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.”
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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.
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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.
Mentions Republican Party US
For the last few years, the GOP has coalesced around an idea that would short-circuit essentially all trans health care in America: banning federal funds from going to businesses that provide health care specific to changing one’s sex or gender identity, including hormones and surgeries. It would essentially signal to the private sector that if it wants federal dollars, it needs to stay away from sex- or gender-affirming care, and bow down to right-wing pundits who aim to, in their own words, “eradicate” and “erase” this form of health care.
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Bans like these can lead to the private sector discontinuing behaviors altogether — and once they are in place, they are hard to get rid of: The Hyde Amendment, enacted in the 1970s, led to most abortions no longer being performed in hospitals, and is continually renewed each year.
Medical groups and civil rights advocates in D.C. tell Rolling Stone they believe that if a Hyde-level ban on federal funding were enacted, many hospitals will simply prioritize federal dollars over continuing this highly specialized form of medical care. So much medicine is performed through hospital systems and universities that this could mean ending access for many.
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“I think if they had to make the choice of, ‘Do we provide this care and potentially have to close our doors to everybody,’ they probably won’t do it,” says Asa Radix, head of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. “It’s very disturbing. Legislation like this — even if it hasn’t passed — creates an environment where people are incredibly afraid. This is the type of issue where people actually feel suicidal. Are we going to see folks dying by suicide because potentially of laws like this being passed?”
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Right now many in the LGBTQ+ advocacy community, as well as some Democratic lawmakers and staff, are quietly terrified the party might let Republicans enact it anyway, should they be forced to choose between funding the government or allowing the medical system to continue to provide this care unabated.
At a minimum, anxious Democrats and advocates believe that party leaders will capitulate on trans health care coverage in federal funding negotiations on the margins, allowing language that bans government-backed insurance plans from covering these services.
This conflict is actually playing out before Trump has taken office or the GOP controls the Senate. Democrats just this week compromised on a military authorization bill that will ban TRICARE and other Defense Department health plans from covering care for servicemembers’ trans children.
Grindr is full of profiles with caveats about what the user is seeking. They can be typical, harmless details (e.g., “looking for guys between 30–40,” “prefer men who like the outdoors”) but also problematic (e.g., “no fat,” “no fem,” “white only”). I initially assumed my “No Republicans” addition would be a vetting tool, letting conservative men know we’re not a match.
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I’ve been told, more than once, “By shutting out all Republicans, you’re shutting out 50 percent of people.” Never mind that Republicans account for just 30 percent of the population; I typically respond that I’m not someone who shuts out of my life everyone with different political beliefs. The difference here is I’m not looking to date, say, my conservative uncle. (It’s also worth noting that the Venn diagram of men who tell me “No Republicans” is discriminatory and men who have problematic profile standards like “No one fat or over 45” is dangerously close to a circle.)
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Many are also outwardly conservative and publicly homophobic, actively working against LGBTQ+ rights. The anonymity Grindr provides seems to make it easy for these men to compartmentalize—I’ve sadly heard multiple versions of “I’m not a faggot; I just like having sex with men sometimes.” These are the men that I try to have some empathy for, but frankly, they piss me off the most. […] When I relay these anecdotes, my straight friends and colleagues are always surprised, which surprises me, as there’s ample evidence—Randy McNally, Aaron Schock, Roy Cohn—of this particular form of hypocrisy.
If this sounds outlandish or like easily dismissed political posturing — surely Republicans don’t want to turn back the clock on marital law more than 50 years — it’s worth looking back at, say, how rhetorical attacks on abortion, birth control, and IVF have become reality.
And that will cause huge problems, especially for anyone experiencing abuse. “Any barrier to divorce is a really big challenge for survivors,” said Marium Durrani, vice president of policy at the National Domestic Violence Hotline. “What it really ends up doing is prolonging their forced entanglement with an abusive partner.”
In the wake of the Dobbs decision, divorce is just one of many areas of family law that conservative policymakers see an opportunity to rewrite. “We’ve now gotten to the point where things that weren’t on the table are on the table,” Zug said. “Fringe ideas are becoming much more mainstream.”
“I’m scared to death” about the level of voter distrust heading into 2024, said Mark Earley, the supervisor of elections in Leon County, Florida, which includes the capital of Tallahassee.
Earley’s comments were echoed by dozens of others among a crowd of nearly 100 local election workers who gathered in Crystal City, Virginia, last week for an annual confab hosted by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
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The two-day event was supposed to be a forum for local officials to review and rehearse often mundane election administration practices, like handling mail safely or responding to severe weather events.
But concerns about voter distrust and conspiracies cropped up repeatedly even though they claimed no formal place on the agenda. During group breakout sessions, hallway conversations and coffee breaks, attendees expressed both alarm and exasperation about how difficult it was to convince some Americans that the vote could be trusted.
“It doesn’t matter what you do, what we say or how much we educate the skeptics,” Kellie Harris Hopkins, the director of elections in Beaufort County, North Carolina, said during a roundtable. Roughly a dozen other officials nodded their heads, snapped their fingers or murmured in agreement.
While federal officials and state leaders often act as the face of election integrity at the national level, it is local election workers who actually run U.S. elections, doing everything from processing ballots to checking in voters.
That also means they’re the ones who most directly confront election conspiracy theories — and the violence and intimidation they increasingly fuel.
One in six election workers have experienced threats because of their job, and 77 percent said those threats had increased in recent years, according to a March 2022 study from NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, capturing the impact of false election fraud claims by Donald Trump and his allies since 2020.
It's remarkable how swiftly Moms for Liberty became such an albatross organization. As many Pennridge parents complained to Salon, much of the initial media coverage of the group was credulous, buying into the false narrative that it's a grassroots group of normal parents who are simply "concerned" about liberal "excesses." In reality, the group was founded in 2021 by the wife of the chair of the Florida Republican Party and was immediately so well-resourced and fully staffed that it could only be they were propped up by secretive, wealthy donors.
The suspicious aura of money around the group was interesting to journalists, but what really damaged Moms for Liberty was that they underestimated the intelligence of the people in the communities they were targeting. The parents of Pennridge were not fooled by attempts to characterize literary fiction as "pornography." Local residents also feared that rewriting history classes to adhere to right-wing mythologies would ultimately harm the school's reputation, which could hurt both their property values and the ability of their kids to get into good colleges. Above all, multiple parents expressed a belief that schools should be preparing kids for the real world. They worried that right-wing whitewashing of history, social studies and other courses would leave kids without the basic skills necessary to thrive in a diverse, dynamic society.
While serving in the Louisiana state legislature from 2015 to 2017, Johnson introduced a so-called “religious freedom” bill to legalize discrimination against married same-sex couples. He told the Baptist Message that he was “on the front lines of the ‘culture war’ defending religious freedom, the sanctity of human life, and biblical values, including the defense of traditional marriage.”
Last December, Johnson introduced a federal version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law called the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act.” The bill threatens to cut federal funding to libraries, school districts, hospitals, government entities, or other organizations for “hosting or promoting any program, event, or literature involving sexually-oriented material,” including “any topic involving gender identity, gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation, or related topics.”
In a July hearing, Johnson — who serves as the chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, said that parents don’t have the right to provide their children with access to gender-affirming healthcare, something he falsely called a form of “abuse and physical harm,” even though every major American medical association has endorsed it as safe, effective, and essential to the well-being of trans youth.