You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views, which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.
- The Doctor, the Face of Evil.
In many countries which have enjoyed (if that is quite the word) half a century of bipartisan neoliberal politics, nominally conservative political parties are breaking with not only this consensus, but also with conservatism as a guiding set of principles. In the wake of the re-election of Donald Trump, nowhere is this phenomenon so apparent, so obsessively analysed, or so globally consequential as in the US.
It is not difficult to believe, or even explain, why the Democrats lost the election. For longer than I have been alive, they have made an art of losing unlosable contests. It is rather harder to explain how the Republicans won it. To the extent that they articulated a comprehensible policy platform, their policies were deeply unpopular with the majority of Americans. Moreover their candidate, and now President-elect, combines the charisma of Nixon, the intellectual heft and nuance of Reagan, and the smooth competence of Bush Jr.
Mainstream analysts, in desperation, point to a supposed Democrat embrace of "identity politics", and the pre-eminence of economic anxiety in the minds of voters. Yet the Harris campaign, particularly in the final weeks, distanced itself from minorities and labour, and positioned itself as the party for disaffected Republican "never-Trumpers". Trump meanwhile emphasised a coming retribution upon voters' nebulous enemies, which, while potentially satisfying in some sense, doesn't even pretend to put food on the table.
In the two-party U.S. system, the Democrats are left as the sole party of neoliberalism and conservatism. The Republican agenda is now driven by those who, since Trump's defeat in 2020, have shifted from hyperventilating about the existential threat of Black Lives Matter and Antifa to declaring that a "Cold Civil War" which has been raging since the days of Woodrow Wilson has finally been lost. In the words of Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts (2023), America has fallen victim to "The Great Awokening".
According to Glenn Ellmers (2021), in large part due to the neoliberalism of "Conservatism, Inc.", i.e. the pre-Trump Republican Party, "our norms are now hopelessly corrupt and need to be destroyed", so "overturning the existing post-American order, and re-establishing America’s ancient principles in practice, is a sort of counter-revolution, and the only road forward". Indeed the situation is so dire that "America, as an identity or political movement, might need to carry on without the United States".
Ellmers is a research fellow at the conservative think tank the Claremont Institute, which he considers "one of the very few serious institutions on the right to make an intellectual case for Trumpism". Which raises the question: what, beyond one grand project per election campaign ("The Wall" in 2016, mass deportations in 2024), and the extemporised policy spitballing of Trump himself on social media, at rallies, and in off-script flights of fancy during press conferences, constitutes Trumpism?
What is the underlying logic that binds the imminent existential threat posed by phenomena both real and fantastic such as reproductive rights, "critical race theory", "gender ideology", vaccines, fifteen-minute cities, the "plandemic", "climate hoax", Black Lives Matter, "the Great Replacement", LGBTQ+ rights, 5G towers, and so on? How is it that a significant section of the population, including bow-tied think-tankers, suburban school board members, and neo-Nazi militias, can reach consensus on what is or is not a manifestation of the insidious threat to all they hold dear? How can they do it with such immediacy and unanimity? And why do they do it at all?
In his book Disaster Nationalism, Richard Seymour (2024b) provides a compelling reason why this thinking is so seductive to so many. He cites as an example the 2020 Oregon wildfires, when rather than flee for their lives, "vigilantes took control of the streets, turned guns on journalists and swept the area looking for ‘Antifa’ terrorists whom they, and some senior police officers, blamed for the blazes." In the face of a panoply of real crises, such as global warming, wars, economic inequality, and pandemics, which are all complex, abstract, and systemic, a grand conspiracy promises the easy fix of a bad guy you can shoot. "This," Seymour (2024a) says, "is what the Right offers as an alternative to disaster; better disasters, disaster in which you feel in charge."
This still leaves the question of how it's possible for the Trumpist right to distinguish between the benign and the menacing with the same unhesitating certainty with which the speaker of a language with gendered nouns can plainly see that a knife is masculine and a spoon is feminine.
An explanation of the how is provided by an article titled "The Mask of War and the War of Masks: The Fabricated Culture War Gets Deadly" (paywalled, unfortunately), by Patricia Roberts-Miller. In explaining how mask wearing became a culture war issue, Roberts-Miller places it in the context of what Richard Hofstadter called "the Paranoid Style in American Politics", which found its apotheosis in the Cold War Red Scare after World War II.
Roberts-Miller draws a parallel between the Manichean logic of 20th century anti-communists and pandemic-era anti-mask demagoguery. In the 1930s, this "transitive theory of evil" ran like so: "Communism is atheist, so all atheists are communist; advocating a separation of church and state is atheist, so any advocates are communist; communists are not conservative, so any such person or group not conservative is communist; socialism is not conservative, so all socialists (including Christian socialists or anti-communist democratic socialists) are communists; the New Deal is not conservative, therefore it’s communist, therefore anyone who supports it is communist. Communists benefit from a community in which all citizens have the right to various civil liberties; therefore anyone who supports civil liberties (or objects to their violation) is communist."
Similarly, in the 2020s: "Masks are Satanic because they are associated with Satanic rituals; masks are communist because liberals wear them and liberals are communists; liberals are communist because they aren’t conservative; Critical Race Theory is communist; therefore mask mandates and Critical Race Theory are all part of one conspiracy."
Roberts-Miller argues that "Anti-mask demagoguery couldn’t claim that there was tangible harm from face masks, and rarely did. Instead, the harm was what wearing a mask signalled." That is, as one frenzied true believer put it, “Wearing masks is a symbol […] that you have been indoctrinated in this new communism”.
Tom Klingenstein, Chairman of the Claremont Institute, is without doubt a Trumpist true believer. With an earnest rhetorical style apparently unchanged since high school debate club, he constructs grand cathedrals of jaw-droppingly implausible factual assertions upon a single, rather wobbly, foundation stone: America is good.
On the face of it, everything he says seems absurd; the bizarre product of a disordered mind. However, seen through the lens of the Manichean logic that Roberts-Miller outlines, plus a willingness to discard ordinary standards of evidence and instead embrace articles of faith, there is an order to this kind of thinking that leads to largely consistent conclusions in those who adopt it. Generalising and extrapolating from Klingenstein's sovereign axiomatic belief, we might be able to model what one could (cheekily following Roger Griffin) call "the Trumpist Minimum". That is, the meta-narrative which drives culture war disaster nationalism wherever and whenever it emerges.
The in-group are inherently and perfectly good and wise. If you prefer, you could moderate this position somewhat by saying that, while not quite perfect, we are nonetheless the most good and wise of all people who have ever existed; the practical upshot is the same. This is all you need to know. Everything else necessarily follows from this.
This is a war not over the size of government or taxes, but over the American way of life. The war is between those who salute the flag, and those who take a knee. Those who believe that America is built on freedom, and those who believe America is built on racism. Those who are convinced that America is good, and those who are convinced America is bad. These differences are too large to bridge. This is what makes it a war. In this case, a Cold Civil War. — Klingenstein, 2021.
Therefore we can consider anything that follows from the action of a member of the in-group as good, natural, or normal. This includes any institution, customary practice, or state of affairs devised by the in-group. The mildest criticism, or the mere existence of people who order their lives differently, is an intolerable assault upon our unquestionable virtue.
Authentic Americans still want to have decent lives. They want to work, worship, raise a family, and participate in public affairs without being treated as insolent upstarts in their own country. — Ellmers, 2021.
Those outside the in-group (the Other) are necessarily morally inferior, unnatural, or abnormal. Therefore their actions and intentions must always be to some degree pernicious and corrupting. Tolerance ultimately leads to disaster.
Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries. Overseas, a totalitarian Communist dictatorship in Beijing is engaged in a strategic, cultural, and economic Cold War against America’s interests, values, and people—all while globalist elites in Washington awaken only slowly to that growing threat. […] Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s “radical chic” to build the totalitarian cult known today as “The Great Awokening.” And now, as then, the Republican Party seems to have little understanding about what to do. Most alarming of all, the very moral foundations of our society are in peril. - Roberts, 2023.
There is therefore essentially only one threat: the Other. It is existential, and encompasses all social phenomena. Everything is either good or evil.
As in the late 1970s, Americans today experience the failures of political and cultural elites in countless ways: in the job market and in the grocery store checkout lines, on the streets and in our schools, in the media and within our institutions. But in truth, these daily dysfunctions are not innumerable problems, but innumerable manifestations of a few core crises. In 1979, the threats we faced were the Soviet Union, the socialism of 1970s liberals, and the predatory deviancy of cultural elites. Reagan defeated these beasts by ignoring their tentacles and striking instead at their hearts. — Roberts, 2023
A casual reader might take the last few pages as surveying a broad array of challenges […] But these really are not many issues, but two: (1) that China is a totalitarian enemy of the United States, not a strategic partner or fair competitor, and (2) that America’s elites have betrayed the American people. — Roberts, 2023.
Whether domestic or foreign, the Other are not "real" people. Our moral responsibility only extends to real people.
"The United States has become two nations occupying the same country. When pressed, or in private, many would now agree. Fewer are willing to take the next step and accept that most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term. […] It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else." — Ellmers, 2021
Anything that is evil/unnatural can be immediately perceived as such by true members of the in-group. Appeals to objective evidence or expert knowledge are prima facie proof of corruption by the Other.
Intellectual sophistication, advanced degrees, financial success, and all other markers of elite status have no bearing on a person’s knowledge of the one thing most necessary for governance: what it means to live well. That knowledge is available to each of us, no matter how humble our backgrounds or how unpretentious our attainments. It is open to us to read in the book of human nature, to which we are all offered the key just by merit of our shared humanity. — Roberts, 2023.
Conservatism, Inc. is worse than useless in this regard because it does not understand through perpetual study what Trump grasped by instinct. As if coming upon a man convulsing from an obvious poison, Trump at least attempted in his own inelegant way to expel the toxin. By contrast, the conservative establishment, or much of it, has been unwilling to recognize that our body politic is dying from these noxious “norms.” Keep taking the poison! it advises. A cynic might suppose that many elements on the right have made their peace with (and found a way to profit from) the progressive project of narcotizing the American people and turning us into a nation of slaves. — Ellmers, 2021 (emphasis mine).
Evidence inconsistent with the fundamental axiom is invalid. Our own goodness, and our consequent ability to intuit good from evil is the sole yardstick against which all evidence is judged. Inconsistent "facts" must be purged from society, along with those who promulgate them, if we are to survive.
The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists. — Roberts, 2023.
What our enemy wants is the destruction of the American way of life. It goes about it by trying to force everyone to say “America is systemically racist.” If it can convince us of this falsehood, it will be well on its way to overturning the American way of life. Every time Joe Biden accuses America of being systemically racist, he is, though he doesn't know it, calling for the overthrow of the American way of life. — Klingenstein, 2021.
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, […] has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered. — Roberts, 2023
The solution to all of the above problems is not to tinker with this or that government program, to replace this or that bureaucrat. These are problems not of technocratic efficiency but of national sovereignty and constitutional governance. We solve them not by trimming and reshaping the leaves but by ripping out the trees—root and branch. — Roberts, 2023.
This pre-modern mode of reasoning is closer to medieval scholasticism than any political ideology. It is consistent with tribal narratives that date back at least as far as the story of the unelected, unrepresentative, technocrat who slithered, Doctor-Fauci-like, up to a vulnerable dupe and persuaded her to eat the corrupting fruit of the tree of knowledge, rather than rely on her intuitive grasp of goodness.
The conventional media analysis of Trumpism is that it represents a singular, historically contingent, convulsion where both Republicans and Democrats have grown more partisan and extremist. In contrast Roberts-Miller, by following the rhetorical threads from mask-wearing to a global woke/communist conspiracy to corrupt and overthrow American democracy shows that we have seen precisely this dynamic before, and that far from being partisan and political, it is unifying and depoliticising.
Indeed current-day true believers agree. As Ellmers insists, Trump voters are not just a new faction of conservatism, but are "representing the true, non-partisan understanding of America". Just as Cold War Manicheanism was bipartisan, so Culture War Manicheanism is bipartisan. This explains why the Democratic Party (if not its voters) dances to it's tune. They are as genuinely afraid of wokeism as Republicans.
Where I differ with the people I've cited here is on the assumption that the U.S. culture war is a product of the Republican Party. Just as Truman stoked the flames of post-War anti-communism, Clinton's determination to "end welfare as we know it", and institution of "three strikes" justice (not forgetting the role of Biden, who never tires of reminding us that he "wrote the damn bill"), heralded this latest remake of the same story with a rousing racist dog-whistle fanfare. Compared to such extraordinary violence against vulnerable communities, the histrionics of Newt Gingrich, cheered on by Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, were vacuous political theatre.
If there is a front in the culture war where the parties have been on opposite sides it is that the Democrats are not in principle opposed to some sort of milquetoast negotiated settlement between "real" America and lesser beings. The Republicans have not been willing to countenance such a thing for decades. However, as we have seen repeatedly, in the face of a tight election, the Democrats are increasingly willing to give ground, throwing their constituency under the culture war bus.
As Roberts-Miller puts it, "imagining that every aspect of every policy (and therefore every policy disagreement) is purely the consequence of the Other’s fanatical and rigid commitment to an evil, determined and determining ideology prohibits normal practices of settling disagreements". This comes at a cost. For Republicans, among other things, it now means a one-sided, self-lacerating trade war with the external Other of China. For Democrats, it means surrendering an election before giving an inch to the domestic Other of wokeism. According to Ellmers, the American founders agreed that the "majoritarian rule of the mob" "could not infringe the rights of the minority". It does not take much imagination to work out who the Claremont Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Democratic Party alike regard as the oppressed minority in most urgent need of protection from the mob.
A shared tribal meta-narrative also explains the unity between fundamentalist Christians, louche billionaires, racists, misogynists, "lean-in" and/or transphobic feminists, open fascists, and so on. Their ideas of who constitutes the "true" in-group may vary at the margins, but they are in agreement on the essentials. Provided we see each other as fighting a different head of the same hydra, what does it matter? You follow your monomania and I'll follow mine. Let a thousand conspiracy theories bloom!
Existential conflict against pure evil is also tremendously liberating: "We are in what Giorgio Agamben (2005) famously called a 'state of exception,' in which we respect the law by excepting ourselves, our behaviour, and our policies from the constraints of the law we claim to honour." (Roberts-Miller, 2023). We tear up the constitution in order to preserve it. We massively increase the size of government in order to shrink it. We fight wealthy elites by increasing their wealth and power. We increase accountability to Congress by placing the executive branch above the law. We end racism by giving it free reign. We cherish history by censoring it. We protect children by policing, harassing, and torturing them to the point of suicide, and uphold parents' rights by leaving them to look on in helpless despair. Lawless chaos is the objective.
Trumpism's contradictions and inconsistencies are thus a feature, not a bug. Of course at some stage, ideological wrinkles may need to be ironed out, but this is all to the good. The worst thing that can happen to a movement predicated on the existence of eternal existential conflict is final victory. Keeping a ready stock of future enemies close to hand is prudent. A successful revolution marks not the end of the purges, but the beginning.
One last thought (for now): As with the Cold War, the present culture war is global. As Seymour (2020) notes, leaders in Hungary, India, Brazil, and the Philippines have been leveraging the same dynamic for some time. But as the saying goes, when the U.S. sneezes, the world catches a cold. The real global crises are not going anywhere, and neoliberal progressive parties will not address them. They will, however, have been watching the U.S. election and possibly learning the lesson, as the Dems appear to have done, that Harris didn't clearly declare her intention to fight the bipartisan culture war against a wilfully imperfect real world early or fervently enough.
References
Ellmers, G. (2021). ‘Conservatism’Is No Longer Enough. The American Mind. https://americanmind.org/salvo/why-the-claremont-institute-is-not-conservative-and-you-shouldnt-be-either/
Hofstader, R. (1964). The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Harper's Magazine. https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/
Klingenstein, T. (2021). Winning the Cold Civil War. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJZBH8sS5s0
Roberts, K. (2023). A Promise to America, in Dans, P., & Groves, S. (eds.), Mandate for Leadership: The conservative promise. https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FOREWORD.pdf
Roberts-Miller, P. (2023). The Mask of War and the War of Masks: The Fabricated Culture War Gets Deadly. Javnost-The Public, 30(1), 111-127. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13183222.2023.2168954
Seymour, R. (2020). The rise of disaster nationalism: why the authoritarian right is resurgent. New Statesman. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2020/03/rise-disaster-nationalism-why-authoritarian-right-resurgent
Seymour, R. (2024a). Disaster Fantasies Are Paying Off for Right-Wingers. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2024/11/disaster-nationalism-fantasies-far-right
Seymour, R. (2024b). Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization. Verso Books.