Why the Extremists Took Over on the Right

Fear of a pluralizing America is fueling a radicalization out of a sense of weakness and besiegement

iStock / credit: lena5

This is Part II of a broader reflection on how to situate our Trumpist moment in U.S. history – sparked by a question I have been getting constantly in recent months: “Why is America suddenly so divided?”

If you need a refresher or didn’t read the first part and want to jump right in, here is the argument I have made so far: America has always conceived of itself as a democracy. This has obscured the fact that a variety of different regimes, of competing social and political orders, of incompatible visions of what the country should be, have existed side by side throughout the nation’s history. A hierarchical ethno-state dominated by white Christians or a pluralistic democracy with sincere egalitarian aspirations? That conflict was not resolved in 1776. It wasn’t settled in 1865. And unfortunately, contrary to the dominant mainstream narrative, the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 didn’t usher in democratic consensus either. Instead, the forces who fear and disdain the vision of egalitarian pluralism have been engaged in a comprehensive counter-mobilization spearheaded by movement conservatism. On January 20, those who explicitly reject the creedal or civic national identity came to power. Their overarching goal is to restore white male domination in all spheres of life and recenter the social and political order around strict hierarchies of race, gender, religion and wealth - as opposed to equality and egalitarian principles. The Trumpists didn’t depart from a previously stable democratic consensus. They represent the radical wing of a rightwing coalition that was never on board with egalitarian principles and democratic pluralism. They believe any measure – regardless of how extreme – is now justified to defend “real America.”

But why now? Why has the Right radicalized so much in the early twenty-first century? What is it about our particular moment in this longer-term struggle over what “America” should be that allowed the extremists to take over and catapult Trump to power? Let’s tackle those questions in Part II below.

America is currently experiencing the latest iteration of a very old struggle that has defined the country since its inception. What should this nation strive to be: A land of and for white Christians that supposedly works best when wealthy white men get to exert power and steer the community – or a place where “all men are created equal” and the individual’s status is not determined by what they look like, where they came from, who they pray to (or not), how they identify, and how much money they possess? The answer to this fundamental question of national identity determines who gets to belong and who gets to define the boundaries of what counts as “American,” who gets to shape the public square in their image. These competing visions are best accommodated by fundamentally incompatible political and societal orders: A white Christian ethno-state with strict hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth on the one hand; an egalitarian democracy embracing a pluralistic society on the other.

This has always been the central fault line in U.S. history. But it is now playing out under distinct political circumstances, shaped by an unprecedented societal and cultural constellation that explains why one side in this conflict has radicalized rather drastically over the past few decades. Trumpist rule is not an aberration from some glorious democratic past. But the Right is also not simply the same it has always been; American politics, as difficult as it may be to remember, has not always been like this.

The most plausible interpretation lies somewhere in-between tales of either total aberration or complete continuity (though that does not mean exactly in the middle). The challenge is to grapple seriously with long-standing traditions and continuities while also acknowledging the more recent radicalization. Take the Republican Party: It has long been beholden to plutocratic interests; extremists and radical conspiratorialists have exerted a significant influence inside the party for decades (the historian Seth Cotlar, for instance, is investigating the life of one Walter Huss, a leading right-wing activist in Oregon from the late 1950s all the way through the early 2000s, a man with ties to the Neo Nazi scene and domestic terrorists who managed to take over as chair of the Oregon GOP in the late 1970s); the shameless fearmongering against an imminent leftist / socialist / communist revolution became the party line as soon as movement conservatism rose to be the preeminent force within the party; waging an aggressive culture war to mobilize the base has been the standard Republican playbook since Buchanan and Gingrich in the 1990s.

And yet, today’s GOP – acting mostly as an authoritarian movement defined by a leader cult – is very different from the political party that existed sixty, forty, or even twenty years ago. Large majorities of Republican lawmakers in both the Senate and the House, for instance, voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the 1970s, there was significant Republican support for the (ultimately failed) Equal Rights Amendment, and the GOP was broadly on board with the establishment of the modern environmental protection state, which was instituted under Nixon. The mainstream of the party either actively supported, or at least accepted, and certainly didn’t dare to fully dismantle the New Deal state through at least the end of the Cold War – which was one of the greatest frustrations of the radical right and paleo-conservative hardliners during the Reagan era. And it was quite uncontroversial in Republican circles until not that long ago to take a pro-immigration stance as part of a broader affirmation of a creedal nationalism that, at least rhetorically, allowed anyone to become American if they declared their allegiance to a set of founding ideas.

I am certainly not trying to sell you on the idea that the Republican Party was all on board with egalitarian pluralism until Trump came down the golden escalator in 2015. Far from it. The point is that the creedal nationalism and the democratic aspiration were still present and at least somewhat influential within the GOP through the end of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. There is simply nothing left of that now. Today’s Republican Party is fully dominated by ethno-nationalism and an aggressive disdain for cultural or religious pluralism, by a desire for patriarchal domination, by a fervor to dismantle the modern state and destroy anything that might act as a check on moneyed interests.

Red America vs Blue America

America’s major parties now represent two fundamentally incompatible visions for this country. What is America? Who gets to belong? How much democracy, and for whom? Those have always been contested issues. But the fact that this struggle now overlaps so clearly with party lines is the result of a rather recent reconfiguration.

In the middle of the twentieth century, there simply was no liberal party and no conservative party in the United States. Both Democrats and Republicans existed as heterogeneous coalitions covering an enormous spectrum ideologically, demographically, and culturally. Sometime between the 1930s and the 1960s, however, those who generally embraced a modern state and the extension of the democratic promise beyond just white people took hold of the Democratic Party. This alienated its Southern wing, the so-called Dixiecrats, whose sole mission it was to uphold Jim Crow apartheid. The 1960s civil rights legislation supercharged a process of partisan realignment and ideological sorting. While it took decades to play out, it ultimately united the forces opposing multiracial, gender-egalitarian pluralism in a Republican Party that has been focused almost solely on the interests and sensibilities of white conservatives. And they tend to define America – “real America” – as a white, Christian, patriarchal nation. America, to them, is supposed to be a place where traditional authority is revered and wealthy white Christian men are at the top.

Today, the struggle over what “America” is maps onto the conflict between the parties. That is the fundamental reality of U.S. politics: National identity and democracy have become partisan issues. This existential dimension of the conflict between Democrats and Republicans overshadows all other considerations, it shapes all areas of U.S. politics.

The conflict over what America should be is not confined to abstract discussion and political discourse. It defines the reality of everyday life for everyone who lives in the United States. Two Americas exist within the boundaries of the nation state: liberal, left, progressive vs conservative, rightwing, reactionary… those are just labels. But they correspond to a reality that threatens the very existence of the United States. The gap between Red America and Blue America is rapidly widening – a profound reversal of a general trend of convergence that had characterized recent U.S. history, especially since the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Democratic states, cities, and communities are quickly moving towards a pluralistic future; meanwhile Republican states and communities are trying to roll back much of the social and cultural change of the past century.

In nearly all spheres of life, “red” and “blue” worlds are moving in opposite directions: Voting rights and participation in the political process; gender relations; the relationship between church and state; education and parenting; access to health care and welfare state protections; attitudes towards science and modern medicine; trade unions and workers’ rights; gun laws and environmental regulations. It all contributes to a situation in which the life expectancy at birth in the two Americas diverges drastically: It is almost universally higher in Democratic states while 15 of the 16 states with the lowest life expectancy are dominated by Republicans. The average lifespan of a newborn in Mississippi, West Virginia, Alabama, and Kentucky is seven to eight years shorter than in California, New York, or Massachusetts. This is not entirely due to deliberate decisions by political leaders, of course – but a significant part of it is. The conflict between the two Americas is, in this sense, quite literally a matter of life and death. The Right is, we should therefore admit, not wrong about the existential stakes of this struggle.

Extremists in charge

The forces dominating the Republican Party today are not willing to resolve that existential struggle within the confines of democratic self-government. They want to impose their version of “real America” by openly embracing state authoritarianism and militant extremism.

Such forces were always part of the modern rightwing movement that formed between the 1930s and the 1950s. It brought together all those who were critical of – or downright hostile towards – the establishment of the modern state and the emergence of a pluralistic, multiracial democracy. Anti-state libertarians and the business right, rejecting any intervention in the market (and regulation of the practices that made them a lot of money) in the name of “free enterprise”; reactionary intellectuals and traditionalists who were skeptical of modern society as such; religious conservatives and Christian nationalists fighting against “secular humanism”; white segregationists and far-right activists convinced that the civil rights legislation of the 1950s and 60s would doom “Western civilization.” This coalition ranged from relatively moderate conservatives still attached to the center and willing to accommodate the system to extremists on the very fringes of society. They all viewed modern democracy as a threat to what they declared were “natural” hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth. They disagreed on whether the advancement of “un-American” leftism, liberalism, and egalitarianism could be halted from within the political system – or had to be stopped by much more radical means, including the use of violence.

The radicals have emerged victorious from this internal rightwing conflict: The people in charge on today’s Right are at war with pluralistic society. A decade ago, they united behind Donald Trump as their standard-bearer. Now they control the government of the United States of America.

Why Now?

Why is this happening now? The Right itself offers two contradictory answers simultaneously. On the one hand, they are constantly trying to project strength: They want us to believe they represent a vital, virile alternative to anemic liberal democracy – and a cohesive vision far superior to weak, divisive pluralism. Liberal democracy, in this tale, is destined to surrender to the far right. On the other hand, rightwingers are also obsessed with their own weakness. The Trumpist imagination is defined by a sense of besiegement: Powerful enemies everywhere, anti-American forces both from without and from within conspiring to destroy the nation, “real Americans” constantly victimized by a society they believe owes them eternal adulation and deference, made to suffer under the yoke of crazy leftist politics.

Relentless self-victimization – a veritable persecution complex – has been a defining feature of modern conservatism since its inception. The heightened version of this type of siege mentality we are seeing now points to something that is diagnostically important: Until very recently at least, the Right was indeed losing the fundamental struggle over what kind of country “America” should strive to be. The idea of a “crisis of liberal democracy” has dominated the political and broader public discourse over the past decade. But in crucial ways, it is the conception of “real America” as a white Christian patriarchal homeland that has come under enormous pressure. Socially, culturally, and – most importantly, perhaps – demographically, the country has moved away from the rightwing ideal since the middle of the twentieth century. It is not just a figment of the reactionary imagination that America has become less white, less religious, and more pluralistic in basically every dimension. As a result, the conservative hold on power has become tenuous. In a narrow political sense, they may be in charge right now – in the White House, in Congress, at the Supreme Court. But it is not just political power the Right seeks. They desire cultural domination and affirmation. In the cultural sphere, the public square, and across many societal dimensions like the family, the shift in power away from white male conservatives has been more pronounced. The Right has engaged in a comprehensive counter-mobilization in response – a radicalization fueled not by a feeling of strength, but by a sense of weakness.

From Obama to George Floyd to Joe Biden

Nothing symbolized this threat to white dominance like Barack Obama’s presidency – an outrageous subversion of what reactionaries understand as America’s “natural order.” Obama’s presidency dramatically heightened the white conservative fear of demographic and cultural change, of the non-white “Other” taking over.

The Republican Party’s increasingly open embrace of aggressive nativism had been coming for a long time, of course. It’s what the self-described paleo-conservatives had been demanding for decades. In 1992, they came close to toppling the party establishment when their standard-bearer Pat Buchanan challenged President George H. W. Bush in the Republican primaries. A wave of white anger, resentment, and despair allowed these ethno-nationalist forces to advance significantly after the end of the Cold War – even if it wasn’t quite enough yet to take over the party. While the rightwing base was almost certainly with Buchanan on issues of national identity and immigration in the 90s, the conservative power centers and the Republican establishment were strong enough still to hold on. They never really denounced the openly anti-democratic forces in their midst, however, and instead decided they would try to harness the extremist, far-right popular energies on the base. As a result, the whole party kept being pulled to the right, with almost every election cycle bringing in a new cohort of people more radical than the last.

9/11 worked as an accelerant for the xenophobia, nativism, and white fear that increasingly defined rightwing political culture well into the political mainstream. Conservative icon Phylis Schlafly, for instance, who had risen to fame in the 1970s as the leader of the grassroots protest against the Equal Rights Amendment, regularly used her monthly newsletters to rage against “invading” Mexicans and “foreign diseases” attacking America. She also fully embraced what is today called Great Replacement Theory, propagating the conspiratorial idea that Democrats were actively trying to bring in “illegals” and dangerous foreigners in order to “change the make-up of the nation.”

Against this backdrop of an already riled-up rightwing base, Barack Obama was elected president in November 2008. In the rightwing imagination, Obama – a moderate liberal politician by any reasonable standard – epitomized the threat from brown foreigners, the dangers of Black radicalism, and the triumph of extreme leftism. His presidency dramatically heightened the white reactionary fear of demographic change, it supercharged the perception of a loss of political and cultural dominance.

By the end of the Obama era, it had become dogma on the Right that Democratic governance was fundamentally illegitimate – an existential threat to the very survival of the nation, actually. Shortly before the 2016 election, Michael Anton, now Director of Policy Planning in the State Department, channeled this perception in an infamous essay published in the Claremont Institute’s online magazine, titled: “The Flight 93 Election.” Anton called on conservatives to unite behind Donald Trump – who had, not coincidentally, risen to political prominence as the most famous proponent of the racist birther conspiracy theory. According to Anton, Democrats constituted a threat to America akin to the terrorists of 9/11. The Republican establishment had failed to stop them; far more radical measures were needed than what a “normal” conservative politician was willing to even consider. Trump, however, was different: “Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.” 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 United Airlines flight 93 on September 11, 2001, one of the four planes hijacked by terrorists: It never reached its target and crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, as the passengers decided to fight back. In many ways, the “Flight 93” mentality has completely taken over the Right – it is now all “Flight 93” politics, all the time.

The Right quickly fell in line. Even among political and intellectual leaders who had initially vowed to stand “Against Trump” because they saw him as insufficiently conservative, most quickly settled for Trump being sufficiently anti-Left.

However, the first Trump presidency did not bring about the comprehensive undoing of all the racial and social change the Right disdains so much. Instead, it ended with millions of people protesting against racist police violence in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. On the Right, the mass mobilization of a multi-racial coalition was not seen as a glimpse of a desperately needed racial reckoning, but instead as the harbinger of national doom. The summer of 2020 was yet another in a series of inflection points that further escalated the perception of imminent threat. It has become a key element of rightwing political identity to regard the protests as irrefutable proof that radically “Un-American” forces of “woke” extremism were rising, that “the Left” had started its full-on assault. This interpretation is a central component of the permission structure that governs rightwing politics. Building up this supposedly totalitarian threat from the “Left” enables the Right to justify its actions within the long-established framework of conservative self-victimization. It’s a permission structure that doesn’t ever allow de-escalation or retreat. Clinging to the idea that “The Right won’t go THAT far” is futile because they have convinced themselves that their leftist enemies have already gone *much further*.

And then Joe Biden “stole” the 2020 election. Well, if he didn’t “steal” it, necessarily, he was still an illegitimate president. That’s what a clear majority of Republicans believed throughout Biden’s time in office. It’s not even necessarily the case that they all bought into Trump’s Big Lie or truly believed the specifics of this conspiracy theory or that conspiratorial rumor. Many of them probably conceded there was nothing technically wrong with how the election was conducted. But that didn’t affect their assessment of Biden’s presidency as illegitimate very much. Republicans didn’t start from an investigation of how the 2020 election went down and came away from that exercise with sincerely held doubts. The rationalization worked backwards: They looked at the outcome and decided it must not stand. Accusations of fraud gain plausibility among conservatives not because of empirical evidence, but because they adhere to the Right’s “higher truth” of who is and who is not legitimately representing – and therefore entitled to rule – “real” America. The Right disputes the legitimacy of the 2020 election not necessarily on the basis of claiming fraud and conspiracy, but because democracy itself subverted the will of “the people” by allowing a supposedly illegitimate coalition to pursue its fundamentally “anti-American” project.

The rightwing intellectual sphere has articulated these claims in remarkably stark terms. In the spring of 2021, the magazine American Mind published a particularly instructive essay by Glenn Ellmers, entitled “’Conservatism’ is no Longer Enough.” Although the author made no claim that the 2020 election was “stolen” and explicitly acknowledged that more people had voted for Joe Biden than for Donald Trump, he maintained that the outcome was illegitimate. According to Ellmers, Biden’s presidency represented a vision of multiracial pluralism that was hostile to what he referred to as “authentic America.” In his view, everyone who voted for Joe Biden and his “progressive project of narcotizing the American people and turning us into a nation of slaves” was simply not worthy of inclusion in the body politic. Ellmers declared that “most people living in the United States – certainly more than half – are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” Only “authentic Americans” allowed – a clearly racialized idea of “the people,” mostly represented by “the vast numbers of heartland voters.” On the other side, the “Un-American” enemy for whom Ellmers knew nothing but disgusted contempt, not coincidentally characterized by their blind admiration for a young Black artist and activist: “If you are a zombie or a human rodent who wants a shadow-life of timid conformity,” Ellmers raged, “then put away this essay and go memorize the poetry of Amanda Gorman. Real men and women who love honor and beauty, keep reading.” Ellmers demanded to redraw the boundaries of citizenship and exclude over half the population. For “authentic America” to survive, he was sure, a different kind of leader had to emerge: “What is needed, of course, is a statesman who understands both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure.”

A rightwing “counter-revolution”

The general sentiment that traditional conservatism needs to be replaced by a much more radical form of politics is being echoed across the Right – among pundits, activists, politicians, intellectuals. People at the center of rightwing politics are now rejecting the label “conservatism” outright. In October 2022, for instance, The Federalist published an instructive piece titled: “We need to stop calling ourselves conservatives.” It pleaded with people on the Right to accept the “need to forge a new political identity that reflects our revolutionary moment.” No more restraint, no more “small government”: “The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life – and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.” John Daniel Davidson, the author of the piece and senior editor at The Federalist, was fully aware of the implications of what he demanded: “If all that sounds radical, fine. It need not, at this late hour, dissuade conservatives in the least. Radicalism is precisely the approach needed now because the necessary task is nothing less than radical and revolutionary.”

What unites all factions on the Trumpist Right is the belief that a “leftist” revolution has already taken place, that the radical “Left” has taken over all the major institutions of American life. In this view, the civil service, the universities, the “liberal media” – they are the power centers from which a leftist subversion is quickly spreading. As the Left now has command of America, all that is noble has been destroyed, there is nothing left to conserve; nothing short of a radical “counter-revolution” can now save the nation. When Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts infamously declared that “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be” a little over a year ago, he was merely expressing what is now the defining sensibility on the Right. A brazen threat of violence, fully in line with the logic that dominates rightwing politics. As Roberts wrote in his Foreword to Project 2025’s policy report: “With enemies at home and abroad, there is no margin for error. Time is running short. If we fail, the fight for the very idea of America may be lost.”

So little time left. The Right’s political and intellectual leaders believe they are engaged in a noble war for the “soul,” the identity, the very existence of the nation. If the stakes are so high, if the other side is out to destroy all that is good about America and not only tear the nation’s moral fabric apart, but erase the natural order in the process, moderation, restraint, and patience are not an option. There is therefore no line they don’t feel justified to cross.

Where does America go from here? “Normal” politics is not an adequate response to the kind of challenge the country now faces. In fact, a return to pre-Trump “normalcy” is not even desirable, as it would merely restore a deeply dysfunctional, deficient system that gave rise to this mess in the first place. America needs transformative change. But as we are locked into an existential struggle, is it even remotely realistic to hope for a democratic leap? What are the actual chances of transformational progress in a society so fundamentally divided?

Let’s end this Part II here, as we are almost 4,500 words in. This last question deserves proper reflection, and we will tackle it in a Part III - to be published early next week.