The Right's Reactionary Spirit Predates Trump
It is reflexively opposed to equality and drawn to the rule of "superior persons" and "established hierarchies," as F.A. Hayek observed
Many have been puzzled by the emergence of a radical and militant right in this country. For decades the consensus view was, in contrast to liberals and especially the left, the political right was committed to caution, moderation and slow reform. Edmund Burke’s quip that one must reform in order to conserve seemed emblematic, as did Bill Buckley’s more contemporary insistence that conservatives stand athwart history to yell “stop!” And to this day some true believers stay faithful to this conceit. In The Conservative Sensibility, George Will devotes nearly 600 pages to showing how American conservatism is and should be fundamentally about upholding the classical liberal tradition of respect for a moderate ordered liberty.
And yet ever since Donald Trump made his way down a gilded escalator to talk about Mexican rapists invading the country things have changed. Conservatism in the United States has become as associated with QAnon shamans and Unite the Right rallies as gaudy boardrooms and respectable soccer moms. The tone of so much conservative media is angry, paranoid, and even overtly insurrectionary: calls for “counter-revolution” in the face of wokeness and liberal hegemony, “invasion” and “replacement” have became weekly fixtures. MAGAfied politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene identify with Christian nationalism while tin-pot soft authoritarians like Viktor Orbán are shown the red carpet at CPAC.
Even the tenor of major conservative intellectuals seems to have shifted. In his recent opus, America’s Cultural Revolution, Chris Rufo presents his take on the well-worn story of how obscure left-wing intellectuals have apparently brought about the titular cultural revolution (sans the mass executions). For the most part, the book follows the familiar conservative template of reading left-wing authors with sufficient superficiality to be able to then inflate their influence beyond any resemblance to reality and suggest, for example, that Marxist-feminist philosopher Angela Davis is to blame for problems of racial animosity. It then goes on to evade dealing with the specificity of their claims by largely pathologizing them; chalking them up to resentment. Consider a sample:
The true heart of the quest for liberation—the driving force behind its theory and praxis—is nihilism. [Eldridge] Cleaver believed that raping white women was “freedom.” Angela Davis believed that taping a shotgun to the neck of a county judge was “justice.” Black Lives Matter activists believed that looting and burning down shopping malls was “reparations.” But all of these are, in truth, pure resentment.
Rufo’s book closes with a vivid call for a “counter-revolution” to remake the country, suggesting he isn’t so much interested in conserving as he is in dramatically changing. This point was emphasized even more explicitly by right-wing Claremont Institute’s Glenn Ellmers in The American Mind when he insisted, “Conservatism is No Longer Enough.” He lambasts “Conservatism Inc.” for not doing nearly enough to halt creeping liberalism, and concedes that real right-wing values only appeal to a “minority” of Americans. Nevertheless, Ellmers isn’t resigned to trying to slow down the inexorable because “practically speaking, there is almost nothing left to conserve.” What he wants instead is a “recovery, or even a refounding, of America as it was long and originally understood but which now exists only in the hearts and minds of a minority of citizens.”
These views aren’t consigned to pop-intellectuals, either. More rarefied figures like Patrick Deneen have taken to calling for “regime change” while Yoram Hazony insists that “liberalism destroys everything.” That’s to say nothing of figures like the Ivy League educated Bronze Age Pervert, a considerable influence on well-heeled young conservative intellectuals who proudly declares himself a “fascist or something worse.” In many respects their views for what will replace liberalism vary enormously, both in their details and radicality. Deneen’s aristopopulist replacement of a redistributive conservative aristocracy is different from Hazony’s more traditionalist “conservative democracy,” and both would blanch at BAP’s “fascism or something worse.” But each of these figures wants to see liberalism supplanted and a new right-wing hierarchy imposed in its place.
The Anti-Egalitarian Core of the Right
The seemingly new radicalness of the right has prompted a limited form of soul searching amongst moderate present and former Republicans. The weekly media cycle has never wanted for commentators musing aloud about what has (apparently) happened to the Republican Party and the American conservative movement as a whole. Many of these strike a nostalgic chord and attribute most of the blame to Trump and Trumpism. In Suicide of the West, Jonah Goldberg admits that the “corruption” of the right didn’t begin with Trump, but stresses that he did “accelerate it” and spends most of his time attacking the bad character and rudeness of the Orange Man. In his helpful historical guide, The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism, Matthew Continetti acknowledges modern conservatism has proven “disagreeable” and “hesitant” but insists it can get back on track by “disentangling the Republican Party and conservative movement from Donald Trump.” For these authors the core question is how did we get from the stolid respectability of Reagan and Bush Senior to the tin-foil conspiracy theorizing of Jan. 6 and outright speculation about a second Civil War?
Such formulations are based on a misreading of the core convictions of the political right, which is not defined by a commitment to moderation or the cautious management of change. These are indeed traditions and resonant chords within the broader tent of the right, and at various historical points a kind of moderate conservatism or classical liberalism has been intellectually and politically dominant in parts of the Republican Party. But they are by no means definitive, and even figures aligned with this outlook can seem quite a bit more radical if you take the rose-colored glasses off.
Modern conservatism in the United States emerged when Barry Goldwater, backed by the conspiracy touting John Birch Society and the very fine people at National Review, declared that “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” Moderate conservatives now lionize William F. Buckley for his erudition and powdery affectations. But he once proudly called himself part of the “New Radicals” and had little intention to conserve the (modest) welfare state that had emerged decades before out of the New Deal. And he certainly had no interest in defending individual rights against the state when he called for the South to “prevail” against the rising Civil Rights movement while dismissing the arguments of “ever-so-busy egalitarians.” As Buckley put it:
The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.
Ronald Reagan was for a long time all but hailed as the real God of the American conservative movement. But few of Reagan’s apologists mention that the great polemicist, who declared that nothing was scarier than a government official claiming to be there to help you, also presided over a mass wave of incarcerations. This was in part justified by America’s higher crime rates, but commentators like William J. Stuntz have pointed out that the response was far in excess of what was needed and likely didn’t contribute to declining crime rates. By the end of the Reagan-Bush years there were more people in prison in the land of the free than in the Soviet Union, or indeed anywhere else on earth. This continued under subsequent Democratic administrations as the Overton Window on crime policy shifted firmly to the right.
So if moderation and caution aren’t essential to the right, then what is? I devote a lot of space to arguing that it lies in a rejection of modernist ideals of equality and liberty for all in my recent book, The Political Right and Equality. But in case some readers won’t trust the word of a certified left-winger and liberal socialist, the essence of the political right was well captured by F.A. Hayek in his, “Why I Am Not A Conservative.” Here he notes that the right is defined, above all else, by the conviction that there are “recognizably superior persons” in society. And by virtue of being recognizably superior these persons are more deserving, and so deserving of more:
In the last resort, the conservative position rests on the belief that in any society there are recognizably superior persons whose inherited standards and values and position ought to be protected and who should have a greater influence on public affairs than others. The liberal, of course, does not deny that there are some superior people—he is not an egalitarian—but he denies that anyone has authority to decide who these superior people are. While the conservative inclines to defend a particular established hierarchy and wishes authority to protect the status of those whom he values, the liberal feels that no respect for established values can justify the resort to privilege or monopoly or any other coercive power of the state in order to shelter such people against the forces of economic change. Though he is fully aware of the important role that cultural and intellectual elites have played in the evolution of civilization, he also believes that these elites have to prove themselves by their capacity to maintain their position under the same rules that apply to all others.
The Enduring Radicalness of the Right
The conservative hero, James Fitzjames Stephen, an early 19th-century British philosopher whose Liberty, Equality, Fraternity famously criticized John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty for advancing unbridled liberty. Stephen insisted:
The main point is that enthusiasm for liberty in this sense is hardly compatible with anything like a proper sense of the importance of the virtue of obedience, discipline in its widest sense. The attitude of mind engendered by continual glorification of the present time, and of successful resistance to an authority assumed to be usurped and foolish, is almost of necessity fatal to the recognition of the fact that to obey a real superior, to submit to a real necessity and make the best of it in good part, is one of the most important of all virtues—a virtue absolutely essential to the attainment of anything great and lasting.
This conviction that there are various “real superiors” in society to which obedience is due is so integral to the center that it stamped even someone as comparatively center-right as Stephen.
To give a particularly poignant example, confronted with Mill’s arguments for women’s equality, Stephen insisted on their continued subordination. He claimed it was “clear” we ought to acknowledge “the inequality of sex for the same purpose, if it is a real inequality.” Is it one? His answer:
There are some propositions which it is difficult to prove, because they are so plain, and this is one of them. The physical differences between the two sexes affect every part of the human body, from the hair of the head to the soles of the feet, from the size and density of the bones to the texture of the brain and the character of the nervous system. Ingenious people may argue about anything, and Mr. Mill does say a great number of things about women which, as I have already observed, I will not discuss; but all the talk in the world will never shake the proposition that men are stronger than women in every shape. They have greater muscular and nervous force, greater intellectual force, greater vigour of character. This general truth, which has been observed under all sorts of circumstances and in every age and country, has also in every age and country led to a division of labour between men and women, the general outline of which is as familiar and as universal as the general outline of the differences between them.
When one recognizes how the political right is above all defined by this resistance to equality and the veneration, even outright worship, of so called “recognizably” or “real” superior persons, much of the ambiguity surrounding the right disappears. Few commentators on the political right have done a better job of capturing its core commitments than Corey Robin in The Reactionary Mind. Robin stresses that the right has always emerged as a response to democratic and egalitarian movements on the left, and constitutes a sustained intellectual and political project to either preserve existent hierarchies or replace them with new hierarchies which will prove more effective. Building on Robin’s analysis we can say that when the right feels that it is in “the driver’s seat” it will often adopt a tone of moderation and conservatism. But when it feels that liberals and leftists have been in the driver’s seat for a long enough time, the demands for radical change and even a new and more effective ruling elite rises to the fore. Oftentimes this will mean finding appeal in any number of different ideological figures or movements who are unified by their rejection of egalitarian modernity.
Bronze Age Pervert nicely encapsulated this view in his recent musings on the election of Argentinean President Javier Milei. His election was widely praised by many on the right, prompting confusion by commentators who couldn’t understand how the same people praising Trump and Orbán’s statism and authoritarianism one day could be cheering a libertarian the next. And indeed there is a pretty clear tension here between different right-wing impulses and arguments, including between conservatives and libertarians. But BAP offers a comment that helps explain the connection he sees in terms of how both Trump/Orbán and Milei are attacking the right’s egalitarian enemies. Milei’s election, then, as far as BAP is concerned, is about “stopping the logic of democracy” by rolling back the “crushing taxation, regulations in the name of social justice that destroy all enterprise, and ultimately really the enslavement of the good, intelligent, and talented part of the population in the service of providing goods to the dumb, dusky, stupid many…” BAP believes, rightly or wrongly, that both MAGA and Milei see the world as being divided into winners and losers, with the losers getting far too much of a free ride under liberalism. The same kind of moral plasticity has become characteristic of MAGA as a whole, with evangelical preachers making truly heroic efforts to construe a serial adulterer as God’s secret weapon to halt the fall into decadence and libertine permissiveness.
In the United States, the right clearly feels that the left has been in the driver’s seat for too long and that moderate “conservatism” is no longer enough. The rhetoric of “order” typically aligned with upholding the status quo has taken on a more metaphysical hue, as the right demands a return or a transition to the proper kind of hierarchy needed to halt the forms of decline brought about by liberalism and leftism. This may even require regime change and refounding, defying the letter of all too liberal law in the name of higher kinds of “natural” but “mysterious” laws demanding the retention of inequality.
Given this, it’s time to recognize that there is no going “back” to a normal “liberal” conservatism that since the 1960s was never all that normal to begin with. The burden of defending liberal principles of securing equality, freedom, and solidarity for all lies where it always has: with liberals, and the leftists who hold a mirror up to liberal society by asking it to live up to those principles.
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A tremendous piece of writing, thank you Matthew. As a liberal (in the UK sense) and social democrat (in the broad sense) I particularly like the specific acknowledgement of the liberal tradition as part of the broader progressive movement.
The tension between Hayek's "The liberal, of course, does not deny that there are some superior people—he is not an egalitarian—but he denies that anyone has authority to decide who these superior people are" and "defending liberal principles of securing equality, freedom, and solidarity for all lies where it always has: with liberals, and the leftists who hold a mirror up to liberal society by asking it to live up to those principles" - really captures where I am (and believe where we should be) in forming a united front against the radical right.
Many official conservatives as in Europe are not interested in conserving but in "restoring" or even re-creating something from the past. But collectivism is still collectivism and dangerous for freedom and human rights