The Reactionary Right Mobilizes
 
The Right’s open embrace of the coercive power of the state, the rise of National Conservatism, and the role of the reactionary intellectual sphere in the broader rightwing assault on democracy.
 
New Democracy Americana: https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-reactionary-right-mobilizes

Conservatives ought to embrace the state and use its coercive powers in the fight against the leftist enemy within. This has become a core theme in not-conservative-anymore circles – a striking renunciation of the supposed pillars of modern conservative thought.

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 - which Ahmari saw as naïve and foolish, as the forces of secular liberalism were supposedly threatening to extinguish religious life in the United States.

The only way, therefore, was “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? Especially since, as Ahmari openly admits, it would have to happen against the will of the majority?

Ahmari’s position is aligned with that of other reactionary Catholic thinkers and activists – among them Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, and former attorney general Bill Barr.
The rise of these Catholic illiberals is indicative of a broader realignment on the Right. The modern conservative political project was in many ways defined by an alliance between traditionalist and libertarian strands of anti-liberalism - that alliance is fracturing.

Traditionalists and libertarians claimed to be united in the fight against “communism” - which more specifically meant: against any attempt at leveling traditional hierarchies of wealth, race, gender, and religion. But increasingly, the traditionalist wing wants out of that alliance.

The traditionalists believe they have not gotten what the fusionist bargain promised. In this interpretation, there has been a lot of small government and free market – while the destructive forces of secular humanism and “woke” liberalism were allowed to advance almost unchecked.

These traditionalists believe the future of the Right lies in “National Conservatism.” NatCons combine an embrace of nationalism with a commitment to mobilizing state power in order to impose on the country what they see as the natural and/or divinely ordained order.
 
There have been three NatCon conferences since 2019 – and they represent the “real” America the NatCons desire: 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.

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.

In this essay, published shortly before the 2016 election, Anton made the case for Trump by presenting the Democrats as a fundamental threat to America, akin to the terrorists of 9/11. In many ways, the “Flight 93” mentality has since completely taken over the Right.

Who else is around? Rod Dreher, of course, senior editor at the American Conservative. Dreher has always been enthusiastically anti-liberal. 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: Do as Viktor Orbán does and mobilize the state against your enemies. Dreher is the biggest fan 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.

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 agree that any measure, regardless of how extreme, is 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.
 
Here is the permission structure of reactionary politics: “Real Americans” are constantly being victimized, suffering under the yoke of crazy leftist politics, besieged by “Un-American” forces of leftism; “we” have to fight back, by whatever means.

Does anything that emanates from the (pseudo-)intellectual sphere influence what is happening on the Right in any significant way? There is no simple answer to that question, as it is impossible to quantify the impact.
 
The argument is certainly not that these reactionaries are leading the way. But they are providing intellectual justifications and rationalizations for the anti-democratic radicalization of the Right. And such ideas infiltrate the way people perceive of the world around them.

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 no more room for compromise or retreat. Extreme measures 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. On December 10, for instance, at a fundraising event of the New York Young Republicans Club, 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.” There is a cringy element of self-aggrandizement in such bold proclamations – but this still matters.

These are 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: And they are pursuing this vision they want to impose on the entire country in increasingly aggressive fashion.