To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.
—MICHAEL OAKESHOTT
In today’s America, being a proud virgin is no easy task.
—BEN SHAPIRO
The right wing in America is like Dracula: a grotesque avatar of inherited wealth who is unkillable, casts no reflection in mirrors, and lives off the blood of peasants. Ever since the modern conservative movement was birthed from William F. Buckley Jr.’s unholy womb, the American Right has mutated into more and more grotesque forms, reaching its logical apex in the election of Donald Trump. As of this writing, right-wingers control every branch of government with only about 30 percent of the country actually supporting them. After conservatives sat humiliated on the sidelines for the first half of the twentieth century, the apparition of St. Reagan in 1979 restored ancient conservative rule, standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” at black voters and anyone trying to obtain affordable health care. To be a modern-day conservative means you think golf is fun, cigars are cool, and wearing a suit every day is a fascinating hobby.
Who are these people? And how can they possibly be defeated?
Even though the standard American lib might desire many of the same “good” things as you and I, their politics have a congenital defect that makes them easy marks for capital and empire. Their problem is not only their beliefs but also their lack of conviction. Conservatives, on the other hand, have no such void at their core. They know what they want, and they have a political vision for how to get it. The problem is simply that what they want is all bad. To put it another way, America’s liberals are the good cops. They appear in viral videos in which they play basketball with diverse teens, participate in charity bike races, and look the other way only on evidence-planting and extrajudicial murder. Conservatives are the bad cops, right down to their Oakley shades, strained to the breaking point as they wrap around their fat, pink heads.
In what passes for conservatives’ moral vision, they embody all the worst demons of Protestantism and capitalism. They’re the living, breathing id of hierarchy and oppression. A descendant of America’s Calvinist tradition, modern secular conservatism exists to settle the same pinched-faced hysterics into a comfortable and pampered suburban existence. Despite its religious affectations, conservatism long ago replaced God with country, which allows them to directly worship America as both their lord and personal friend while celebrating the same petty and punitive characteristics that defined an earlier deity. To the conservative, America’s vast wealth and power are signs of its goodness, because if there’s one thing the Bible is clear about in both the Old and New Testaments, it’s that rich and powerful empires are good and blessed by God.
So what does “America” mean to a conservative? What do they really believe in? The answer to both questions is, of course: freedom. America is a shining beacon of freedom, with a hype man called “liberty.” It’s the best country because it’s the freest country, and, as such, the greatest country that God—which is also America—ever created. A liberal will most likely snort at this, cough up their kombucha, fall off their tassled-handlebarred bicycle, and get up off the pavement just long enough to say that conservatives have traditionally been violently opposed to the freedom of most people in American history. They would be right, but are, as usual, missing the more important point, which is that, to a conservative, freedom means something very different from what a normal person imagines.
In the right-wing vernacular, freedom means the freedom to exercise one’s God-given right to dominate anyone deemed lower than you. This includes rich over poor, men over women, employers over employees, white over black, and America over the rest of the world. This is why, in the conservative mythology, there are few greater enemies than “big government.” In the modern era, it’s usually the federal government that has unjustly intervened in this natural order.
During the George W. Bush years, Thomas Frank asked in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas? why average, salt-of-the-earth types consistently vote for a party so transparently dedicated to fucking them over. The answer given by liberals is usually that the conservative movement is running a massive grift wherein they trick their marks into voting against their own economic interests by catering to their prejudices through a number of “social” issues and culture-war signifiers like abortion and gay marriage. In other words, conservatives run on gays, guns, and God as they dismantle the public sector and facilitate the upward transfer of wealth once they get into office.
While it’s true that anyone who’s not a millionaire or richer is voting against their economic interests by supporting Republicans, the same could be said of the modern Democratic Party as well, and this idea that the Republican base is being “tricked” lets them off the hook too easily. Enough of the red-state rubes in question might vote against economic domination if the Democrats offered an alternative, but in the absence of that, liberals would do well to realize that, to the traditionally minded, the maintenance of racial, religious, and gender hierarchies does, in fact, deliver the goods to the roughly one-third of this country that identifies as conservative. They do get something tangible from this deal: resistance against bathroom sickos, the petty privilege of being white, and the cathartic sadism of American military conquest and warfare.
Conservative religion holds that the representatives of that sadism, its prophets, are the tough, stoic heirs to America’s rugged frontier tradition. But the collection of penguin-shaped dunces in Under Armour polos and khaki shorts grazing through America’s exurbs tends to spoil this myth. These war-dads and bow-tie perverts are unable to reconcile their actual lives with the values of primitive domination and masculine authority they hold so dear. This dynamic is best embodied by political philosopher, neocon godfather, and genuine Harvard professor of “manliness” Harvey Mansfield, who once told the New York Times he displays his own strength and masculine prowess by “lifting things” and “opening things” for his wife, “who is quite small.” Mansfield noted that his lifting included “furniture. Not every night, but routinely.” I
Since the noble qualities conservatives obsess over have been bureaucratized out of existence in the “civilized” West, they fetishize military “operators,” cowboys, and business entrepreneurs, imagining themselves to be rebelling against modern culture. Unbearable, treacly self-regard gives them a lump in their throat when they think of parades, the flag, baseball, and other people running into machine-gun fire on D-Day. Books with names like The Patriot’s Playbook and American Lion: How to Thrive in Life after Marriage sit on their nightstands. Their lives are the epitome of the much-derided “safe space,” and they are constantly offended by everyone and everything who ever hurt their feelings or, even worse, hurt the feelings of America.
Ironically, becoming a popular movement is precisely what undermined the right-wing project drawn up by its founding intellectuals: guys like William Buckley and Russell Kirk—names that no conservative will know in fifty years—planned to build a Platonic kingdom of logical, limited government that funneled society’s wealth to deserving aristocrats, where intellectuals would become philosopher kings over the simple masses. But that required popularizing their ideology and mobilizing the hoopleheads to win elections, which in turn required a much more rigorous apparatus of power and propaganda than the Republicans of old.
Over time, supported by the money of anemic oligarchs who saw the potential to rubber-stamp their (fairly nonideological) capital accumulation, the conservative brainiacs and think-tankers preached culture war, states’ rights, small government, and low taxes. They smuggled in right-wing economics, something middle America didn’t care about, by draping it in cultural bullshit, something middle America couldn’t get enough of. And, as Frank’s book argued, it played pretty well. For a long time they masterfully triangulated racial and class resentments to enrich the upper classes while the Democrats gave up trying to offer alternatives. Within a couple of decades, the New Deal was dying, and “conservatism” was back, with an ideology, a coalition, presidents in office, and a vast customer base—er, voter base—of angry, aging white cranks.
Only problem was, by opening the doors to the CHUDs and the riffraff, the Republicans let in a bunch of wackjobs who actually believed the intellectuals’ Noble Lie, or at least pretended to in order to out-crazy an increasingly batshit wave of GOP populists. As the years rolled on, the movement’s homophobia, racism, and authoritarianism started to unnerve even the very ghouls who set the whole thing in motion.
The Republican Party has certainly conquered American politics. The catch, however, is that in the meantime, American culture could not be more inhospitable to them. The monster created by the effete intellectuals may now turn against its masters. Donald Trump is a stupid, gauche, uncultured philistine whose unabashed jingoism and racism has probably inaugurated a new era of right-wing Blood and Soil politics—which, believe it or not, hinders the interests of the well-manicured, multinational cartel of rich Republican vampires that nurtured the conservative movement.
Now, before we forecast where that nightmare project is ultimately headed, let’s meet some of those aforementioned philosopher kings and queens who founded this dark universe.
Like any good political movement, American conservatism draws on its own tradition of writers and thinkers that make it vital, complex, and, most important, extremely fucking funny. Despite being caricatured as less of an ideology than a series of “irritable mental gestures,” “the incessant whining of collicky adult babies,” or “thinly veiled justifications for base prejudice and ignorance,” the conservative movement does have a proud intellectual heritage of hating anything intellectual. Great minds like Ben Shapiro or Megan McArdle weren’t just hatched as fully pupated geniuses—they were the inheritors of a long and storied conservative canon of truly impressive men and women who have shaped the world we live in today.
RUSSELL KIRK
“Who?” you’re probably asking. And you would be right to do so. Russell Kirk hasn’t been relevant to American conservatism since Gerald Ford last fell down a flight of stairs, but there are still some pencil-necks out there (mostly employed by the New York Times op-ed page) who will insist that “conservative” doesn’t refer to goose-stepping neo-fascists and snake-handling religious fanatics. You’ve got it all wrong, they insist. Conservatism is a rich intellectual tradition!
To make the case, they can’t point to the collection of televangelists, game show hosts, carnival barkers, and anime characters who inspire contemporary reactionary thought, so they dust off ol’ Russ. Kirk was a grumpy Catholic paleocon who called automobiles “mechanical Jacobins” and whose books are filled with such sterling insights as “Tradition is good; that’s why it’s traditional” and “Christianity, gotta have it.” The next time some bow-tied dingus brings up Russell Kirk after the speaker of the House proposes giving cops rocket launchers, remember that the last person to read Kirk was required to do so for David Brooks’s Yale class about humility.
JERRY FALWELL AND PAT ROBERTSON
The Master Blaster of rising theocracy, Falwell and Robertson spearheaded the radicalization of American evangelical Christians. Before this power duo came along, most God-touched citizens steered clear of political organizing and, in many cases, voting. “That’s the devil’s bidness,” they would remark before returning to their humble beet harvest. It was only in the 1970s, when Big Government Liberals started interfering with their noble folkways, that evangelical Christians awakened politically.
No, it wasn’t the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion that broke the camel’s back. Common mistake. It was actually the federal government’s efforts to strip tax-exempt status from segregated Christian private schools. Something had to be done to stop this godless assault on traditional values. Jerry Falwell, who’d founded a radio show called the Old-Time Gospel Hour and Klanbake as a youth and spent the 1950s and ’60s barnstorming against integration, founded the Moral Majority in 1979 to protest the loss of Bob Jones University’s tax exemption for the “crime” of forbidding black students from attending. He was helped in his mission by Pat Robertson, another Baptist fire-eater whose 700 Club show kept generations of Christian shut-ins company while they wrote outraged letters to PBS about Henrietta Pussycat’s whorish ensembles.
These Pentecostal Powerhouses combined to turn the 1980s into the decade when white Christians woke up to the necessity of fighting the culture war at the ballot box. Along the way, Falwell sued Larry Flynt for writing that he fucked his sister, resulting in a landmark Supreme Court decision that has freed trolls to own the shit out of public figures with no consequences ever since.
Robertson actually ran for president in the Republican primary in 1988, but lost to human charisma volcano George H. W. Bush. In later years Falwell and Robertson both presided over religious colleges that spit out class after class of glassy-eyed true believers who filled the ranks of the W. Bush administration. The Bush years were also the high point for Robertson’s and Falwell’s most insane public statements: blaming 9/11 on feminists, blaming Hurricane Katrina on voodoo, and defending Liberian dictator Charles Taylor (who awarded Robertson a gold-mining concession in his country). Robertson also touted a pancake mix that he claimed gave him the ability to leg press two thousand pounds.
AYN RAND
In the pantheon of great Russian novelists, names like Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Bulgakov spring to mind. Missing from the usual suspects is Rand, whose catalog is richer than that of all those goofies put together. Perhaps the single greatest popularizer of the “libertarian” strain of right-wing thought, Ayn Rand immigrated to America in 1926 after the Bolshevik Revolution and immediately began her own American success story. She traveled to Hollywood with dreams of being a screenwriter, and a chance meeting with Cecil B. DeMille scored her the role of “Jewess #2” in the biblical epic The King of Kings. She went on to write a batshit manual advising Hollywood studios on how best to glorify industrialists and stamp out Communism.II
Don’t preach the superiority of public ownership as such over private ownership. Don’t preach or imply that all publicly-owned projects are noble, humanitarian undertakings by grace of the mere fact that they are publicly-owned—while preaching, at the same time, that private property or the defense of private property rights is the expression of some sort of vicious greed, of anti-social selfishness or evil. . . .
Don’t spit into your own face, or, worse, pay miserable little rats to do it.
You, as a motion picture producer, are an industrialist. All of us are employees of an industry which gives us a good living. There is an old fable about a pig who filled his belly with acorns, then started digging to undermine the roots of the oak from which the acorns came. Don’t let’s allow that pig to become our symbol.
Despite her early success in Tinseltown, Rand didn’t really become famous in America until she published The Fountainhead, her novel about an architect named Howard Roark who is better than everyone else. By creating a character who was supposed to be the coolest guy ever and who directly said all the things she believed, Rand took literature to a brave and bold new place. She would use this technique again in her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, a novel about a big, powerful train that also features a character who was the greatest person who ever lived and said exactly what Rand believed, sometimes for stretches of ninety pages, all of it shimmering prose.
Rand knew that before her arrival, art and fiction were mostly tools for the weak and desperate to blame others for their lot in life. A true revolutionary, she embedded in her fiction a competing philosophy, a holistic system of ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics. She called this system “Objectivism,” because it was objectively true. This system held that man is an inherently heroic being and that individual happiness and fulfillment is the only moral good one should aspire to. During a famous appearance on the game show You Bet Your Life, she told host Groucho Marx that Objectivism came only “out of my own mind, with the sole acknowledgment of a debt to Aristotle, the only philosopher who ever influenced me.” To which Groucho retorted, “Try telling that to Nietzsche!” and then ashed his cigar in her lap.
Like all great philosophers, Rand realized that her system of ethics didn’t mean anything unless she possessed a cadre of credulous rich people hanging off her every word. So, she created the Collective, a group of what the weak and timid usually call “friends,” who would meet at her apartment to go over the latest draft of Atlas while Rand berated them for their many personal failings. A young Alan Greenspan was an early acolyte and member of the Collective who would go on to apply the Objectivist beliefs of anti-altruism and ethical megalomania to great effect as chairman of the Federal Reserve. In perhaps her most glorious philosophical triumph, Rand broke up the marriage of two members of the Collective so she could keep having sex with the guy using only reason, facts, and logic.
Rand’s legacy in right-wing thought is clear. Not only did she write several thousand pages’ worth of pseudo-philosophical drivel that declared the highest moral good was achieved in being the biggest asshole possible, but, in elevating reason as supreme among all human faculties, she was the first philosopher to elevate facts over feelings.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Gilbert Keith Chesterton is the favorite writer of a particular type of American reactionary: the Trad(itional)Cath(olic). He taught a generation of religious weirdos that piety can be funny and thoughtful and that wearing tarp-sized tweed jackets and a cape while carrying a walking stick is a cool look. Chesterton was Edwardian England’s most eloquent advocate for distributism, a Catholic social and economic system that contemporary TradCaths embrace, more (skepticism of big-government socialism) or less (actually distributing anything to anyone). Like many of the Catholic Church’s most ardent defenders, Chesterton was a convert, which made him directly opposed to the Church’s fiercest critics and those heretics who actually had to grow up in it.
An extremely prolific writer, Chesterton was a poet, columnist, critic, and lay theologian who is best known for creating the famous character Encyclopedia Brown. A legendary wit, Chesterton is beloved by contemporary conservatives for his many deliciously quotable lines, such as “The worst part of being an educated man is receiving an education,” “The thing I love most about writing is not writing,” and “I owe my considerable girth to my beloved mother, who, when she sat around the house, sat around the house.”
Unfortunately, his body of work and reputation as a beloved doddering fatso were undone when it came out that his writing inspired C. S. Lewis to believe in God and write a stilted and punishing fantasy series that ruined the tender minds of a generation of children. In addition to incessantly coining acerbic phrases, Chesterton also enjoyed other pastimes beloved by contemporary conservatives, such as civil debate, anti-Semitism, and sweating while he ate.
PAUL KERSEY
The original “liberal who got mugged by reality,” Paul Kersey was a softhearted Upper West Sider whose heart bled for the poor and unfortunate until Jeff Goldblum and his gang of savage thugs brutally attacked his wife and daughter. Instead of checking his privilege or retreating to his safe space, Paul went out into the mean streets of Manhattan to deal out hot lead to thieves and vandals. This hard right turn mirrored much of American culture in the late 1970s and early ’80s as liberal, soft-on-crime policies led to gang rule in the streets.
Tough on crime and strongly in favor of the Second Amendment, Kersey had a Death Wish for the criminals who endangered law-abiding American citizens and a Life Wish for Constitutional Liberty. He also once lit up an entire South Bronx neighborhood with a Browning .50 cal. That was awesome. Whenever you read the comments on a local news article about crime in which every other response is a guy fantasizing about burying hip-hop thugs up to their necks and driving a John Deere over them, you’re taking part in the conservative style pioneered by Mr. Kersey.
FRED FLINTSTONE
In the conservative worldview, the anchor of society is a strong father figure. All good things flow from a strong family unit, and you can’t have one of those without a man who pays the bills and lays down the law. As the prototypical blue-collar guy and paterfamilias, Fred Flintstone was one of the first models of fatherly virtue. Fred was a lover of simple things: rock bowling, driving his rock car, drinking rock beer, and killing pterodactyls for fun.
Untainted by postmodern influences, Fred showed that things were better when the man was the head of the house. He belonged to fraternal organizations like the Water Buffalo Lodge and the John Bauxite Society, which encouraged civil leadership and homogeneous communities. Fred always insisted on ordering as many brontosaurus ribs as he wanted, regardless of Mayor Rockberg’s whining that it was “too much” and would “tip his car over.” Fred created an intellectual justification for wishing you lived in the distant past that conservatives have been cribbing from ever since.
WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.
The true godfather of modern conservatism, William Francis Buckley Jr. did more to advance the intellectual case for conservative principles than anyone else in the latter half of the twentieth century. He did all this despite being technically dead since the late seventies. As a writer, thinker, and social gadfly, Buckley remains an iconic figure on the right. He’s still regarded as a great mind because he affected a toff accent and was on television a lot. He remains so beloved that even his darting, gila monster–like eyes and tongue are often described by writers even worse than he was as “energetic” or possessing a certain “twinkle.” This impressive appearance made him a memorable party guest and a formidable opponent of civil rights.
Not much is known about Buckley’s early life; he first appears as a member of Yale’s Skull and Bones society, where he quickly rose to prominence by spending the longest time ever jacking off in a coffin. “I feel quite at home in here, Duckie!” he was once quoted as saying during a particularly successful initiation rite. Buckley’s name does crop up again in the public record during his two years working as a professional snitch for the CIA in the fifties; however, it has long been speculated that he was a guinea pig in the Agency’s infamous “Operation F.A.U.N.T.L.E.R.O.Y.,” a Cold War–era mind-control program designed to create the most insufferably precious fancy lad of all time.
After emerging as a fully formed dandy from the Ivies and the Agency, Buckley got his start in politics as a lickspittle for Joe McCarthy and would go on to lend his name and every cliché he could muster to virtually every crackpot right-wing movement or group in America and every blood-drenched dictatorship overseas. He did this as the founder of the premier journal of conservative thought, the National Review, for which he penned classic lines such as “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail [over black people because] . . . it is the advanced race” and “Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals” and something to the effect of: I was dead wrong about apartheid in the American South back then but am correct about apartheid in South Africa now.
In both “life” and death, Buckley is often positioned against his great nemesis, Gore Vidal, whom he famously called a “qwee-ah!” on national television. The clash of these two titans of the Left and Right makes for an interesting contrast. On one hand you have Vidal, who produced a major body of work, including dozens of novels and plays and hundreds of essays touching on every aspect of American history, literature, and politics; on the other you have Buckley, who wrote a book about how there are too many Jews at Yale, a few lyrical essays about how much he loved sailing, and a series of spy novels in which a thinly veiled alter ego named Blackford Oakes fucks the queen of England. Vidal and Buckley’s famous spat on television is also funny because it involved Buckley calling Vidal a homo and then threatening to beat him up in the gayest way possible.
Buckley died around 1977, but his shambling cadaver maintained a bizarre form of “un-life” until 2008, robotically churning out columns, making TV appearances, and taking young men sailing. His influence on the American Right is still deeply felt. While many people believe Buckley defined the parameters of the modern right wing, his really lasting contribution is the creation of a pretentious writing style aped by every single slob, moron, and dork to come out of a college Republican group and land bylines in Buckley’s characteristically undead magazine.
MURRAY ROTHBARD AND HANS-HERMANN HOPPE
One of the many ways in which libertarianism is like Scientology is that both organizations try to ease new recruits in. Scientologists don’t bring up Xenu and volcanoes full of dead aliens until one has already signed the trillion-year contract; they start with e-meters and diet tips. Similarly, when libertarians make their pitch to skeptical youth, they tend to emphasize the commonsense, “economics 101” writings of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. Capitalism is just choice! Everybody loves choice, right? It’s only later, after one has hosted an awkward campaign fund-raiser for Bob Barr and named one’s firstborn Bitcoin that they offer up the hard stuff.
Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe took the fuzzy, freedom-loving logic of libertarianism to its logical endpoint, a place that most of the uninitiated would consider a nightmare of inhumanity. Rothbard, who didn’t leave the island of Manhattan until his forties due to an intense fear of bridges and tunnels, realized that a political system based on property had a child problem: Children don’t own property and they don’t work, so what is the basis for their claim to rights? His answer was: they don’t have one. Children are the property of their parents, who can dispose of them as they wish. They can’t kill them, of course (that would violate the non-aggression principle), but they could starve them to death or, if they’re angling for a trip to Branson, sell them.
For his part, Hoppe reached the conclusion—inescapable, but unspoken by most mainstream libertarians—that democracy is incompatible with liberty. Property is the basis for freedom, so society is, obviously, a mutual agreement among property owners. All functions of the state should be privatized. What about people who don’t own property? asks the nerd. They don’t have rights, bitch, answers Hoppe. Hoppe argued that the most “natural” form of government was feudal aristocracy, and that the imposition of the taxation and redistribution associated with liberal democracy was in fact far worse than the serfdom of an earlier era. Hoppe’s biggest idea was that because democracy is majoritarian by nature, the majority of people will choose to be protected from oppression and discrimination. This, to Hoppe, was why democracy is a terrible evil that must be abolished and replaced with a system of unfettered private tyrannies.
Often libertarians will couch their arguments in terms of personal freedom and sell them based on the idea that if we would only abolish the capital gains tax, the EPA, and public schools, we would all be much freer to be you and me. Once big government is out of the way, we can all smoke weed and fuck whatever our 3-D printers can dream up, so the argument goes. But for some reason, serious libertarians like Hoppe don’t cotton to the notion that their politics are about expanding the personal freedom of other people, particularly young people and racial and sexual minorities. Hoppe correctly realized that the total abolition of the state in favor of a strict regime of private property and laissez-faire economics would involve the brutal curtailment of the freedoms of speech, movement, and bodily autonomy for the vast majority of people, and that was a good thing. He envisioned a society managed by a combination of large landowners, homeowners’ associations, and insurance companies that would enforce the property rights of their customers and no one else’s. What’s more, Hoppe also realized that this society would necessarily involve the forced expulsion of anyone who thought differently. According to Hoppe:
There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They—the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism—will have to be physically removed from society too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.III
This is the kind of stuff that would send a normie running for the hills, but once you’ve bought your third Penn Jillette book, you’re pot committed. If any intellectual has laid the groundwork for where the Right is headed now, it’s Hoppe: scorched-earth libertarianism fueled by atavistic hatred of minorities, queers, and Communists.
Now let’s depart from the mind castles of these great figures and witness modern conservatism in practice.
There was a time in the country when men were truly free—when rugged individuals could carve out and tame a piece of the American wilderness, build a home, buy some seed and some workers, and wring wealth from the black earth. A man’s plantation was his castle. A man’s wife was his lady. A man’s slaves were his property. A man’s hat was . . . I don’t know, his daughter. The government existed to protect him from foreign invaders and domestic cutthroats, but otherwise had no power to interfere with his life and works. A man would wake up; spend the morning reading on his veranda being fanned by one of his cheerful thralls; ride his horse through his gorgeous fields of cotton and indigo; shoot anything that flew, walked, or crawled on his property; and have the cook serve it up to him at a sumptuous dinner. This was the real Land of Liberty.
Then, under a dark cloud, the bleeding-heart do-gooders of the nanny state invaded and ruined everything with their freedom-stifling bureaucracy and so-called Thirteenth Amendment just because some visionary liberty-lovers banded together to secede from the union to expand human slavery.
But the arc of history bends toward justice. Thankfully, the economics of war created opportunities for capital accumulation beyond the dreams of even the most successful antebellum agribusiness entrepreneur, creating a new class of Free Men: the slanderously named robber barons. These business titans used their massive wealth to push the boundaries of what freedom could mean. Yachts as big as mansions, mansions as big as hippodromes, days filled with oysters, champagne, and showgirls. You could hire Pinkertons to murder Irishmen, name libraries and concert halls after yourself, and get gout. Then, once again, big-government pencil-pushers, jealous of the robber barons’ #successwin lifestyles, destroyed their freedom with the so-called New Deal, all just because unfettered capitalist speculation had destroyed the world’s economy. This is how freedom dies—to thunderous applause.
After that, entire generations were lost—hooked and abused by the foul regulatory regime of FDR’s shock troops. Gender and racial caste systems were thankfully maintained, but the laissez-faire freedom of the wild nineteenth century was replaced by a stultifying order of high taxes, strong unions, and restrained innovation—all because a solid majority of American voters came out of the Great Depression convinced that capitalism needed to be tightly controlled by government oversight! Cowards. So the nation’s achievers and visionaries spent decades in the wilderness, scheming and theorizing about how to get regular schmoes to recognize that untrammeled economic liberty was in their best interests.
Captains of industry spent the 1950s exchanging samizdat by the aforementioned subversive libertarian thinkers Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Count Chocula, and others. They spent money to build an intellectual and media infrastructure that would take their message to the people. By the early 1960s they were ready to unveil a new, vigorous conservatism to replace the stuffy, country-club Republicanism of years past: A bold defense of economic and personal liberty. A muscular military. Down with government meddling, from zoning regulations to taxes to civil rights laws.
These appeals found a ready audience, among not only the white Southerners who had been diaping out since Brown v. Board of Education but also the new generation of suburban strivers. These puds had grown fat and happy in the Keynesian hothouse of the 1950s and yearned for a freakier, more daring capitalism that would give them the status of true gods: a world where they would break the shackles of regulation, where merciless competition would see the best and strongest rewarded for their power, where Communism would be vanquished—not appeased—and where uppity minorities would truly learn their place again. An army of suburban warriors, fired up by this activist reactionaryism, stormed the GOP and nominated Arizona senator and human Lego Barry Goldwater for the presidency in 1964. But most voters at the time still believed that the media was an impartial arbiter of truth rather than a cultural Marxist brainwashing machine, so when the papers said Goldwater was a dangerous extremist, folks believed them. Goldwater got crushed, and liberals got the Great Society.
Sicko libs didn’t have too long to gloat, however. The 1960s saw the inherent and irreconcilable contradictions of liberal society explode into open conflict. The civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, and a generalized youth culture revolt saw many more middle-class white people coming around to the Goldwaterite analysis of America: it had gone soft. It coddled criminal minorities and Communists here and abroad. The times demanded a return to hierarchy and control, and if that meant sabotaging the burgeoning welfare state, then so be it. Richard Nixon took this reactionary discontent and made it respectable and mainstream. No one could accuse old Dick Nixon of being a fringe crank like Goldwater. His command of the issues and connections to establishment conservatism were unsurpassed. Nixon rode a wave of disenchantment and media acquiescence to a narrow victory in 1968, but paradigm shifts take time. He had to deal with a Congress dominated by New Dealers and was forced to govern from the center-left on domestic policy.
But in the arena of culture, Nixon stoked social conflict and positioned himself as the tribune of the little guy, the silent majority, the hard hat who had been shouted down and bullied by agitating minorities and smart-mouthed student brats. The taciturn bigots helped Nixon roll to a historic blowout win over George “Acid, Amnesty, Abortion, Adult Baby” McGovern. Yet Nixon’s project was undone by the Watergate scandal, in which he sent spies to bug Democratic National Committee headquarters in order to find out whether Jane Fonda liked him or, you know, liked him liked him, which gave the foundering Democrats a new grip on power.
Jimmy Carter came into office with Republicans fully discredited by Watergate and Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, just in time to oversee the dismantling of the New Deal policy consensus. Rising foreign competition to American industry, skyrocketing energy prices, galloping inflation, and cost overruns on NASA’s Six Million Dollar Man project caused a crisis for capitalism in the 1970s. Rates of profit collapsed, and firms felt they could no longer afford the postwar deal they had made with workers for union recognition and high wages in exchange for labor peace. With the ruling class unwilling to budge on their monocle allowances, profits would have to be maintained at the expense of labor. So Carter carried out a policy of high interest rates and deregulation that helped the 1 percent get their libertarian revolution without even having to win any elections.
By the time Ronald Reagan successfully snared the Republican nomination for president in 1980, the stage was set for a politics of purely reactionary cultural grievance. Neoliberal reform of the economy had been implemented without much in the way of public debate or voter input. Reagan’s campaign took this right-wing economic reality and ran with it, promising an unfettered capitalism that would work to reinstitute the hierarchical social relationships of pre-1960s America.
But a strange thing happened over the next few decades: the economy became markedly more savage and immiserating. Incomes stayed flat or declined as productivity rose and CEO pay exploded; deindustrialization obliterated entire swaths of the country; and stable middle-class jobs were replaced by precarious part-time service-industry ones. All the while, the cultural drift that had originally alienated and enraged white suburbanites in the sixties accelerated. The underlying racial order, codified by redlining and mass incarceration, remained largely undisturbed, but the flow of culture—from television and movie portrayals to news media framing—resisted control by grassroots reactionaries. For the most part, these right-wingers were people who had grown secure in the waning days of the New Deal consensus era and lived lives of comfort and ease. But even when you’re master of the land, you rage at your inability to control the tides.
After Reagan and his temporary replacement, George H. W., shuffled out of office, the 1990s dawned as a decade of indiscriminate dudgeon at an indiscreet presidency and culture. The Right hated Bill Clinton less for his policies (most of which were borrowed from the GOP, much as Nixon’s were borrowed from his New Deal Congress) than for his status as an avatar of 1960s licentiousness. Pat Buchanan—the Hitler-sympathizing reactionary who held George H. W. Bush to 53 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary by railing against sodomy, Jewish pressure, women in the workplace, and African immigrationIV—gave the game away in his prime-time “Culture War” speech to the 1992 Republican National Convention:
This, my friends, is radical feminism. The agenda that Clinton and Clinton would impose on America—abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units—that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change America wants. And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.
In the 28 Days Later red-pupiled eyes of the Right, Clinton was a flag-burning, pot-smoking, USSR-visiting philanderer who, with his cookie-hating lawyer wife by his side, clambered over a heap of dead Arkansawyers to steal the White House with just 43 percent of the vote. One didn’t have to be a sovereign citizen under the unfringed flag of Ruby Ridge to divine that Slick Willie was an illegitimate president. For all his Third Way–ism, Clinton did undo Reagan-Bush abortion restrictions, let closeted gays serve in the military, and sign an assault weapons bill that took everyone’s dang guns away. With no major economic policy differences between Clintonite pragmatism and GOP orthodoxy (while the former at least accepted a social safety net, both supported NAFTA, the line-item veto, and prioritizing deficit reduction), culture-war issues and latent racial animus became more salient priorities to voters. After all, one party was promising to put an end to the daily baby Holocaust and throw Cadillac-driving welfare queens in prison, while the other was offering James Carville–garbled bromides about fiscal responsibility and “investing in opportunity.” Team Clinton’s feeble attempts to find middle ground with reactionary suburbanites—decrying black “superpredators” and Sister Souljah—proved unsuccessful in withstanding the electoral tidal wave propelled by the burgeoning populist right.
In 1994, Newt Gingrich inner-tubed that wave of resentment straight into the speaker’s chair. Joining Newt’s Republican Revolution were such solons as Bob Dornan, who had recently outed a gay colleague and told a reporter that “every lesbian spear-chucker in this country is hoping I get defeated,” V and Col. Ollie North, who had committed some light treason by selling weapons to Iran and raised over $20 million from direct-mail solicitations (an early form of Kickstarter) to GOP grassrooters in his losing Senate bid.
This new Republican Congress set about dismantling welfare, shutting down the government, and banning third-trimester abortions. But the antiestablishment fervor of right-wing voters—stoked by “feminazi”-hating outsiders like Rush Limbaugh, who was feted as the “Majority Maker” and made an honorary member of the class of ’94—was hardly sated by Newt’s modest changes to Congressional Process.
In 1996, Pat Buchanan was back, baby—this time wielding a literal pitchfork to continue his peasant revolt against Washington, DC, which he thought was once a nice Southern town “before all that crowd VI came rolling in and took it over.” Despite a brief stint as front-runner, Buchanan lost the nomination, yet the old-style racial resentment at the amorphous DC establishment articulated by his campaign continued to metastasize. Buchanan later abandoned the GOP, announcing, “Neither Beltway party is going to drain this swamp,” but his brigades of aggrieved white suburbanites stayed, placated for the time being by the siren song of “compassionate conservatism” and a glibly pious cowboy LARPer from Texas.
Based on the trajectory of his domestic agenda, George W. Bush was destined to be a one-term president. He inherited the dot-com bust, a recession, and a massive corporate-accounting scandal. His priorities were a tax cut for the rich and a bipartisan bill with Ted “Chappaquiddick” Kennedy to inject the feds into public education. Sure, the frothing populist base got some weak-sauce pandering with stem cells and faith-based bullshit, but with Clinton and his blow job crimes receding in the rearview mirror, the grand old coalition of big business and lunkheads seemed destined to fracture. If only there were some sort of banner or, perhaps, flag they could all rally around . . .
The 9/11 attacks finally gave the ambient cultural grievances of grassroots conservatism direction, focus, and energy. The global War on Terror became a fighting faith for the twenty-first century. This particular American combination of protestant wrath and militarized nationalism unleashed itself on the world, and woe betide any Arab or Frenchman who got in its way. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were blood rituals, sacrifices to a God who embodied a pure, retro vision of America in which the cultural pollutants of feminism, secularism, and multiculturalism were purged with fire. And no petty class grievances could ever disunify the GOP base, so engaged were they in the holy quest that gave new meaning to their lives.
For an on-the-ground view of the populist right during the Bush years, here’s a first-person report from our own Matt Christman:
Sometime after the invasion of Iraq, I worked in the bursar’s office of a public university in the Midwest. I spent my days typing up labels for files and updating student information in an open bullpen. I was accompanied by a few sounds: the piped-in nursing-home music of the local smooth jazz station and, from the office behind me, the soft murmuring of local right-wing talk radio and the wrenching, wheezing cough of the man inside. His name was Neil, and he was a thin, balding man with glasses and a failing mustache. His job was to badger students who were delinquent on their loan payments; otherwise, he listened to local talk-radio shitheads and coughed.
One day I came into work and his office was empty. My boss told me that Neil was dead and that I should clean out his desk. There wasn’t much in there besides a travel-sized cologne bottle and some hard candy. The only other personal touch in the office was an editorial cartoon that Neil had cut out and pinned to his corkboard, depicting Uncle Sam standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier next to a row of fighter jets. He said, “Can Saddam come out and play?” This man had spent the last years of his life slowly suffocating and being yelled at by broke college students, his only source of pleasure and purpose coming from his imagined connection to the violent triumphs of the American military.
Ever since then, I think of Neil whenever I contemplate the relentless militarized nightmare of the War on Terror. At the grassroots level, support for obscene military spending and imperial bloodletting satisfies a deep psychic need among neutered and demoralized American men.
I ate the dead man’s candy and threw the rest of his shit out.
Jingoism, fear, and explicit homophobia propelled the Republicans to an electoral high-water mark in 2004 (as of this writing, the only time since the 1980s that they won the presidential popular vote). But despite the bodies piling up in Iraq and the yellow-ribbon magnets plating entire car bumpers, those ancient tensions—people vs. establishment, slobs vs. snobs, plucky poor-kid summer camp vs. posh rich-kid summer camp—began to rise from their slumber.
White suburban boomers were aging and getting ornerier, growing ever more concerned about the proximity of millennials to their lawn. Despite whatever liberalizing drugs they’d consumed in the 1960s, they were now being fed a steady diet of unadulterated rage from scaremongering local TV news, AM talk radio, Fox News, crypto-fascist publishing grifters, FreeRepublic.com, chain e-mails from Bill Cosby warning of the looming saggy-pants crisis, and the nascent right-wing blogosophere. It gave them a junkie’s craving for something harder than Bill Frist or Roy Blunt.
And soon the slumbering wyrm revealed itself: Bush’s clumsy second-term attempt to privatize Social Security may have pissed off the AARP, but what really raised the hackles of the GOP base was shamnesty: the bipartisan bill to beef up border security, revise guest-worker visas, and offer a grueling path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Not even such seasoned statesmen as Lindsey Graham and John McCain could sell a Kennedy-cosponsored bill to their apoplectic ward heelers, who drew a line in the desert over letting brown people become legal residents. The rancor spilled over into the 2008 primaries, in which the right wing viewed McCain with suspicion or hostility for the immigration bill and his bleeding-heart opposition to using medieval torture techniques on Muslims. To placate the grunts, he ran on generic “country first” militarism, highlighting all the villages he napalmed in Indochina to distract from the fact that this privileged son of an admiral wasn’t exactly a CHUD himself. When that didn’t cut it, he chose, in a desperate act with far-reaching consequences, to elevate one of their ranks to the ticket.
Sarah Palin, a certified brain genius who has read every newspaper, awakened a primal urge in the populist Right. She proved that one of their own could stand on the national stage spewing verbal diarrhea and, quite possibly (if not for the machinations of the biased lib media), end up a heartbeat away from the presidency. Not coincidentally, McCain’s rallies in the home stretch devolved into screams of “Terrorist!” and “Liar!” and jeers at their own candidate’s feeble calls for civility. One rally full of Minnesota-nice conservatives featured a man cryptically telling McCain, “Obama will lead the country to socialism! The time has come, and the Bible tells us: ‘You speak the truth, and that the truth sets you free.’ ” Another woman told him, “I can’t trust Obama. I have read about him, and he’s not, he’s not, uh—he’s an Arab,” to which McCain responded, Dear God, no, trust me, he’s not an Arab, he’s a normal person, I promise. VII
Then the Gay Muslim Marxist Canine-Eater won. America, Reagan’s shining city on the hill, vanished in a cloud of Choom smoke. Obama spent four years krumping on the Constitution, and real Americans had to just sit back and take it.
Take it they did, but not well. Almost as soon as Obama was inaugurated, the country’s reserve population of cranks, gun-fuckers, and Revolutionary War cosplayers strapped teabags to their tricorne hats and staged armed occupations of JCPenney parking lots from coast to coast. They watched Fox News with the reverent intensity of an astronomer witnessing the explosion of a supernova. They forwarded e-mails about secret mosques in the White House basement and Facebook memes demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate. Such an awful and alien being simply could not be a real American. He had to have hatched from a glistening black egg in a sun-cursed Kenyan village, then slouched toward Washington, DC, in the dark of night. For the Right, the only psychic balm of those years was bearing witness to Obama’s relentless parade of scandals, frauds, outrages, and humiliations, all of which ensured that he would go down in history as a Carteresque failure who would keep Democrats out of any national power for a generation.
Then he won again! Despite four years of craven appeasement and bowing and telepromptering and fifty-seven-states-ing and being from Kenya and Fast and Furious movies and LETTING OUR OPERATORS DIE AT BENGHAZI and lying about keeping my doctor and killing that fly and latte-saluting and putting his feet up and ACORN and Candy Crowley, dead and illegal voters somehow