Executive summary
The author thinks (and I'm not entirely convinced he's right but it is an illuminating oversimplification) that the GOP coalition of religious conservatives, foreign policy hawks and fiscal conservative/libertarians is dead.
The "New Right" has four factions:
"Flight 93ers" who believe the end of smashing liberals who don't think that the U.S. has always been awesome and are incensed at efforts to treat women and minorities better, justifies the means;
"Integralists" who are Christian dominionists with a Catholic flavor;
"National Conservatives" with a nationalist anti-immigration, anti-market, and anti-woke agenda who want to break up tech companies, defund the left, impose trade barriers, build a border wall, increase the size of the child tax credit and put God back in schools. They want an English only, white Christian country where everyone else is a second class citizen rather than a cosmopolitan, tolerant, multi-cultural society; and
"Red-Pilled Anarcho Bros" are Social Darwinists who think progressive elites use the language of equality and justice to give special privileges to women and minorities to keep themselves in business while robbing men, especially white men, of even the vocabulary to protest their loss of freedom or the unfairness they are forced to endure, and that . democracy and freedom are inherently at odds because democracy is based on notions of equality—while freedom would lead to the emergence of natural hierarchies based on physical and mental strength and a world where government exists to serve corporate power.
In more depth:
The conservative movement as we knew it pre-Trump arose in the heyday of the Cold War when the threat of Soviet communism loomed large in the American political consciousness. The movement was famously described by Ronald Reagan as a three-legged stool with each leg representing a different faction, to wit: religious/social conservatives, foreign policy hawks and fiscal conservatives/libertarians. . . .What kept the stool together, however, was the fear of an external leftist enemy that each side feared for its own unique reasons. This is not to deny that there was also some genuine common ground between them. Indeed, to the extent that they all took America’s founding project seriously, none of these factions were fundamentally illiberal—or whatever streak of illiberalism they might have had was kept in check by the competing commitment to this project.Trump’s arrival changed all that. The new right, which started taking shape even before Trump, is in a different mood altogether. Its unifying force is not the leftist enemy abroad, but the leftist enemy within. And it doesn’t just fear this enemy, it hates it. Indeed, the new right’s dislike of the domestic left is so great that it is rethinking America’s historic foreign policy commitments in light of it. If you have been puzzled by the post-Trump right’s love fest with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin despite his invasion of the liberal democratic and pro-West Ukraine, it is because Putin has declared himself the enemy of the woke left that he claims is destroying Western civilization of which he is now the self-avowed champion.In contrast to the previous one, this has four identifiable factions. It is, if you like, more a table than a stool. But not, for all that, more stable because the four legs are uneven. In fact, were it not for the various factions’ joint hatred of their common leftist enemy, there would be less to keep the coalition standing than with the previous conservative movement.I would label the four factions as follows: Flight 93ers, the Integralists, National Conservatives and Red-Pilled Anarcho Bros. . . .Flight 93ersThis faction is named after the infamous Flight 93 essay that Michael Anton wrote in the Claremont Review of Books under the pseudonym of Publius shortly after Trump landed the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Claremont Review is the premier publication of the Claremont Institute, the flagship of the West Coast Straussian school of political philosophy. In contrast to East Coast Straussians, many of whom broke away from Trump, the Claremonsters, as they had long been called, went the other way. They weren’t without qualms about Trump but still submitted to him enthusiastically. Anton’s Flight 93 essay played an important role in convincing the Claremont Institute and the broader conservative establishment, at a time that it was still in shock over Trump’s primary win, that it needs to abandon its squeamishness and rally around him. Four years later when Trump launched his Big Lie, the Claremonsters supplied him with not just bogus arguments to justify his claims but also the notorious John Eastman, the legal brains behind the scheme to get Vice President Mike Pence to reject Biden state electors so that they could be subsequently switched with Trump state electors.To understand how odd these machinations were, consider that Claremont Straussians have long regarded the American Constitution as a sacred document. . . . Just like their leader and founder, the late Harry Jaffa, they consider America’s Founding Fathers as gods among men. They also worship Abraham Lincoln whose statesmanship abolished slavery—and fully delivered on the Constitution’s promise of liberty for all—while keeping the Union intact.So how did Lincoln lovers end up embracing Trump?It is unclear, actually, if Jaffa, a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater, would have ever gone along with his institution’s pro-Trump turn; his son insists that he would not have. But his Claremont heirs’ annoyance with what they see as the anti-Americanism of the progressive left has grown into a burning rage over the years. They consider the left’s depiction of America as a racist, sexist, and homophobic country—despite the heroic efforts that have been made to abolish slavery and Jim Crow—as intolerable blasphemy. They have always seen the left’s demands for special privileges for minorities and women as a perversion of the constitution’s promise of equal rights. Then, on top of this, when the leftist elites who control the media, academia, the government bureaucracy, Hollywood and other commanding heights of the culture use their power not just to press their anti-American agenda but, in their woke arrogance, silence objectors like them through a regime of censorship, political correctness and cancellation, they are incensed. Denying the left control of the state, arguably the last remaining bastion of power, became a paramount concern for them.Whatever Trump’s character and other flaws, they paled in comparison to his big virtue, namely, his unapologetic and no-holds-barred willingness to take on the left and obliterate it. . . .What distinguishes Claremonsters from the other factions of the new right is that they alone see themselves not as anti-liberals but adherents of the true liberalism. The illiberal subversion of elections to install a strongman like Trump, in their book, is a temporary measure to crush the left and return America to a true, originalist commitment to individual liberty and limited government.IntegralistsDefending any kind of liberalism is emphatically not the integralist project, however. Whereas Claremonsters see progressive leftism—its attacks on institutions of ordered liberty such as the family, churches and schools—as a perversion of liberalism, integralists see it as a natural outgrowth of the political individualism enshrined in the Constitution. . . . If Patrick Deneen, a professor at University of Notre Dame and a leading integralist, is to be believed, the source of America’s current travails, its communal and moral breakdown, lies in the Declaration of Independence itself. . . . Nothing irritates them more than Justice Anthony Kennedy’s famous quote in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992): “At the heart of liberty, is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” As far as they are concerned, one can draw a direct through line between this kind of thinking and the rise of sexual promiscuity, pornography, abortion and radical demands for gender self-authorship of the woke movement. And like the other three factions, integralists hate the progressive elite that advances and defends transgender surgeries and multiple pronouns.Integralists are all Catholic and integralism is a very old doctrine that authorizes the state to promote the earthly common good as ordained by God. . . . the integralists do aspire to a return to some kind of a pan-Christian confessional state that uses its muscle to ban abortion, gay marriage and other progressive aims and that allows preferential expression of Christianity in the public square. Other religions wouldn’t be prohibited but they would not enjoy state support. Their role model in this is Hungary’s Viktor Orban who is taking affirmative steps to restore Christian domination in his country by barring Muslim immigration and embracing natalist policies to encourage Christians to have more babies and boost their demographic footprint.If integralists could turn back the clock to some halcyon period in America, it would be 17th and 18th Century Puritan New England where a thick and unified community used a muscular government to impose widely shared religious norms or understanding of the common good. Deneen, along with his fellow integralists Gladen Pappin and Adrian Vermeule, has started a Substack publication called The Postliberal Order to develop their integralist critique of modernity and liberalism. . . .(To understand the nuttiness of these Catholic intellectuals using bad boy Trump, the very embodiment of the ruggedly atomistic spirit of Appalachian “backcountry” Scottish-Irish settlers, to return America to a communal New England Puritan Protestant order, read this fascinating account by Tanner Greer, “The Problem of the New Right.”)National ConservativesNatCons . . . morphed into something of a MAGA organ, workshopping an anti-immigration, anti-market, and anti-woke agenda. . . . American NatCons want to break up tech companies, defund the left, impose trade barriers, build a border wall, increase the size of the child tax credit and put God back in schools. . . .Their dream is to elect a contingent of Republicans who are committed to using state power to, as Hillsdale College's David Azerrad, declared, “defund and humiliate the institutional centers of power of the left...and reward friends and punish enemies." . . . .If one is going to pick one figure and one moment that launched this movement it would be Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony with his 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism. . . .His rap against liberalism is that it is a fundamentally imperialistic ideology because it claims to be founded on universally applicable political doctrines. That, he says, leads to a crusading moral universalism that denies the validity of alternative principles of national self-determination based on local, cultural commitments. Liberalism judges every polity by whether it respects individual rights and allows religious pluralism. That bars the state from using its power to protect indigenous ways and customs. Instead of nurturing citizens of a nation with strong local blood, soil and cultural attachments, liberalism encourages individuals to see themselves as citizens of the world. Cosmopolitanism is a dirty word for him—as it had become for many on the MAGA right. Ironically, Hazony’s critique of liberalism is a warmed over version of the anti-globalization left’s slams against capitalism which, it alleged, obliterated local ways and homogenized every country in the image of the West.Hazony does not reject liberalism out of hand. He thinks it might be suitable when local conditions warrant—for example in a naturally diverse and multicultural community. But in Hazony’s post-liberal world, liberalism is merely one legitimate possibility among many. When a dominant majority exists, it should be allowed free rein to determine its destiny. It can choose a religious, linguistic, ethnic or cultural principle around which to order itself depending on the self-understanding of the majority.
So if India’s dominant Hindu population chooses to jettison its liberal commitments and become an explicitly Hindu nation, that is fine. Also kosher is America declaring itself a Christian country with English as its only official language—as is Israel remaining a Jewish nation without pressure to accord equal rights to non-Jews. Hazony says that in such regimes, minorities wouldn’t be persecuted. They would be tolerated—but not awarded equal rights. In other words, they’d have to accept their second-class status. . . . he dismisses as “elitist” liberals who insist that the rights of minorities and immigrants be respected in a polity. His streak of populism is pretty evident.Red-Pilled Anarcho BrosIf Hazony is the godfather of the NatCon movement, then a long-haired dude called Curtis Guy Yarvin— who wrote under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug—is the godfather of this movement. . . . he started writing a blog called Unqualified Reservations under his pseudonym in 2007 . . . Many of the terms and concepts that gained popularity in the alt-right and then entered the political bloodstream along with Trump were coined by him.Yarvin believes that a complex of progressive elite institutions—the press, academia and the federal bureaucracy or the Deep State—run the country and exercise control more totalitarian than authoritarian China—a country that he admires precisely because it is so openly authoritarian in contrast to liberal states that mask their true intentions behind mind-numbing pieties. He calls this complex of institutions “The Cathedral” and he believes that their ideology permeates everyone and everything. . . . progressive elites use the language of equality and justice to give special privileges to women and minorities to keep themselves in business while robbing men, especially white men, of even the vocabulary to protest their loss of freedom or the unfairness they are forced to endure. It’s all an elaborate ruse to keep the truly good subservient to a false progressive ideology. . . . democracy and freedom are inherently at odds because democracy is based on notions of equality—while freedom would lead to the emergence of natural hierarchies based on physical and mental strength. . . .
Mencius Moldbug, who has made an hour-long appearance on Tucker Carlson, has had a deep influence on Peter Thiel and was even rumored to have a line to Steve Bannon, wants to tear down the whole liberal edifice and replace it with a techno-state in which corporations run the country like their private holding. . . . So if, under fascism, the state directs private industry toward its ends, in the Moldbug world private industry directs the state towards its goals.Moldbug was deeply influenced by Hans-Herman Hoppe, who subscribes to a perverted version of the libertarian Austrian School of Economics. This would be comical if it were not so dangerous given that key figures of this school like Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek (who has been a deep intellectual influence on me) are among the most eloquent defenders of liberalism—and ardent opponents of authoritarianism . . .
Damon Linker at Eyes on the Right has written extensively about some of them, but the most prominent perhaps is Yale PhD Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) who has developed a huge following among young, white men of the reactionary bent. Just like Moldbug, BAP’s animus is directed at those whom he calls “bugmen”—reminiscent of Nietzsche’s last men—because they are filled with ressentiment against those who are more beautiful, powerful and stronger than them and therefore want to tear them down. In a calculated bid to provoke fear against the left, BAP has gone so far as to compare the anti-male and anti-white rhetoric of the new left to the “extermination”-level anti-Tutsi propaganda that the shorter, phenotypically African Hutus in Rwanda deployed before massacring the more European-featured, taller Tutsis (never mind that the extermination of the Tutsis was possible only because they were a reviled minority in an illiberal state that did not offer them protections from the depredations of the Hutu majority, precisely the kind of polity that BAP disses.)If integralists have a problem with liberal secularism, the anarcho bros are upset with liberalism’s democratic egalitarianism. They don’t have a beef with religious pluralism like the intergralists—or even gays (Thiel, their fan and benefactor, is gay, after all!). They have an obsession with biology and natural differences and are far more concerned with feminist—and to a lesser extent, racial—demands for equality. They are at core Neitzcheans who believe that a good society is one that is ruled by the principle of meritocracy in all its forms—not equality, a creed for losers.
From UnPopulist.
9 comments:
Well, that was depressing.
Well... I guess if you live on Twitter? I think the lower middle and lower class whites are pretty laid back about race. Kinda live-and-let-live. By now most of them have a cousin or a niece/nephew in a mixed race marriage. But they don't much care for race being weaponized. And for the most part, if the East Coast Elite (ECE) is for it, then they're gonna say they're against it. To simplify immensely, the world is changing too fast for them to keep up, and the older they are the further in the past their values were set. But going back to that "Don't trust the ECE", they will seem rudderless to those more in touch with current events. About the only thing good about Trump that I hear is that "he stuck to the ECE".
So I guess if you are a member, at least in spirit, of the ECE, then you might ask "What did we do to deserve such hatred?". I guess that the lower class eventually figured out that they and their kids livelihood was sacrificed on the altar of global trade. Perhaps if they hadn't been lied to consistently for decades about the cost and benefits of global trade, if they were given credit for the fact that their stagnant (relative) wages paid to lift hundreds of millions of Chinese out of abject poverty, and if the upper and upper middle class were paying equivalent costs, then maybe I could point my finger at them and say "it's you deplorables that are the problem". As opposed to our national leadership, Republican or Democrat, which are cut from the same cloth.
@Guy
There is no doubt that the working class white man's economic prospects have been stagnant since the 1970s.
Women and non-white people saw their relative status improve greatly as a result of the civil rights movement and the removal of discrimination against them in education and the workplace. The least capable of the men in jobs that opened up to women and minorities were replaced by more competent women and minorities. The more competent men in those jobs held onto them. This also meant that less skilled men who were dominant in their breadwinning capacity pre-civil rights were now much more on a par with their less skilled spouses.
Economic growth disproportionately went to the educated and people with significant capital. The absolute number of jobs that didn't require a college education didn't actually shrink but its share of the workforce did as automation and offshoring reduced the domestic demand for less educated workers. Even when factories need more workers, the kind of men who used to labor in them are no longer qualified to do the work that factories require now.
More men have college educations now than in the 1970s, with the most capable of the men who in the 1970s wouldn't have gone to college now earning BAs, AAs, and occupational certifications, and only the less capable of men who wouldn't have gone to college in the 1970s still not doing so. Women, in contrast, in the U.S., of all races, and abroad, are keeping up and getting educated at rates that keep rising and have long since surpassed men.
continued . . .
These men, like everyone else in the U.S., did receive significant benefits as well from global trade. The real price of goods has been low and the quality of those goods has dramatically improved. And, a lot of the cost of locally provided services, like higher education, doesn't make a big share of their market basket of goods the way it does for the upper middle class.
But urban real estate and health care that he does consume have gone up greatly. And, the men who continue to remain less educated, in addition to having lower relative incomes (even though lower income people have a significantly lower tax burden than they used to since 1986 and even more now), also are finding that they are too disabled to do manual work in their 50s when an office worker driving norm expects them to work to age 68 or older, and that there are frequently bouts of unemployment. Their economic inadequacy undermines their ability to get married, to stay married, and to avoid neglecting their children.
But if your job was capable of being done much cheaper by someone in another country who like you, wasn't very skilled, with the work product shipped to the U.S., that's what was done.
Immigration has been a similar story. If you are a native born Anglo white man who isn't qualified to do anything that pays better than migrant farm work or the least skilled construction work (what economists used to generically call "ditch digging"), or you were a native born Anglo white woman who wasn't qualified to do anything that pays better than working as a maid or washing dishes, then, yes, your economic prospects were impaired by low skilled immigrants, mostly from Latin America. But, since simply being able to speak the language fluently and have a bit of cultural understanding of other native born Americans has a lot of economic value, the only people squeezed out by this immigration have been the dregs of the native born workforce.
A country with little immigration that didn't import much from abroad, didn't have many people with college educations, didn't allow women to do many kinds of jobs in the paid workforce, relegated non-white workers to the worst and lowest paid jobs, had very little and unsophisticated automation, had lost a lot of able bodied male workers in World War II, had immense domestic demand because consumer goods purchases had tanked in the Great Depression (because of the economic collapse) and WWII (because of guns v. butter issues) leaving pent up demand, and was exporting goods abroad like mad because much of the rest of the world's industrial based had been destroyed in World War II and because the rest of the world also had pent up demand, was the best economic environment that less skilled white men could imagine. But that was a perfect storm of good fortune, not a situation that could be sustained indefinitely.
Maybe national leadership could have eased the transition from this state of bliss better as it did in countries that developed a strong welfare state. But the bottom line is that technology changed what the economy needed, and uneducated white men who couldn't upgrade their skills weren't offering what the economy needed anymore. Now, they're looking for scapegoats and angry because they don't know what hit them.
One of the big open questions in economics is why programs designed to provide opportunities to better yourself through improved access to education and skill work so much better for women than for men. Often the benefits of these facially neutral programs (e.g. free college tuition for all graduates of a particular high school) produce great gains for women and negligible gains for men, over and over and over again.
Part of the problem, I think, is that a lot of those men aren't seizing the opportunities that present themselves because they know in their gut that the perfect storm that persisted from about 1945 to 1970 in this country is going to return, even though it won't.
It's a bit like the person who refuses a life jacket, a ride on a boat, and a helicopter evacuation as they're in peril of drowning in a flood because "God will save them", who in the modern parable I was taught as a Boy Scout then dies only to hear God tell him, "I sent you a life jacket, a boat, and a helicopter." A whole generation of young men think God is going to save them and are ignoring the ways that they can save themselves.
But there's also something to the conservative claim that society is "feminizing". Physically strong men with a culture of honor are actively being selected against in our economy because their strong points are useless, at best, and actively dysfunctional, at worst, in modern society and a modern economy. We now need team players who can worry less about justice for wrongs done, and more about how to create win-win interactions and regularly do business with other people. Smart wimps can add a lot more value to a firm than dumb alpha males. The culture that a lot of rural and Southern men grew up in undermines them in modern society, especially when they weren't socialized differently by going to college, by impairing their ability to function in an environment where sensitivity and brains are what are necessary to keep everything running smoothly.
"they don't much care for race being weaponized."
I read that mostly as, they are upset that they aren't automatically given advantages without having to earn them any more. They've lost relative standing and naturally enough feel hostile towards the policies and mechanisms that took those free rides away from them and leveled the playing field. They aren't being discriminated against, they're just the bottom of the barrel and being treated fairly for the first time so it feels to them like it's unfair.
"the world is changing too fast for them to keep up, and the older they are the further in the past their values were set. . . . . they will seem rudderless to those more in touch with current events."
This is true, and their inability to change and to be open to even considering changing is one of multiple important reasons why they are failing at life. And it is understandable. Who would want to change in order to embrace a world that offers you worse prospects than your similarly situated fathers, uncles, and grandfathers had? But the trouble is that there's no turning back. Time only flows in one direction.
"About the only thing good about Trump that I hear is that "he stuck to the ECE"."
Put slightly differently, they see any prospects of making the system work better for them and people like them as so futile (and that perception isn't entirely wrong), that they just want to burn the whole thing down, like a younger sibling who always loses in Risk or Monopoly and knocks the board off the table instead out of frustration because they can never compete at that as well as their older brothers and sisters.
The Democratic coalition is increasingly made up of people whose prospects improved over the last 50 years and want to continue those trends: women, minorities, non-Christians, educated people, and city people. Their message is hope.
The Republican coalition is increasingly is made up of the people whose prospects have worsened over the last 50 years and want to turn back the clock: uneducated rural white Christian men most of all. Their message is fear.
"I think the lower middle and lower class whites are pretty laid back about race. Kinda live-and-let-live. By now most of them have a cousin or a niece/nephew in a mixed race marriage."
When unskilled white men, unskilled black men, and unskilled Hispanic men finally figure out that they've all lived the same story a few decades apart and have common interests, a political party that can unite them will be much more powerful. And, in a few isolated corners of Hispanic America where Hispanic people identify as "white" like South Texas, the inland empire of California, and parts of Florida, this is starting to happen.
But the GOP has been so intent on scapegoating black and Hispanic men for the hardships working class white people experience in their lives that they've prevented this from happening so far.
If your party shows callous disregard towards police misconduct, unfair criminal courts, immigration policies that hurt decent hard working people, and blatant discrimination against blacks and Hispanics and Muslims who should be your natural allies, your going to prevent yourself from having broad appeal and a big tent.
And, there you have a 1750 word response to a 276 word comment. But, if you didn't like long worded analysis with multiple paragraphs, you wouldn't be reading this blog.
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