The Curse of the Right
Nobody polite was ever going to get these ideas heard. That's the problem.
French conservative Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry made an important observation about the political right:
The Verona intercepts revealed that McCarthy was right about significant communist penetration of the US government, but his infamous Wheeling list of card-carrying communists was basically fabricated.
It’s often the case that where there’s a strong institutional consensus around an issue, or where a tight-knit community of insiders controls an organization or movement, it takes a certain kind of person to challenge that.
At some level, that kind of person has to be disagreeable enough to engage in a fight that likely comes with strong social penalties. They may also need to engage in tactics that violate various social conventions or tacit arrangements, because those established ways of doing business are in part designed to preserve the status quo, prevent any reform or change, and inhibit dissent.
In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill argued, “In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degree without losing ground.”
In my experience, it doesn’t always work that way. Very often, calm appeals to reason have no effect, and can even draw bigtime blowback anyway. Incumbent elites and institutions very frequently don’t allow even the most reasonable, calmly argued disagreement to get a hearing, and indeed still perceive it as a threat.
For example, the presbyterian pastor and academic James Wood wrote a very calm, mild article asking whether the strategy of superstar evangelical pastor Tim Keller was still the right one for today. He was very appreciative of Keller in it. He got viciously attacked anyway.
Hence the rise of the disagreeable provocateur as change agent.
The problem is, as Gobry notes, this disagreeableness tends to be associated with a variety of other negative behaviors and crackpot beliefs.
One of my dictums for life is that what got you here won’t get you there. The skills that make someone a good staffer don’t necessarily make him a good manager. And the way someone managed a team or department may not be what it takes to succeed at the executive level.
Few of us are fundamentally able to change how we operate or engage, however. I notice this online, where I observe that few online figures are able to successfully pivot when changing times call for it.
Thus, the disagreeableness that makes someone an effective outsider critic is typically intrinsic to their personality. They aren’t able to turn it off, even at the point where it becomes a liability to themselves and their cause.
Which of course brings us to Donald Trump.
A number of issues animated the Trump phenomenon, including opposition to immigration, global free trade, and wars. Underlying these was a sense of a threatened identity and social position.
As political scientist Eric Kaufmann has noted, immigration has basically never been popular in America. So that issue predated Trump. Likewise, there was strong opposition to trade deals like NAFTA, so there was a popular base for this as well.
These issues were foregrounded in 1990s-era populism. Pat Buchanan’s presidential runs in 1992 and 1996 were based around them. His “culture war” speech at the 1992 RNC sounded very Trumpian themes.
Buchanan was a flawed person with personality quirks to be sure. But he was a devout Catholic and a gentleman as well. Likewise, H. Ross Perot ran for president as an independent in 1992 on some of these issues, particularly trade. He was a quirky person but also a self-made billionaire known for his moral rectitude. He lost, but won 19% of the vote in the election, which was remarkable for an independent candidate. John Anderson only got six and a half percent in 1980.
Not only were Buchanan and Perot defeated, but their ideas were categorically rejected by America’s ruling elite. In fact, those elites proceeded to press the pedal to the metal on immigration and trade.
When the public was once again roused over these issues, they came with a new standard bearer, Donald Trump. Trump far outclassed Buchanan and Perot in terms of political talent and charisma. He’s unlike anything we’ll likely see again in our lifetimes. He was also willing to say or do anything to win, no matter how badly it transgressed norms.
In the absence of suppressed but popular ideas, Trump would never have been viable. Likewise, without Trump and his style, those ideas would once again have been successfully suppressed. Trump possessed unique personal talents combined with politically salient issues - a package previous populists lacked.
But despite his claims that he could “be more presidential than any of them,” Trump has proven unable to change styles once in office. He is who he is.
Elements of Trumpism have been absorbed into the governing consensus. Nobody is going back to a pro-China position. After his first term, industrial policy continued with the CHIPS Act was passing. Huge chip plants are going up and opening in America. Rebuilding at least some critical industries is on the agenda. Mainstream leaders agree that the woke era went too far.
But as with McCarthy, Trump’s flaws risk discrediting many of his ideas, and harming some of his followers and supporters.
It’s strangely common for people to nail their colors to the mast in defense of these kinds of flawed people. William F. Buckley co-authored a book defending McCarthy, for example. Or look at the recent trend toward a Richard Nixon revisionism that completely exculpates him.
These people sometimes end up suffering the most. Some people who took the risk of working in the first Trump administration came out and couldn’t find jobs. Others were subject to various persecutions. There are people who are not among those cashing in off the second administration that are nevertheless willing to stake all of their own personal capital on defending Trump (as opposed to simply seeing and supporting him as a transactional vehicle for achieving their own goals, as the big money people do).
Buckley might have gone to bat for McCarthy, but he also went on to institutionalize anti-communism on the right in a very non-McCarthyite register. He even played a key role in later expelling the John Birch Society from the conservative movement. And he didn’t start personally acting like McCarthy. But that’s what a lot of people in GOP land have done when it comes to Trump.
For example, in one incident, a Blue Angels jet flew too close to spectators. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s response to this was to post, “The flyovers will continue until morale improves.” Navy Secretary Hung Cao said, “Flight debrief complete. No reprimands. No firings. No problem. That’s the sound of Freedom!” These senior figures can’t even take aviation safety seriously. (Fortunately, the Navy itself did).
Outside of Washington, GOP candidates keep getting crazier and crazier, something dissident-right writer Scott Greer called the “insane clown party” effect. This may be popular with GOP primary voters, but when we are talking about imitators rather than the genuine Trump article, it isn’t likely to work with the public at large. As I’ve noted many times, highly educated people and institution leaders are particularly turned off by this kind of low-class behavior.
This creates the conditions for Democrats to not just retake power and roll back much of Trump’s agenda, but to see his issues discredited once again. In the absence of the canopy provided by the truly unique political talent of Trump himself, some of his supporters and imitators might suffer the same fate. Gobry’s tragedy of the right repeating itself is an all too imaginable future if Republicans stay on their present course.
Hard to believe it's been four years since Wood's article in First Things.
An anecdotal observation related towards this behavior pushing away the educated. I’m an engineer and historically engineering has been the most conservative professional class field (software/computer science notwithstanding). However, nearly every engineer that I know under 40 leans Democrat to some degree even in fields that lean conservative (military and sometimes even petroleum!)