; Trump stays on the ballot. Moreover, every Democrat in Berman’s piece in The Atlantic was adamant that the country must not experience another January 6. And yet, on the basis of that “evidence,” Dougherty invokes the danger of Democrats staging an insurrection to nullify an election – but doesn’t mention anything like that as even a remote possibility with regards to the guy who already tried it before and is nevertheless still the leader of the American Right.

Rich Lowry’s concern rests on similarly disingenuous pillars. In his interpretation, it is actually “recent Democratic presidents and Trump’s opponents” who are “happy to trash the system when it doesn’t produce the hoped-for outcome.” In his world, if you are worried about insurrections and election nullification, the danger is not coming from Trump: “Democrats never really accepted his victory in 2016, and would likely go even further to reject a Trump win in 2024.” Hillary Clinton actually conceded the election immediately. But maybe you didn’t know about her multi-level, multi-month Democratic campaign to get her into the White House anyway? Well, that’s because it never happened. You are worried about “politicized investigations and prosecutions”? Oh, but let Rich Lowry remind you that “This is exactly what happened to him and those around him in 2016 and afterwards” – to Trump and his people, that is. Never mind the almost complete impunity for comical levels of Trump world corruption, I guess. And if you are worried about the abuse of presidential power via executive action, let Rich Lowry explain: “This, of course, is exactly the approach used by Barack Obama and Joe Biden to find a way around the immigration laws.” Because, you see, if you operate at an extreme level of abstraction, you can make it all sound the same.

This isn’t analysis. It is sophistry in defense of the premise that the actual threat are the Libs, and the Libs only.

The long history of National Review vs democracy

National Review has fancied itself the flagship of modern conservatism for decades, and it has certainly served as a major platform for a high-minded conservative discourse. It has also held a prominent place in the story we used to tell and accept about the history of the mainstream American Right. Until Trump came along, the story went something like this: William F. Buckley Jr., who founded the National Review in late 1955, purged extremist elements – the conspiracy theorists, the white supremacists, the violent antisemites, the Birchers and the Klansmen – from the ranks of modern conservatism and acted as a gatekeeper who held the line against such unsavory elements on the Right. This was, not coincidentally, also the story Buckley himself liked to tell about modern conservatism and his own place in it.

To this day, Buckley is an almost mythical figure who is widely regarded by conservatives themselves as the founding father of their movement. He was indeed instrumental in creating a network and forging an alliance between different strands and traditions of anti-liberalism – between the reactionary, traditionalist camp and the market-fundamentalist libertarians, specifically. Into the early twenty-first century, Buckley was one of the most popular faces of conservatism in America. As a highly educated and distinctly cultured member of elite circles, his presence seemed to prove the tale he wanted the country to believe: About the venerable modern conservative political project that fought with noble ideas against the dangerous forces of liberalism.  

When Rich Lowry famously organized a special issue of National Review in late 2015 and brought together leading conservative intellectuals under the title “Against Trump,” the mainstream press hailed him as the true heir of this noble conservative tradition – the respectable gatekeeper of our time, making sure that conservatives would continue to hold the line against fringe extremism. In the words of the New York Times, Lowry was “embracing the role of his predecessor, William F. Buckley, who in the 1960s confronted Birch Society members.”

The problem with this story is that it never adequately described the position of the National Review, nor the role its famous founder or his successors have played. Rather than purging and ostracizing the extremists, National Review has mostly taken a position that is probably best described as sympathetic semi-distance. And that impenetrable line Buckley supposedly defined has always been more of a semipermeable membrane. It is true that National Review would generally not platform the open extremists and the white supremacists who responded to civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 60s with violence. But it nevertheless supported their cause. In an infamous editorial titled “Why the South Must Prevail,” Buckley himself, in August 1957, rejected school desegregation and the idea of extending the right to vote – not just on paper, but in practice – to Black people in the South. The key question, as Buckley saw it, was “whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas which it does not dominate numerically?” And he gave the “sobering answer” himself: “The White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” What Buckley referred to as “white civilization” was simply more important than democracy and universal suffrage: “If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.” Besides, Buckley argued, the majority of Black people in the South “who do not vote do not care to vote, and would not know for what to vote if they could.” Under these circumstances, white supremacy in the South, he explained, was actually “in step with civilization.”

Such an explicitly anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian position was not an outlier for Buckley or National Review. In a famous debate with James Baldwin in front of Cambridge University students in February 1965, Buckley argued that not only did he oppose letting more Black people vote – he also thought “that too many white people are voting.” He meant poor white people, uneducated white people. There was always a strong elitism about Buckley’s anti-democratic sentiment. It was always about race, and race first, but also about class.

While it would be unfair to entirely reduce Buckley to the position he took with regards to Black civil and voting rights in the 1950s and 60s – a position he, himself, later considered a mistake –, the stance he took was indicative of the anti-democratic tendencies and impulses that have always defined modern conservatism as a political project. The allegiance of the leaders of modern conservatism has never been to democratic ideals – their acceptance of democracy was always conditional and depending largely on whether or not it would be set up in a way that allowed for the forces of egalitarian multiracial pluralism to be kept in check. And the “respectable,” serious conservative circles Buckley embodied have always displayed a willingness to, at the very least, provide legitimizing cover for and make common cause with more openly extreme rightwing populist forces whenever democracy threatened to seriously level established hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth.   

There is, in this sense, a strong tradition from Buckley’s anti-democratic arguments in the 1950s and 60s to Kevin D. Williamson, in April 2021, asking in National Review: “Why Not Fewer Voters?” As always, this position was presented as a concern for civic virtue: The republic, Williamson explained, “would be better served by having fewer – but better – voters.” This argument has routinely come with an embrace of the full slate of voter suppression measures Republicans have introduced on the state level – measures that always, and always deliberately, affect people of color and any group suspected of voting for Democrats in a disproportionate way.

You still won’t find the most open, aggressive white supremacists in National Review. But its leading voices are reliably all in on every rightwing culture war crusade and reactionary grievance against “wokeism,” “the Left,” and multiracial pluralism in general. Go through Rich Lowry’s recent pieces, for instance, and you won’t find much that qualifies as highbrow conservative thought. Instead, he’s been lusting for a future Trump Department of Justice to charge Joe Biden with a crime (by pretending it was a purely political decision to not charge him for mishandling classified documents) – and telling his readers why Trump should indeed make fighting “anti-white racism” his priority. Michael Brandan Dougherty, our other protagonist, is really worried about “progressive institutional capture” and Biden’s “open borders”; he is also, surprise!, all in on the Christopher Rufo-led anti-diversity crusade to purge people of color from elite spaces that comes under the banner of fighting “plagiarism” and “DEI.”

The trajectory of the Rich Lowry-led National Review from leading the establishment conservative resistance against the Trumpian insurgency to accommodating Trumpian rule is indicative of where the mainstream Right has gone in general. After announcing its stance “Against Trump” with much fanfare right before the start of the 2016 GOP primaries, people like Lowry quickly pivoted to making their peace with Trump and directed their anger back at the real enemy on the left. January 6 didn’t change much in that regard. National Review conservatives were aesthetically opposed to Trump’s insurrection – but they swiftly settled on bemoaning what they deride as liberal hysteria in response to the assault on the Capitol.

That is the one constant in these circles – the glue that has always held the modern conservative coalition together: The bigger threat is “the Left.” Asked specifically how he went from “Against Trump” to embracing Trump’s reign, Lowry declared in November 2019 he had realized that Trump was good, actually, “on some really important matters of substance to conservatives.” And “at the end of the day,” he continued, “we’re asked to either favor Trump or root for Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden or Mayor Pete, who oppose us on basically everything. So it’s a pretty simple calculation.”

“Against Trump” no more. Anti-anti-Trump is the game these “serious” conservatives are playing.

Anti-anti-Trump conservatism is giving people permission to support extremism

Rightwing extremists don’t have enough support to rise to power on their own – not even in a system that consistently awards disproportionate power to those who abhor true democracy via a host of anti-majoritarian institutions and structures. Whether or not they succeed therefore depends on how much support they get from mainstream conservative circles – it depends on the extent to which the rightwing establishment is willing to make common cause with the extremists.

One key question in American politics is: How are mainstream conservative elites giving themselves and those who follow their lead permission to radicalize and keep supporting – or, at least, accommodating – Trumpism? The pieces Lowry and Dougherty have written provide an excellent example of the permission structure that has governed conservative politics more broadly. Conservatives find ever more extreme justifications for why Trump is, at worst, the lesser evil compared to the “leftist” enemy. That is partly why rightwingers are constantly playing up the threat of “woke” radicalism and the “illiberal Left.” The Democratic Party, in this understanding, is not just a political opponent, but a faction captured by the dangerously radical forces of “woke” leftism.

The Right doesn’t see the struggle between Republicans and Democrats as a competition between political opponents – but as an existential conflict over whether or not the only version of the country they are willing to accept as “America” will survive and endure.

And Trump? As crass or radical or outrageous as some on the Right might find him and his actions, nothing he has ever done has betrayed the accepted dogma of reactionary politics: That “real America” is defined by a white Christian patriarchal order – a society that respects and reveres the “natural” order as it supposedly manifests in discriminatory hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth. Whoever and whatever Trump may be, nothing ever justifies making common cause with those who threaten to level those hierarchies.   

It's not that I don’t believe Rich Lowry and Michael Branden Dougherty when they say they don’t like Donald Trump very much. It’s just that it’s politically irrelevant as long as they insist on presenting any opposition to Trump as deranged hysteria and categorically declare that supporting those who oppose the Trumpist threat in any meaningful way is not an option because they supposedly are at least as dangerous – and certainly quite a bit more annoying – than Trump.

American democracy is ill-served by such “respectable” conservative thought leaders. Their most significant contribution in this specific moment of U.S. history is to build and perpetuate a permission structure that allows people who don’t think of themselves as supporters of rightwing extremism to support rightwing extremism nonetheless.