The Reactionary Right Mobilizes

Conservatism no more! A reflection on what we are up against – Part III

This is the third part of my reflection on how to capture and describe the political conflict and what is happening on the Right. If you haven’t, please read Part I, in which I wrote about the counter-mobilization (rather than: backlash) against egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic democracy (rather than simply: democracy) – and Part II, in which I started examining how conservatives are openly embracing a much more radical politics.

Conservatives ought to embrace the state and use its coercive powers as a “blunt instrument” in the fight against the leftist enemy within. This is the core message of a remarkable piece – entitled: “We need to stop calling ourselves conservatives” – in The Federalist from late October. And it’s become a core theme in not-conservative-anymore circles. A while back, in May 2019, Sohrab Ahmari, one of the most popular proponents of a specific strand of post-liberal thinking on the religious right, authored an essay in First Things in which he railed “Against David French-ism.”

Ahmari directed his criticism at fellow conservative David French’s vision of a pluralism-affirming religious liberty. According to French, the state has to stay neutral and must not tip the scales either way, must not favor or hinder any religion or its secular counterparts. Ahmari, however, sees “French-ism” as naïve and foolish, as the forces of secular liberalism are supposedly wining the “culture wars,” threatening to extinguish religious life in the United States. The only way, therefore, is “to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.” Who but the state could possibly achieve such a forceful re-ordering of the public square against the will of the majority?

Ahmari’s position is closely aligned with that of other prominent reactionary Catholic thinkers and activists – among them Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, and former attorney general William Barr. Theirs is a particular brand of illiberalism that puts them in the tradition of Catholic integralism: the conviction that religion, specifically their interpretation of the Catholic faith, needs to take precedent over all “earthly” concerns, that it must guide and structure political power and the state.

The rise of these Catholic illiberals is indicative of a much broader realignment on the Right. What emerged as the modern conservative political project in the middle decades of the twentieth century was in many ways defined by an alliance between traditionalist and libertarian strands of anti-liberalism, united in the fight against “communism,” and more specifically: against any attempt at leveling traditional hierarchies of wealth, race, gender, and religion. But increasingly, the traditionalist wing wants out of that alliance – because they believe they have not gotten what the fusionist bargain promised. In this interpretation, there has been a lot of small government, deregulation, and free market – while the destructive forces of secular humanism and “woke” liberalism were allowed to advance almost unchecked.

These frustrated reactionary traditionalists believe the future of the Right lies in “National Conservatism,” which is the name they have given themselves and their new vision. The political project of the NatCons combines a euphoric embrace of nationalism with an unabashed commitment to mobilizing state power in order to impose what they see as the natural and/or divinely ordained order on the entire country. Democracy, it should be noted, is not exactly high on the list of priorities for these folks – or it is, but only as a problem, as the enemy.   

The National Conservative project was launched to much fanfare from rightwing circles – and a significant level of horrified concern from everyone else – at an inaugural conference in Washington, DC in the summer of 2019. Two further NatCon conferences have since followed, both held in Florida, in the fall of 2021 and in September 2022, respectively. These conferences represent the “real” America the NatCons want. Of the 95 speakers listed for NatCon 3, 86 were white, 76 of them were men – 70 out of 95 speakers were white men. There are the prominent Republicans who love to present themselves as populists: Ron DeSantis was a keynote speaker this September, Ted Cruz joined the party last year, Josh Hawley spoke every time, railing against the “woke” assault on manliness, what else. Peter Thiel is always a key speaker – he who believes that freedom and democracy are “incompatible,” who funds far-right GOP candidates across the country, who represents the tech oligarchy’s libertarianism-to-far-right trajectory in its purest form: a constant reminder that the kind of “liberty” these people talk about was always just the freedom to do as they please, unburdened by any kind of regulation or criticism. Thiel loves to bring his disciples too: J.D. Vance was a speaker in 2019, Blake Masters, who stood out as one of the more openly fascistic candidates among Republicans, even in a midterms lineup full of bizarre radicals, was around this year.

Then there is the usual cadre of reactionary wannabe-intellectuals. Michael Anton, for instance, another one of those Claremont people, has been a fixture at all three NatCon conferences. He’s most famous/infamous for authoring the “Flight 93” essay, published shortly before the 2016 election, in which he made the case for Donald Trump by presenting the Democrats as a fundamental threat to America, akin to the terrorists of 9/11: Anton called on the Right to embrace Trumpism because Trump would be willing to go much further to stop this “Un-American” threat than any of the “ordinary” Republicans who were “merely reactive” and for whom Anton had nothing but contempt. Since Trump, in this interpretation, wasn’t bound by norms, traditions, or precedents, he alone could be counted on to do whatever was necessary to fight back against the “wholesale cultural and political change” - to “charge the cockpit,” in Anton’s crude analogy, like the passengers of Flight 93. In many ways, the “Flight 93” mentality has completely taken over the Right – it is now all “Flight 93” politics, all the time (which is also why the Anton piece merits its own deep dive, hopefully soon).

Who else is around? Rod Dreher, of course, senior editor at the American Conservative and a prominent figure on the religious Right. Dreher is an interesting bellwether for the reactionary intellectual sphere: He has always been begrudgingly pro-Trump, because he is so enthusiastically anti-liberal. Dreher was properly reactionary even during the Trump presidency. But since 2020, he has radicalized to a new level – and is now constantly raging against the “moral horror” of “trans totalitarianism,” in particular.

Dreher believes he knows the solution. He is the biggest fan aspiring European autocrats have on this side of the Atlantic. Find someone in your life who admires you half as much as Rod Dreher admires Viktor Orbán. “Putin, Orban, and all the illiberal leaders that our baizuocracy loves to hate are all completely clear and completely correct on the society-destroying nature of wokeness and postliberal leftism,” Dreher mused in October 2021. So, do as Viktor Orbán does, and mobilize the state against your enemies:

“As I see it, this is the main lesson American conservatives can learn from Viktor Orban and his government. They grasp that this is a civilizational struggle, and that they are not just dealing with opponents, but with very powerful people who push an agenda that is tearing our societies apart. And they are willing to use the power of the state to stop it.”

There it is, again: Use the power of the state. Dreher, it should be noted, has now moved to Budapest, supposedly forever. And he is sending dispatches from his apartment on the banks of the Danube – from a place called “Hungary” that exists solely in the reactionary imagination, a kind of white Christian patriarchal wonderland, where men still get to be real men, where the “woke” hordes and “globalist” enemies are still being kept in check by the iron will of the “real people.”

Making up the rest of the NatCon speaker field is an assortment of rightwing pundits and activists of all kinds. Tucker Carlson was a keynote speaker at the inaugural meeting in 2019; Christopher Rufo, who played a key role in manufacturing the reactionary moral panic over “Critical Race Theory” – a transparently disingenuous attempt to lump every critical perspective on racism in America’s past and present together under a “scary” term so that it can be attacked, demonized, and de-legitimized –, was a guest in 2021.

If the NatCon Conferences are lacking in diversity demographically, the picture is even bleaker politically and intellectually. National Conservatives are united in their disdain for the “woke” assault on “American culture” – by which they evidently mean white patriarchal Christianity. And they are largely in agreement that any measures, regardless how extreme, are justified in this noble struggle against “the Left.” If you listen to NatCon speeches, you are subjecting yourself to speaker after speaker playing up the threat of “woke” radicalism and the “illiberal Left.” Here is the underlying permission structure of reactionary politics in its purest form: It states that “Real Americans” are constantly being victimized, made to suffer under the yoke of crazy leftist politics, besieged by “Un-American” forces of leftism; “we” have to fight back, by whatever means.

So extreme, so unhinged was this seemingly endless stream of anti-“Left” hysteria that none other than David Brooks – yes, THAT David Brooks – came away from his visit to the 2021 NatCon conference shocked and worried, writing about “The Terrifying Future of the American Right.” Even David Brooks, a reactionary centrist / center-right conservative himself and someone who has done more to “both sides” the anti-democratic radicalization of the Right than almost anyone in America, had to admit that what he found down on Florida had very little to do with the empirical reality of America’s liberal, Democratic, “left” camp – and that National Conservatism was very clearly not conforming to his (willfully?) naïve / mythical ideas of a venerable conservative tradition. It’s certainly fair to wonder why such an experience is apparently never enough to break the spell of the Brooksian “both sides” operation, and why someone so horrified at what he heard and saw from the Right can just turn around and keep producing column after column for the nation’s biggest newspaper about the dangers of leftwing “cancel culture” and all that good reactionary stuff. But for this one day, his conclusion about National Conservatism was mostly spot on:

“Sitting in that Orlando hotel, I found myself thinking of what I was seeing as some kind of new theme park: NatCon World, a hermetically sealed dystopian universe with its own confected thrills and chills, its own illiberal rides. I tried to console myself by noting that this NatCon theme park is the brainchild of a few isolated intellectuals with a screwy view of American politics and history. But the disconcerting reality is that America’s rarified NatCon World is just one piece of a larger illiberal populist revolt that is strong and rising.”

(I’m hoping to explore the NatCon universe in more detail at some point. If you are interested, the always-excellent Know Your Enemy podcast has fantastic deep dives on the inaugural conference in 2019 here as well as on NatCon 2 in 2021 here.) 

Let’s pause for a moment to think through what an “intellectual” is. Because I’ve been using that term a lot: reactionary intellectual, or rightwing intellectual sphere. And the criticism I often get is: “You are giving them too much credit!” I understand the frustration and the sentiment – but I believe it is based on a rather unhelpful meaning of “intellectual” as someone who is smart, a great thinker. I am not using the term in such a normative way. To me, there is nothing inherently good, or noble, or even necessarily smart and cunning about being an “intellectual.” It’s a term describing someone’s preoccupation with thinking, writing, talking about society, with publicly offering interpretations and solutions to society’s problems, which often concerns dimensions of national identity and normative values. Even so, it’s fair to argue that the term is a stretch for some of the people I talk about here – which is why I often include qualifiers like “pseudo-” or “wannabe-,” or just call them pundits. Others, however, definitely fit the description, purely in terms of what they do, what they are known for, what they are being paid for. It has nothing to very little to do with the actual substance of what they are offering. So, again, I am not giving anyone any credit, certainly not in a normative sense, when I call them “reactionary intellectuals”: It just means they are mostly preoccupied with publicly outlining, defending, and rationalizing a reactionary vision and political project. Every authoritarian regime in history has had their own cadre of intellectuals providing that sort of service. Nothing noble or “good” about it.

A crucial question, however, is whether or not anything that emanates from the (pseudo-)intellectual sphere truly matters and influences what is happening on the Right in any significant way? There is no simple answer to that question. It is certainly not the case that Donald Trump or anyone on the Trumpist base is running around reading Claremont publications or taking notes listening to NatCon speeches. The argument, therefore, is not that the reactionary intellectual sphere is leading the way (as much as many of our protagonists would like to believe, and probably tell themselves, that they are the vanguard of the movement). But these reactionaries are providing intellectual justifications and rationalizations for the anti-democratic radicalization of the Right. What exact impact that has is impossible to quantify, and it will differ depending on where we look and who we are talking about. In a fundamental sense, however, we all need to make sense of our actions and find ways to legitimize them in the stories we tell ourselves. And such ideas infiltrate the way people perceive of the world around them and of their own place in it. That matters.

Most importantly, what these rightwing thinkers and pundits are expressing is a sense of being under siege that is pervasive on the Right well beyond the intellectual sphere, a sense that there is very little time left to stem the tide of radical, “woke” liberalism. As The Federalist put it: “For now, there are only two paths open to conservatives. Either they awake from decades of slumber to reclaim and re-found what has been lost, or they will watch our civilization die. There is no third road.” There is, in this worldview, no more room for moderation, compromise, or retreat. Extreme measures are not just legitimate, they are acutely necessary: “If all that sounds radical, fine. … Radicalism is precisely the approach needed now because the necessary task is nothing less than radical and revolutionary.”

Such overt, aggressive affirmations of radicalism are now everywhere on the Right, very much including all levels of the Republican Party. On December 10, for instance, at a fundraising event of the New York Young Republicans Club (basically an organization for youngish Republicans under the age of 40), the club’s president Gavin Wax had this to say: “We want to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets.” Again, there is an unmistakable – and quite cringy – element of self-aggrandizement in such bold proclamations: Look how radical we are! And in New York City, that woke-liberal dystopia, how brave!

These are, however, obviously not *just* the fascistic fever-dreams of a wannabe-radical who may or may not have read too much Claremont propaganda. It’s a radicalizing spirit that also manifests in the Republican Party’s core political agenda. As the political arm of a broader reactionary counter-mobilization, Republicans are trying to turn the clock back by many decades wherever they are in charge: At least to the 1950s, the pre-civil-rights era, in the political, social, and cultural sphere; even further back, to the pre-New Deal era, in the realm of economics and in terms of the state’s role in regulating the economy. And they are pursuing this vision they want to impose on the entire country in increasingly aggressive fashion.    

No more conserving, preserving, certainly not in the colloquial sense. American conservatism is now taking an openly and aggressively hostile stance towards the current order, and towards “liberalism” (very loosely defined) in general. It is this specific attitude, this disposition towards liberal democracy and anything derided as “leftwing” and “woke” that characterizes today’s Right. Conservatives have given themselves permission to escalate. That’s where the center of conservative politics currently is. If nothing else, the reactionary intellectual sphere captures this most clearly and provides a dangerous veneer of legitimacy and inevitability.

Since we are roughly at the 3,000 words mark, and that is already far too long, I will be taking this to a Part IV, coming very soon, in which I’ll situate this reactionary turn in the longer-term history of the American Right, reflecting on why it constitutes a significant radicalization – but not an aberration or departure, since it is fully in line with longstanding anti-democratic tendencies and impulses and what has always been the core of modern conservatism as a political project.