As the old baseball saying goes, sometimes “You can’t tell the players without a scorecard.” This became especially true since Curt Flood opened the floodgates to free agency more than fifty years ago when he refused to be treated as disposable property by the owner of the St. Louis Cardinals, one August A. Busch, Jr. Although Flood never benefited, current players should thank him every time their pay gets deposited in their bank accounts, and good for them. [1]
These days it is also difficult to tell political players without a scorecard, and this seems to be particularly true among conservatives. Laura K. Field (LKF) has remedied this situation with her Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, which was published by Princeton University Press earlier this month. LKF is a former academic with a PhD in government from the University of Texas. She is very good at explaining the philosophical and political backgrounds of current conservative thought. The precipitating event of her “long, slow process of extricating myself from the world of conservative intellectualism” is recounted in the brief preface. She had good reason, based on that one experience. Furious Minds is excellent and very fair throughout its 406 pages, including endnote and index (both extensive and very useful).
The signal question answered in Furious Minds is “How did Donald J. Trump unite the Right?” This he has done, from the election of 2016 up until now. And while the demise of MAGA has been forecast recently, in keeping with a recent theme here that is not the way to bet. The MAGA New Right has the will to power and plans to use it. And why not? They have the field to themselves.
The story is one of ideological radicalization – the mutually reinforcing radicalization of intellectuals, politicians, and the movement they led. The men [and they were virtually all men] of the New Right saw Trump as a major opportunity; they egged him and his supporters on, and they brought others into the fold. They saw that he shared some of their extremist, old-school conservative views, and they appreciated that he would use whatever means necessary – including unconstitutional means – to gain and exert power. They are people who sought to leverage real problems, as well as the known vulnerabilities of liberalism, to impose their own homogenizing moral and political vision on the rest of the country. They wanted to turn back the clock on pluralistic liberal democracy, and even on modernity itself. Many were also articulating new visions of the future: new laws, new schemas for education, modes of constitutionalism, traditional communities, and technological utopias.
The various New Right policy prongs are organized around a traditionalist (usually white, Christian, and patriarchal) social vision meant to counter and replace pluralistic liberalism. The New Right views mainstream liberal America – the “woke” America that embraces plurality and equality, including across various formerly marginalized [pathological] identities – as an all-encompassing monolithic regime of elite oppression (which they often also refer to as the “enemy”). Culture warriorism – which we might define as an excessive emphasis on rhetoric and media performance over policy formulation and real-world political negotiation – plays a major role on the New Right because at bottom this is a movement driven by reactionary social values and principles, not specific policy concerns.
This is an apt description. Some believed in Trump, some used Trump and means to an end. And these men were not reluctant to take advantage of the abject fecklessness of conventional liberals of the notional Right and Left, whose solutions to real problems of political economy and society always answer the needs of the rich and well-off. Their rice bowls on both sides of the divide between hard right and soft left are not to be touched, ever.
Who are these people, and where do they get their ideas? According to LKF the New Right as a defining core but is not a monolith and includes three major groups. “The Claremonters idealize the American founding, the Postliberals a particular (religiously inspired conception of the ‘Common Good,’ and the National Conservatives the myth of the traditional American nation.” The Hard Right Underbelly is also present, in the form of a fascinating self-reverential nihilism.
Much of the theoretical apparatus of these three groups goes back to the big “little book” written by Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (1948). Weaver is in interesting study and his work repays the effort. He was from the small town of Weaverville, North Carolina, and taught in the College of the University of Chicago for his entire academic career. Weaver is one source of the “Ideas First” approach to politics that is common on the New Right.
Ideas are important, but they do not exist outside of context. For Weaver, the context was the rural American South of the first half of the twentieth century, which is much more than the conventional presentist view of the South as the one and only one benighted region of the United States. [2] Other philosophical sources for the New Right include Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom, who published one of the ur-texts of the modern conservatism in 1987, The Closing of the American Mind, to acclaim from the Right and criticism from the notional Left:
The New Right generally agrees with Weaver…but they also show why the Ideas First approach is confused. Too often, New Right thinkers find themselves in the awkward position of using intellectual abstractions to defend nativism, rootedness, and love of one’s own. Too often, the recitation of moral ideology is privileged over the practice of good and virtuous deeds…highbrow abstractions smother straightforward real-world truths – about, say, who won which election, who invaded which country and when, or which demographic is being abused and oppressed. And in many instances, “intellectual abstractions” and Ideas First are too generous as phrases, for we are in fact talking about, myths, ideology, and lies.
This is also true of the notional left described so well, initially by Barbara Ehrenreich and more recently by Musa al-Gharbi in We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. The Professional Managerial Class of Ehrenreich is much the same as the Symbolic Capitalists in al-Gharbi’s analysis.
An extended treatment of each representation of the New Right as described by LKF must await the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books treatment, but here we will discuss two primary subjects of Furious Minds as representative of the type. The first is the Postliberal Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame. The second is Adrian Vermeule, also a Postliberal, who is a professor at Harvard Law School.
Deneen is the author of Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Regime Change (2023). As someone who has never thought much of Liberalism, primarily because its individualism works only for the rich who had the good sense to choose the right parents, I read Why Liberalism Failed in the hopes of understanding its fundamental flaws better. I was disappointed, but the book was an eyeopener. Deneen, as described by LKF, believes that:
Liberalism’s latent individualism has destroyed political life and ransacked the natural order. Eventually, Deneen argues, the liberal desire for freedom leads, through paths of “deracination,” “depredation,” and “disintegration,” to despotism. It’s a vicious circle of individualism and statism, of political atomism that fuels state tyranny. And whereas Bloom (in The Closing of the American Mind) presents his story as a warning (one that made a lot of sense), Deneen offers his as an inevitability. This is pure Ideas First determinism: We are doomed because of the ideas that have shaped our lives (and since, for Deneen, liberalism has a static definition, it cannot be ameliorated).
There is some truth here. Liberal politics was supposed to mediate between and among conflicting worldviews after the political strife of Early Modern Europe while protecting the individual’s rights and autonomy. And it has had “disintegrative effects on some dimensions of modern social life and community, especially if one considers liberal economic policies as part of the ledger.” This, of course, depends on the perspective of the observer regarding the economic policies that morphed into the Neoliberal Dispensation. It is difficult to disagree with LKF here:
Deneen…views…the dizzying social, political, and technological changes of recent decades and all he can see is chaos and instability. Meanwhile, many of us – especially those whose lives have benefited from progressive social changes – see reconfiguration rather than destruction and wonder when things have actually been better. I often look around today and compare it to the world of my grandmothers inhabited, and I can’t help but shake my head at men like Bloom and Deneen. [3]
Regime Change was much the same, only more. The title suggests repudiation of our liberal democracy, however lame it has been, especially in the Age of Citizens United in which one dollar equals one vote because “freedom of speech.” Deneen argued for something called:
‘Common-good conservatism,’ which involves a revival of Aristotelian ‘mixed constitutionalism’ and something he called ‘Aristopopulism,’ which means rule by a better class of elites…One of the postliberal changes that Deneen advocated in this vein was the embrace of an overtly Christian state, with holy holidays and tax-funded religious public works.
A “better class of elites” defined by Deneen or anyone else is exactly what we do not need. Patrick Deneen is a professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. These recommendations sound as constitutional as Donald Trump’s implied intention to run for a third term as President despite the 22nd Amendment, which was ratified in February 1951 when Harry Truman was President:
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
One other thing. Deneen can get quite exercised by the failing (in his mind) Institution of Marriage, which he apparently views only as a sacred trust between a man and a woman. It has been a while since I read his two books mentioned here, but I cannot remember that he ever admitted that marriage is also a civil instrument that governs the relationship and legal responsibilities (e.g., inheritance, medical care, power of attorney, end-of-life decisions) between two spouses (if I missed this, I apologize). This is simple willfulness combined with solipsistic meanness and nothing more. But that is common on the New Right. Solipsism is just as common on the notional Left, which is utterly clueless, but not intentionally mean.
Adrian Vermeule is Ralph S. Tyler, Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. Professor Vermeule converted to Roman Catholicism in 2016 and is a Catholic Integralist. As described by LKF, “Catholic integralism is a way of thinking about religion and politics that, in opposition to the modern separation of church and state, and in opposition to dominant strains of contemporary Catholic political thought, advocates for church-state integration and unity.” According to Kevin Vallier, author of All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism, Oxford University Press (2023):
Catholic integralists say that governments must secure the earthly and heavenly common good. God authorizes two powers to do so, they assert. The state governs matters temporal, and the church in matters spiritual. Since the church has a nobler purpose that the state (salvation), it may authorize and direct the state to support it with certain policies, such as enforcing church law. At times, the church may need assistance to advance its objectives.
We do not have time for JD Vance today (but he is not going away), who has been supported by Peter Thiel among others, but note that the new edition of All the Kingdoms of the World “includes a new introduction that spotlights the political rise of JD Vance and religious anti-liberalism in America.” The current MAGA Vice-President is a recent Catholic convert.
Professor Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism (2022) is meant to “reground American constitutional law on its true foundation” rather than on “originalism” or the “living constitution” [4]:
For Vermeule, the conservative the conservative originalist mode is too constrained and needs to be unbound, whereas the liberal mode is too active and individualist and needs to be bound down. Common Good Constitutionalism is the Goldilocks of judicial interpretation since it offers both scope and traditional grounding: If you need to determine whether a law or action, you ask, “Does it serve the common good?” and voila, you have your decision.
Right, the common good. I suppose it would be churlish and too literal minded to ask if the common good of John C. Calhoun (Nullification, among other outrages) and James Henry Hammond (Mudsill) could ever be congruent with the common good as understood by Frederick Douglas or Sojourner Truth or Abraham Lincoln. According to LKF, the book does cover originalism versus the living constitution well. But going back to Plato and Aristotle:
Abstract questions like “What is the good?” are treated as multifarious and difficult. Abstract answers (happiness, flourishing, virtue, social cohesion) are offered by never settled, and tensions between the good of individual persons are always kept alive (think of Athens vs. Sparta)…Adrian Vermeule treats the good differently…as a straightforward and uncontroversial dogma. The common good is, “for the purposes of the constitutional lawyer, the flourishing of a well-ordered political community.
For him this includes justice, peace, abundance, health, safety, and security, as it did for Thomas Jefferson in June-July 1776 and the writers at the Constitutional Convention during the summer of 1787. No one can argue with these six desiderata. But Vermeule did leave out freedom, which is at best a secondary good in his view. I would think freedom (both positive and negative, depending on one’s view of Isaiah Berlin) would be at the top of the list among the New Right. When I think of common good constitutionalism, cost-benefit analysis immediately comes to mind: Whose good, whose benefit? These are entirely contingent on the real world, rather than the world of ideas.
In the past few days there has been much talk about the crackup of MAGA over the Epstein Files, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the failure of MAGA to achieve any of its goals to make life better for Americans not at the top of the income distribution (when you have lost The Spectator…) while sowing discord and beating the war drums based on a misunderstanding of the Monroe Doctrine (but that has been a constant of American history for 200 years). The New Right doctrine of NETTR (No Enemies to the Right) will be put under strain. The Ballroom Builder calling MTG “Marjorie Traitor Greene” is of a piece with much of the New Right in its distemper that will not really help MAGA in the long run. Whatever happens, and a week is a long time in politics, Furious Minds is the essential scorecard for identifying the players of MAGA, and there is much more than can be covered here. LKF brings a deep understanding to the currents and undercurrents of American politics in the Age of Trump. The section on “Bronze Age Pervert” is especially good for those of us who do not click in those circles.
Notes
I do not generally do commercials, but Furious Minds is still available at a 30% discount using the code “PUP30” on the Princeton University Press website. Or better yet, ask your local library to order it, if you still have a local library.
[1] No one deserved to be subject to the Reserve Clause for his entire career, but Curt Flood was a star I remember well from my Little League days. From the Wikipedia link, Flood “was a three-time All-Star, a Gold Glove winner for seven consecutive seasons, and batted over .300 in six seasons. He led the National League (NL) in hits (211) in 1964 and in singles, 1963, 1964, and 1968. Flood also led the National League in putouts as center fielder four times and in fielding percentage as center fielder three times. He retired with the third most games in center field (1683) in NL history, trailing Willie Mays and Richie Ashburn.” A very strong case can be made for his inclusion in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown as a player and prophet, but this is unlikely.
[2] For example, in the Statement of Principles of I’ll Take My Stand (1930), which was written by the Agrarian poet, essayist, and critic John Crowe Ransom, later of Kenyon College and The Kenyon Review. Later several Agrarians contributed to Who Own’s America: A New Declaration of Independence (1936, OP).
[3] Not so very long ago when I was a postdoctoral fellow my mentor was the first woman to be granted tenure in a basic science department at one of the best medical schools in the world. This happened only when the department was evaluated by outside evaluators, who asked “Why has she not been promoted, based on her outstanding research and teaching?” Apparently this had never occurred to the Old Boy Network in charge, which included one Nobel laureate. The current entering class in the medical school at which I work during my day job is 63% women/37% men. When I considered medical school back during the early-1980s, the typical entering class in professional schools was 25-30% women. Today is much better, however “untraditional” it is to privileged white men.
[4] Patrick Deneen’s predictable blurb: “You are holding that rarest of books, one that will change minds, change the terms of debate, and change the future. Adrian Vermeule has written the most important and original book on constitutional theory for this generation. Future scholars, lawyers, and citizens will look back at this book for having sounded the death knell of the seemingly unassailable camps of conservative ‘originalism’ and progressive ‘living constitutionalism,’ revealing them to be exhausted sides of the same devalued liberal coin. More importantly, this book charts a new and better path – a common good constitutionalism grounded in the classical tradition but repurposed for the revitalization of a declining but redeemable republic.”
Yes, all we must do is join the Catholic Integralist Brigade to redeem our republic. Do any of these white men remember the history of Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe? Religion and politics do not mix, then or now, anywhere on planet Earth.
‘In the past few days there has been much talk about the crackup of MAGA over the Epstein Files, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the failure of MAGA to achieve any of its goals to make life better for Americans not at the top of the income distribution’
What may be happening is that MAGA as a movement is re-configuring itself as an America First movement and is shedding such things as Israel First, foreign wars, etc. As such, people like Thomas Massie, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Marjorie Taylor Greene easily find themselves a home there. Trump tries to take credit for the formation of MAGA and acts like he owns it but he is, though his words and actions, is rapidly sidelining himself from that movement. The old MAGA may find itself historically binned with the Tea Party movement as it evolves into an America First movement. The funny thing about an America First movement? It can easily attract leftists – not to be confused with liberals – who find a lot in common with an America First movement such as stopping new foreign wars.
But if it is a White America First movement, treating the Great Replacement Theory as fact, supporting Voting Prevention and Voting Prevention against non White-Power-Eligible citizens, etc. . . . then what will the Left do in that case?
Don´t know how meaningful is the “social conservatism” of the new Right. Maybe more a distraction than anything else. I know an elderly GP, a staunch Catholic and by all means “social conservative” who absolutely rails against the way the 17% or 18% of GDP spent on health is used. His solution: no more privately owned hospitals, no private equity in any medicine. In his words: throwing the money men out of the temple of medicine. Hospitals should be publicly owned and only by as small a public entity (city, village) as possible to make the administrators accountable and no doctor should be forced to administer care not according to the best standard but to how much profit a certain treatment will bring. An altogether horrible socialist that is my GP. In the eyes of MAGA. And the college “left” doesn´t like crusty catholics like him either. But Barbara Ehrenreich would have…All the while Private Equity is laughing all the way to the bank…
Five minutes of reading on The John Birch Society (JBS) tells you most of what you need to know.
When Clinton took the Republicans reason-for-being philosophies such as those of the JBS, previously untouchable, were all that were left to occupy.
Save us from the saviors. I note that J.D. Vance, Adrian Vemeule, and Newt Gingrich are all recent converts to Catholicism. I can assure you that what they are seeking is authoritarianism, not the big buzzing confusion that is Catholicism with all of its rituals, feast days, saints, miracles, and special foods.
Here in Europe, one would define Catholic Integralism as Francoism. It is no accident that many of these fundi Catholics have a strong whiff of Opus Dei and its manias. You know, the thigh pinchers. The cilice.
As a cradle Catholic, bad Catholic, and bad Buddhist, I am nonetheless impressed with the continuing efforts of Italian Catholicism to be something better than Francoism. But then Italy is lucky in its many, many saints — The Poverello of Assisi among them.
This is the usual religious / patriotic gore: “One of the postliberal changes that Deneen advocated in this vein was the embrace of an overtly Christian state, with holy holidays and tax-funded religious public works.”
Yep, I’m in favor of the U S of A putting Mary, the Theotokos, the Gran Madre di Dio, on the nickel. I’ll wait… And Saint Joseph’s Day as a national holiday, with traditional fritters of chickpeas. I”ll wait.
What these clowns want is power. What they don’t want is the Beatitudes getting in their way or inconvenient behavior by Saint Francis of Assisi — kissing lepers and using a stone for a pillow.
I recall one of my sisters, the most observant among us, dismissing Amy Coney Barrett during her hearings: “She isn’t even Catholic.” My sister isn’t exactly a theologian, but she comes like most Catholics, whether observant or, like me, visiting churches only to look at the paintings, from the mystical confusion that is any great religion (see: Shintō).
Thank you – as one who has to deal with traditionalist Catholic relatives, I have sought some refuge in folk Catholicism, which is not dogmatic. Also a refugee from yoga/meditation world here.
My understanding of why Vance converted had nothing to do with accepting the magisterium of the historic Catholic Church, but his adoration of the magisterium of his patron, Peter Thiel, and Thiel’s devotion to (and many say misconceptions about) Rene Girard’s ideas – along with a hefty dose of German jurist Carl Schmitt’s ideas.
I’m a cradle catholic, from a family of east coast jesuits. Drives me nuts how the church has been changing. Growing up my family was all “public service, duty to help the poor” but you can see the protestanism seeping into a lot of Catholic events. Where more of the focus is on personal relationship with christ and not bring christ’s works into the world. I haven’t been to NCYC (national catholic youth confrence) but my friend told me it has a lot of protestant megachurchisms to it. There was a lot of jesuit hate at my catholic high school for being too into works and not enough into the sacred, which is fair, some jesuits end up more like unitarian universalists than catholics. But the opposite direction is also bad. I do think one of the catholic church’s strengths is how both camps can coexist.
It remains weird to me every time people are like “and the church is right wing.” I am biased by who I hang around with, but there are absolutely left wing catholic still out there. Many of them are my friends.
But I can never hate on catholic converts, because lowkey whatever brings them to christ is good. Maybe they will see the light and realize theyre going about things wrong.
matt:
Yep, it’s especially dangerous when Calvinism and its Elect cargo-cult side start seeping into Catholicism. Because Calvinism is so much a part of U.S. culture, the “you’re going to hell” part of Calvinism slops over into Catholic life easily.
One of the reasons that I had to re-consider my ideas about Catholicism in Italy was an interview that I read in an Italian paper not long after I arrived. The interviewer was asking a representative of a lay / secular peace / justice organization about going into coalition with Catholic peace / justice organizations. His answer, more or less, was: Oh, yes, we’re working with the Catholic organizations, and they are often to the left of us.
My problem with converts is converts who arrive in the Catholic church and then decide that they are Plus catholique que le Pape. I don’t want J.D. Vance interpreting Catholic theology and trying to set Pope Francesco on the path to righteousness.
I don’t trust politicians who make a big deal of their religious beliefs in public. (What are they really trying to prove?) Especially Opus Dei followers (and I have known a few – authoritarian, judgemental, and deeply unhappy).
I also am very troubled by Vance pressuring his wife in public to convert to Catholicism. That should be a private conversation between them. it is mean of Vance and cannot turn out well.
Vance wants to be President. The Legions of Saint Kirk will not accept a Hindu First Lady.
If Mrs. Vance won’t convert to Catholicism, then Mr. Vance will find a way to get divorced from her. Maybe he will try forcing her into seeking the divorce.
This discussion reminded me of an excellent book, especially for those struggling with Catholicism – The Sparrow.
The title refers to the verse about not even a sparrow falling to the ground without God noticing. As the events of the book play out, it suggests that while God may notice these things, she also might not care a whole lot. It’s a rather harsh read. I’d suggest that the Vances of the world should read it, but I’m sure they would take away exactly the wrong lesson from it.
Along with J.D. Vance, Adrian Vemeule, and Newt Gingrich as converts to Catholicism, you can also add Tony Blair.
Strongly second your tying these Catholic converts to a scramble for authority. I can add another to your list: Richard John Neuhaus. Neuhaus was the son of a LCMS Lutheran pastor, attended one of the denomination’s residential “prep schools” that prepared them for seminary beginning in 8th grade, and finally, Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. But he split from the conservative denomination in the 60s, becoming a sort of hippie pastor of a poor, mostly black congregation in Brooklyn who preached antiwar sermons.
But something didn’t work for him. He eventually became a right-wing Roman Catholic, founder of First Things, a journal that served as a springboard to these integralists.
Authority is the refuge of the frightened and the lost, and the calling card of the sociopath. Better to seek harmony, to reconcile with reality rather than trying to hide behind the skirts of some strong man or institution.
Great quote!
The US Catholic Bishops issued a statement in response to vilification of immigrants, deportations ect.
“The Church’s concern for neighbor and our concern here for immigrants is a response to the Lord’s command to love as He has loved us (John 13:34)”
My daughter is in catholic middle school and the diocese here also issued a similar statement due to concern and outright fear from the families here.
I think Americans are basically conservative in the broad sense- they don’t want radical change, arbitrary actors, and ‘will to power’. I can’t see maga ever succeeding here. Most people just aren’t going to go along with that. We see that in all approval numbers now. It’s all arrows pointing down.
The Bishops statement:
https://www.usccb.org/news/2025/us-bishops-issue-special-message-immigration-plenary-assembly-baltimore
I wonder how long the Catholic rightists can stay allied with the Protestant Evangelicals when their theologies are so different. A marriage of convenience till they have burned all the seculars at the stake? A strong strain of political thought in the Darbyite heretical type of American Protestantism seems to be centered around the desire to Make Christianity Judaism Again, returning us to an Old Testament patriarchate with public stonings and all that sort of thing. Even while saying “Jesus” every other sentence. Picking up where Rushdoony left off. I can’t see the Catholic hierarchy going along with that unless there is a large scale replacement of the men in the current College of Cardinals.
It’s easy: they are not Catholics, or even real Christians. My view about Christianity is that we believe because we are sinners–in the present tense. Those who believe that they are not sinning and are therefore entitled to cast the first stone are not Christians, but Satanists.
Like you DJG, I am a lifelong Catholic of, ahem, indifferent piety and adherence. The tent is truly gigantic, and the squabbles therein predictable.
I try to remind myself that the Church is NOT the magisterium, no matter the latter’s stolen valour in that regard. Converts, in my experience, don’t understand the distinction. I try to avoid them.
According to LKF the New Right as a defining core but is not a monolith and includes three major groups.
These three groups may form the intellectual underpinning but that is not enough to answer the question posed: “How did Donald J. Trump unite the Right?”
A more realistic answer is that Trump got a lot of help from the Deep State and a committed group of Rightists that stoked white resentment.
First off … why Trump? Most plausible answer: because McCain died.
McCain was the first to try to tame the Conservative Movement for the Establishment. And McCain was close with virtually every top political leader – including Hillary.
Furthermore, the Clintons were family friends of the Trumps. And both Bill Clinton and Trump were close with Epstein.
Trump sailed through the 2016 Republican Primaries while his good friend Hillary faced a bogus candidate in the form of Bernie (“enough with the emails!”). Nothing to see here?!?!
Meanwhile, the mysterious QAnon preached “Trust the Plan” – sending the message to get behind Trump as he played the “populist outsider”. But his actions have been anything but:
– “Lock her up!”?? Nope.
– “Drain the Swamp?” Nope.
– “America First?” Nope.
– “Peacemaker?” Nope.
– Release the JFK+Epstein files? Nope.
I haven’t read the book so I don’t know if the author deals with this issue. But the key contradiction among those calling themselves “conservatives” in the US has always been between those for whom the term evokes, or is actually synonymous with, “authority” – political, religious, intellectual, military – and the deep tradition of individualism and rhetoric of “liberty” – libertarianism – that must be overcome for actual conservatives to gain legitimacy to rule. True “conservatives” in the European sense can write books and articles and discuss political philosophy amongst other elites. But they cannot gain support from the masses based on their honest beliefs. For that reason, “conservatives” who seek political power have always had to pose as defenders of “liberty.” “We want to preserve your freedom” against the dangers of “Eastern Bankers,” “Socialism,” “Big Government,” “political correctness,” “the International Jewish Conspiracy,” “the New World Order,” etc., etc. That has *always* been the problem for “conservatives” in the US who seek popular support. Academics who write books about the “radical Right” often downplay this contradiction. They emphasize the dangers of fascist ideology in militia movements and Christian reconstructionism, but they minimize the “libertarian” element among many followers who pay lip service to such movements.
That tension between the elitists at the top and their libertarian followers is always the problem “conservatives” in the US have to overcome. It is breaking out into the open among the MAGA folks today, as it has in the past.
Ken Burns’ The American Revolution is unspooling on PBS this week and I think it is one of his better shows (the aging Burns has collaborators for this one). He is coming to praise, not condemn, the Founders while also not treating them as plaster saints. We are a country created by rationalists but not liberals in any current sense.
And what they very much believed in was a social contract that would maintain order and above all prosperity (they were upper class) and reject arbitrary power. Their bible was something called Common Sense which punctured the premises of old Europe and most especially inherited monarchy.
Meanwhile Trump’s MAGA wants to make the country 1890 great rather than 1776 great. He’s the very definition of arbitrary power and aims to set up a dynasty of buffoons like himself. He was only elected by promising change while planning a different kind of throwback change. Nobody voted for this other than the billionaires behind him at the swearing in.
So no its not about ideas but about power–our deep down monkeybrain on steroids. Seems we’ll never get rid of it even if we did once have a moment of common sense.
I think political theorists think too much. I don’t think successful political movements usually have a “clear ideology.” They can’t, because they operate by bringing disparate groups with incompatible ideas together. They may come up with an “ideology,” but if so, if they are to have any kind of durability, it has to be and stay “mushy” (Roy Rogers was wrong–the Democratic Party of the old was designed that way for a good reason.)
I think we can chalk up Trump’s success so far to the inchoate nature of his ideology–if one could call it that. But his unraveling, I think, can be attributed to his clear inability to keep things suitably confused–it took a lot of worj from highly capable people to keep the Dems mushy in Roy Rogers’ day–something that was never properly appreciated.
I think you mean ” Will” Rogers.
Oops, yes. I always get them mixed up.
There is much to be reactionary about for the conservatives. The social norms – particularly regarding gender relations – have changed pretty much in the last decade or two, down from the ivory towers. The consequences must be pretty annoying for them – so much that only Donald Trump would be effective in the dirty job of reversing the glorious liberal Long March Through The Institutions. The following item should not be missed in the subsequent LKF analysis:
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-great-feminization/
on the topic of abstract ideals. i keep having conversations with my chinese friends where they describe the chinese surveillance state and i describe american gun laws. they say they have security cameras everywhere, so any time there is a crime it is immediately spotted and prosecuted. guy in my lab says on the roads there are these cameras (similar to what they have replaced toll booths with here) that flash a big light at you and check who you are, if you have a license, if you are wearing a seatbelt, license plates. this is real, they also use it for jaywalking, article here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-20/china-deploys-ai-cameras-to-tackle-jaywalkers-in-shenzhen/9567430
i was horrified when i heard of this. i guess i really do value freedom. but then once you go too far on freedom you get stand your ground law and all its issues. i genuinely dont know which option is better. it’s so hard to optimize goals for large states like an empire. i get stressed every time i think about it and end up focusing on a smaller system like my hometown where you can actually implement something and be pretty sure it’s improving the world.
The problem I can see with any top-down social rules enforcement system, even when most of the “heavy lifting” is done through self-rectification due to cues like ubiquitous surveillance, is that when the Top changes, so do the rules to suit the new policies of that new top tier elite. In such a system, there is no surety, no resting state, no personal feeling of absolute calm and safety. This makes for a paranoid and dysfunctional society. Easy to rule over, perhaps, but equally, not capable of uniting to resist stresses and crises.
The eternally d—ed Magrat Thatcher said: “There is no such thing as society.” Without society, all you have left is savagery. Look around you today. The signs are all there.
Stay safe.
Great essay, KLG. I learned a lot and had a good time doing it.
I do want to push back a bit on your discussion of the “common good.” There are attempts to define the term more concretely, and a lot of thought has gone into the effort. Kate Raworth uses the UN’s “17 Sustainable Goals” as the inner ring of her Doughnut (while the 9 Planetary Boundaries constitute the outer ring) as a way for communities or biophysical regions (like a watershed of a smaller river) to plan to meet people’s needs while staying within the Earth’s limits.
I join in your praise of Mr. Flood. He was part of that ’64 Cardinals team that beat a Yankees team with Mantle, Maris and Ford. The Cards countered with Gibson, Flood, Ken Boyer (his brother was the Yanks’ SS), Lou Brock and a young catcher named McCarver. I was lucky enough to have a 5th grade teacher who was a baseball fan, and we listened to the school-time games in their entirety.
You touched on something very important in noting that some used Trump as a means to an end. This speaks to Trump not being a particularly powerful or authoritarian president who is easily manipulated by those with bad intentions. We’ve heard for years that he simply repeats what the last person he was talking to told him, which accounts for a lot of the rambling inconsistency. IMO, the ones to worry about are Vance, Thiel and the others in that entourage.
As for Vermeule leaving out freedom from his list of common goods, well, people don’t need freedom when Jesus H Surveilling Xrist is in charge, do they? All they need to do is OBEY!
Cue the ‘Optics Dei’ jokes!
Thank you for the reporting KLG.
Most articles posted here have a little summary that is presented in the preview section. (Sorry, I don’t know what words to use to describe that preview section.) Anyway, yours just starts with the first paragraph of your article which is not helpful as a summary. Anyway the summaries are really useful, in case you’re not aware of them.
How convenient for Dineen, who almost certainly considers himself a better kind of elite, that his ideas should include a place for him at or comfortably near the top. We are reminded that the brain evolved after the stomach, and could be called ‘the justifier’.
As concerns the constitution, we can refer to a couple of books here. One, more ideological, is “Towards an American Revolution”, by Jerry Fresia; the other is the very careful and scholarly “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States” by Charles Beard, a classic. We find that the document in question was an opportunistic power grab by its authors and the interests they represented, rammed through in an antidemocratic process including in some cases violence and intimidation. It sanctifies the contract, and so the inviolability of debt agreements. There is a claim going around that the phrase “We, the people”, crafted by the elitist Governor Morris, was cribbed from the Iroquois to give a democratic flavor to this elite manifesto, the authors of which were bitterly opposed to the interests of the majority of their country (see Federalist no. 10). However, it is a part of our national mythology that the founders are accorded a religious reverence, which is probably where we get this school of original literalism which reminds us so much of Salafis in MENA. Of course the thing is a living document: the 18th and 21st amendments are right there for us to read.
Like any institution, our country is ruled by people, not ideas; it is of questionable value to have to hew so closely to tradition, something Thomas Paine would have called “rule by dead men”.
What class to these new thinkers represent? It has been tradition for right wing think tanks to merely offer new ideological vessels for the protection of extractive industry and the capitalist class writ large, and I see nothing different here. Well-to-do reactionaries groping around for a reason to continue with their comfortable lives.
They may have been aristocrats of money (and slaves) but not of “breeding”–the thing the Euros took so seriously. For a long time we were the United States of upward mobility which is a kind of democracy.
I think this is important and am not willing to be Charles Beard cynical about it. That Declaration–whatever the motives of the authors (and are we such infallible mind readers?)–was revered by oh say Ho Chi Minh.
As for MAGA–it’s all noise really.
Aurelien, in today’s links, seems to me to offer a better assessment of Dineen’s point (drawn, I imagine, from Alastair MacIntyre) than that found here.
I hope so! God bless our pluralist comments section. There’s no nuance in the easy way I assigned a selfish motivation to Mr. Dineen. I’m reminded of something I read in Musa al Gharbi’s We Have Never Beeen Woke: the author warns us against cynical attributions, because, he says, the brain just works that way; we shouldn’t attach a moral judgment to such seemingly self-serving stuff from intellectuals.
Vicky, you may warm to this evergreen JK Galbraith quote:
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
There is a website called oceanofpdf where you could find this book. It’s legal to download it in my country, but other people may better use VPN.
One of the reasons Patrick Deneen’s book “Why Liberalism Failed,” gained global attention is because it was recommended by (among others) Barack Obama (see Barack Obama Recommends “Why Liberalism Failed,” Institute of Advanced Studies in Culture 2018).
It is also the case that many of Deneen’s early intellectual heroes were communitarians along with more left-sympathetic thinkers like Wendell Berry and Christopher Lasch. It was Vermeule’s review of “Why Liberalisim Failed” that may have contributed to Deneen abandoning his original localism to advocate for a greater role for state power. His latest book, “Regime Change,” goes further and endorses a type of Aristopopulism in which a new conservative elite (perhaps including Deenen himself) endorse the wisdom of church-going. (See “Post Liberalism: A Genealogy” Telos, Number 212, Fall 2025)
I look forward to reading this book. I am presently convinced that the New Left critique of American foreign policy during the 1960s also had a significant role in influencing a portion of the MAGA Right. (See Mike Benz statements about this and his apparent role in turning Tucker Carlson into a critic of our Imperial State.)
Hard to judge without reading, but it sounds like more willful misreading of the situation by liberal academia. No one with tenure had anything to do with what is happening on the right.
To begin to understand what is happening, it might be helpful to look at a list of every conservative thinker and writer that was cancelled by Buckley and his minions. It’s a long list but at the top there’s Sam Francis, Joe Sobran, Peter Brimelow and John Derbyshire.
In my experience, most on the left have never heard of these people, just like many had never heard of Charlie Kirk before he was murdered.
The fight going on now on the right is both a two- and four-way fight between establishment conservatives and neocons on the one side, and national conservatives and anti-conservative right-wingers motivated primarily by race on the other.
Whenever I hear “common good” I insist that two questions be answered:
For whom?
To whom?