By Thomas Zimmer

Even as many East Coast Straussians such as The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol have become vocal Never Trumpers, West Coast Straussians are obsessed with the Founding and the idea that America is good because the Framers based the country on certain natural rights and timeless laws of nature, enshrining these eternal laws and morals in the country’s founding documents. In this interpretation, progressivism is the key enemy: A relativistic project of adapting laws and morals over time, thereby alienating America from the timelessly pure essence it once embodied. This, to West Coast Straussians, puts progressivism in the same category as fascism or communism—ideologies that seek to remake humankind and the world in defiance of the natural order through totalitarian government intervention. That is what Vought invokes here: When “the left” started to “modernize” the constitutional order, they were in fact destroying all that was good and noble about America—they were deviating from the “natural order” itself.

[…]

The American right today has become dominated by forces and factions that are convinced that the answer is that our moment requires not restraint and preservation but radicalism and counter-revolutionary force. As the major institutions of American life are supposedly in the grip of anti-American, leftist, “globalist,” “woke” forces that desire to tear the moral fabric of the nation apart, as the “natural order” is supposedly under siege, those who used to call themselves “conservatives” need to do whatever is necessary to defend a particular kind of “freedom”: the freedom to live in accordance with the “natural order,” which necessitates imposing it on the whole country.

[…]

Many people get caught up in Trump’s nomination of clowns and buffoons to key positions. That’s invariably bad. But something even scarier awaits us: Trump also empowers competent radicals like Vought who pursue goals like “rehabilitating Christian nationalism” and “pursuing the largest deportation in history,” as an undercover video caught him saying. And unlike in the first go-round, there won’t be the moderating presence of “adults in the room” in Trump’s second term. That’s the whole point of Project 2025, of the Center for Renewing America, of handing Vought the policy keys from the beginning. Vought’s “radical constitutionalism” is about to be elevated to a position of immense influence and power, unbothered and undisturbed by inconvenient guardrails like moral and legal accountability, for the next four years. Somehow, he’s convinced himself that this is just what the Founders would have wanted.

Finally, the pervasive tendency among nominally anti-MAGA leaders to accommodate Trumpism in power and cling to a treacherous idea of “normalcy” is also rooted in foundational myths that shape the collective imaginary of liberal America, in particular. We may be decades removed from the heyday of the so-called “liberal consensus” of the post-war era, that shared understanding among the country’s elite that America is fundamentally good, the institutions essentially healthy, and the U.S. inexorably on its way to overcoming whatever vestigial problems there might still be – but such ideas of exceptional goodness are still powerful today. They often go hand in hand with a mythical tale of American democracy being exceptionally stable. Never mind that, empirically speaking, multiracial democracy has existed for only about 60s years in this country and has been hotly contested at all times: What could possibly happen to America’s supposedly “old, consolidated” democracy? A fundamentally healthy, functioning, consolidated democracy cannot, in this imagination, be brought down by an authoritarian threat rising within its midst. So, either the system is not healthy – or the Trumpist regime is not an acute threat to the survival of American democracy. The latter is a much more comfortable proposition.

Ideologically, the Claremont Institute is the home of West Coast Straussianism, a term pointing to a specific school of thought on the Right that goes back to political philosopher Leo Strauss. His disciple Harry Jaffa, a famous Lincoln scholar and one of the most influential conservative intellectuals particularly in the middle decades of the twentieth century, is a key figure in the West Coast Straussian intellectual tradition. It was Jaffa’s students who founded the Claremont Institute in the late 1970s.

West Coast Straussians are obsessed with the Founding – and the idea that America is good because the Framers based the country on certain natural rights and timeless laws of nature, enshrining these eternal laws and morals in the country’s founding documents. In this interpretation, progressivism is the key enemy: A relativistic project of adapting laws and morals over time, thereby alienating America from the timeless essence which it once embodied. This, to West Coast Straussians, puts progressivism in the same category as fascism or communism – ideologies that seek to remake man and the world in defiance of the natural order through totalitarian government intervention. That is what Vought invokes here: When “the Left” started to “modernize” the constitutional order, they were in fact destroying all that was good and noble about America – they were deviating from the “natural order” itself.

In 1954, William F. Buckley and his best friend and brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell published McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning. Both men were in their late twenties. Their full-throated defense of McCarthyism and the anti-Communist crusade received a lot of attention and furthered their status as rising stars on the Right. One year later, Buckley founded National Review. I re-read McCarthy and His Enemies this fall in preparation for a graduate course on “Conservatism and the Far Right” I taught at Georgetown this past semester. And what stood out to me was the book’s final chapter, titled “The New Conformity” in which the authors left no doubt that all societies must indeed impose some conformity, defined as “its prevailing value preferences” – “or else they cease to exist. The members of a society must share certain values if that society is to cohere; and cohere it must if it is to survive.”

[…] 

In this quest, Buckley and Bozell were certain to have the support of the “vast majority of the American people” who agreed there was no place for communism in America – McCarthyism was therefore only aiming “to harden the existing conformity.” What about the danger of censoring and sanctioning anyone and anything associated with “the Left”? Certainly, Buckley and Bozell agreed, “Whenever the anti-Communist conformity excludes well-meaning Liberals, we should … go to their rescue.” But they dismissed the idea that the anti-communist crusade might have produced such dangerous excesses – in fact, they claimed, McCarthy “fixes its goals with precision.”

That, however, is a very disingenuous depiction of Red Scare America and the pervasive anti-communist hysteria of the post-war period. And beyond the machinations of senator Joe McCarthy: It’s difficult to accept such reassurances that conservatives were targeting *just* communism when we remember that Modern Conservatism’s leading thinkers like Whittaker Chambers explicitly claimed that there was little difference between communism and liberalism, that both represented merely different guises of the same fundamental threat.

[…]

The overriding goal of Modern Conservatism has been to uphold what its leading intellectuals in the 1950s explicitly defined as the “natural” or divinely ordained order. If “traditional” conservatism – of the preserving kind, or the Burkean/Oakshottean variety, if you will – was no longer commensurate with that challenge, more radical measures would have to be taken.

The leaders of today’s Trumpist Right aren’t conservatives. But they continue, in a profound sense, the tradition of Modern Conservatism.

We are currently getting a terrifying preview of what all this would look like in practice. Trump has never shied away from admitting – from promising – that his mass deportation “will be a bloody story.” And the leaders on the Right are currently doing their best to ensure that there will be blood long before the election.

On September 9, J.D. Vance used his social media to rail against “Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio.” He added: “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country. Where is our border czar?”

[…]

Over the next few days, Vance kept doubling down. On September 10, he claimed a child had been murdered by “a Haitian immigrant who had no right to be here.” The senator from Ohio did not care that the child’s parents begged him to stop using their boy, who was killed in a car accident, to demonize immigrants.

[…]

This vile propaganda has had its desired effect. Already on September 12, City Hall, schools, and the DMV in Springfield had to be evacuated because of bomb threats from people raging against the Haitian immigrants. Acts of vandalism against the Haitian community followed. More threats against elementary and middle schools as well as against public officials on September 13. On September 14 and 15, hospitals had to be evacuated – so did universities, as someone threatened to shoot members of the Haitian community on campus. Ohio State Troopers now sweep every building in every school in Springfield Ohio, every morning before the start of classes, looking for explosives, because the bomb threats keep coming. Meanwhile, neo-Nazis are marching through town – the Proud Boys, and a group called Blood Tribe. Life in Springfield, Ohio upended. All based on a lie.

Wow; this guy knows the US Right. His argument that what unites them is a powerful shared vision of what (indeed who) they do not like is utterly sound. By the time they have worked their way through this list, there will be very little satisfaction to be had from watching them turn on each other.

As the broader public turns its attention to these plans, and most people rightfully react with a mixture of horror and concern, a lot of skepticism remains. What is the role of Trump in all of this: Isn’t it more likely that he is going to mess things up, as he has never shown any interest in meticulous planning nor the necessary discipline to enact an ambitious agenda? The Right may try to present a unified front now, but there are so many groups and factions here, and they don’t all share the same ideas about what America should look like: Shouldn’t we expect a lot of infighting and self-sabotage rather than a well-oiled regime? And most importantly, perhaps, haven’t we been through this once before: Isn’t it more likely we get a repeat of the kind of chaos that was so characteristic of the first Trump presidency?

These questions are important. But too strong a focus on Trump’s erratic nature and the many rivalries on the Right obscures the fact that reactionaries are actually united by the desire to punish their enemies, “take back” the country, and restore the “natural order” of unquestioned white Christian patriarchal rule – a unity that is indicative of a broader realignment on the Right towards an aggressive embrace of state authoritarianism. And those who expect merely more of the same chaos that defined Trump’s presidency tend to overlook the fact that the Right would be operating under much more favorable conditions this time: With a fully Trumpified GOP, a reactionary super-majority on the Supreme Court, and with the omnipresent threat of escalating political violence intimidating anyone who dares to dissent.

Trump world wasn’t ready in 2016. The American Right more generally wasn’t ready – they didn’t have the know-how, the plans, or the personnel to get anywhere close to remaking the nation in accordance with their reactionary vision.

They are determined to not make that mistake again. “Project 2025” is evidence that the Right has concrete plans to take over and transform American government into a machine that serves only two purposes: Exacting revenge on the “woke” enemy – and imposing a minoritarian reactionary vision on society.