Demonizing Democracy

The Right has long derided any attempt at leveling racial and social hierarchies as anti-American “socialism” or “communism.” What they are actually fighting is equality.

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During a press conference on Thursday, Vice-President JD Vance was asked: “How do you define socialism, personally, and why do you think socialist candidates are popping up everywhere across the country?”

His response (Opens in a new window) offered the blend of ridiculous, unintentionally funny, outrageous, breathtakingly stupid, and acutely dangerous that is the true hallmark of rightwing politics in the Trump era:

“I think in reality what it actually means in the American context is that you wanna replace American workers with foreign workers and you want boys to play in girls’ sports. That’s what unites the socialists that I see running across the United States of America today.”

I know I owe you Part II of the deep dive into the most urgent questions about the upcoming midterm elections and Trump’s attempts to interfere – and that will be coming very soon. But I believe it is worth dwelling on what Vance said for a moment. Because as is often the case with the obviously bizarre nonsense the leaders of today’s Right are blurting out constantly, it reveals something of importance about the people and the movement that currently controls the U.S. government: About how they see the world and the political conflict, about the long-standing traditions of anti-democratic thinking on the Right that have gotten us here, about the radicalizing sentiment that is fueling the assault on liberal democracy.

The key point here is this: The political Right has always derided anything that threatens the social and racial hierarchy as a form of anti-American “socialism” or “communism” and used those terms to demonize anyone who dares to question the righteousness of past, present, or future white reactionary elite rule. What has united the different factions on the Right – those who came together in the middle decades of the twentieth century under the banner of “Modern Conservatism” as well as the different camps of the MAGA coalition today – is a commitment to fighting against any attempt at leveling hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth. Rightwing political identity has always been centered around this commitment to a specific societal order – and by its hostility towards the “left”-coded forces working to change, undermine, or subvert it. It always defined the stakes of the conflict as existential because it set out to defend a “natural order” that was not up for political deliberation or subject to democratic control.

With so much of the Right’s identity wrapped up in rejecting “the Left,” and no equally strong commitment to limiting principles that could have moderated political action, where was the restraint against a continuous escalation and radicalization supposed to come from? If “traditional” conservatism was no longer commensurate with the challenge of upholding a societal order defined by strict hierarchies, more radical measures would have to be taken. That is how those who dominate the Right today have given themselves permission to embrace extremism and state authoritarianism.

But let’s take a step back: Let me offer a brief, incomplete history of the Right raging against “socialism” or “communism” when they really mean equality.

“Race Mixing is Communism”

In late August 1959, a group of angry white protesters assembled in front of the state capitol in Little Rock, Arkansas. To express their “concern,” if that is what we want to call it, they brought signs that read: “Race Mixing is Communism.”

The “race mixing” in question was the integration of public high schools.

The conflict over the desegregation of the education system in Arkansas had escalated two years earlier. In 1957, a group of nine Black students who would become famous as the Little Rock Nine (Opens in a new window) enrolled in the previously all-white Little Rock Central High. The countermobilization from segregationists and white supremacists was swift and brutal. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus tasked the Arkansas National Guard with preventing the Black students from entering the school – in direct violation of a court order to desegregate. In response, President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the state’s National Guard in order to put it under direct federal control; he also invoked the Insurrection Act, which enabled him to send the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to impose federal law and the right of the Black students to attend school.

Governor Faubus wasn’t done yet, however. In the summer of 1958, rather than going into a second year of school integration, he ordered all four public high schools in Little Rock to be shut down entirely – a decision embraced by the overwhelming majority of local white voters in a referendum in September.

However, after a federal court decided that the school closures were unconstitutional, public schools were reopened the following year, on August 12, 1959. A little over a week later, the people you see in the infamous photo above gathered in front of the state capitol.

Versions of the signs they brought to protest integration were very common in the South at the time. Segregationists routinely derided the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s as communist. Martin Luther King? Obviously a communist, according to white supremacists everywhere.

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In a narrow sense attacking racial integration as “communism” was an attempt to discredit the civil rights reforms as an anti-American imposition and demonize anyone associated with the Black freedom struggle as an enemy to the nation. Amidst the Cold War, and shortly after the height of the anti-communist hysteria of the early 1950s, “communism” was the term you reached for if you sought to maximally disqualify something or someone you didn’t like.

But this particular political attack also stood in a much longer tradition of demonizing racial equality and any form of social progress towards a more egalitarian, pluralistic democratic order. The most prominent pro-slavery theorists and agitators of the Antebellum South, for instance, often claimed that the real goal of abolitionists was to institute socialism or communism in America. During the Reconstruction era immediately after the Civil War, Southern white supremacists complained that the federal government was imposing “socialism” by going after white terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

Equating the struggle for multiracial democracy with “communism” was common not just among redneck protesters or white supremacist militias, but also within the halls of conservative thought leadership. In October 1966, for instance, Frank S. Meyer, one of the most prominent conservative intellectuals of the post-war era, wrote in National Review (Oct. 4, 1966), the self-declared flagship of highbrow-conservatism, about what he called the “Negro Revolution.” In the Martin Luther King-led civil rights movement, Meyer saw a fundamentally illegitimate “program of confiscatory socialism, revolutionary in essence.” This dangerous leftist revolution, Meyer was certain, was connected to a much broader “Liberal ideological approach.” What he called the “chaotic energies of the Negro revolution” were, according to Meyer, just one manifestation of that broader attempt to impose the “egalitarian myth.” “All the powers of an omnipotent state,” Meyer summarized the philosophy of the leftist enemy, “must be brought to bear to take from those who have achieved and give to those who have not.” He concluded: “This is the essence of that marriage of egalitarianism with unbridled state power that in its various manifestations is called Communism, socialism, welfarism.”

Frank Meyer was a key figure in the early Modern Conservative movement. As a political project, it emerged in the middle decades of the twentieth century as a somewhat uneasy alliance between two distinct factions. One the one hand, there were reactionary traditionalists and, especially from the 1970s onwards, a newly mobilized Religious Right. On the other, there were market-fundamentalist libertarian factions, staunchly opposed to the New Deal state and the reformulation of liberalism into a governing philosophy that embraced an active role for the state in creating the kinds of conditions in which individuals would be protected from the worst excesses of capitalism and be enabled to thrive as equal citizens. Meyer was convinced this alliance would hold. He was a major theoretician of “fusionism” – the idea that traditionalists and libertarians could come together under the banner of “conservatism” despite their differences, animated by their shared rejection of the liberal order. They would often claim the glue that held them together was their devotion to fighting communism. And that is correct – as long as we recognize that their anti-“communist” struggle was never just, or even predominantly, directed at the Soviet Union and its allies. It was targeted with at least equal force at the sinister forces of “leftism” on the domestic front, and their definition of “communism” made very little distinction between Marxism, socialism, communism, liberalism… The intellectual leaders of the post-war Conservative Movement explicitly claimed that there was no meaningful difference between communism and liberalism, that both represented merely different guises of the same fundamental threat. Liberalism was basically a less overtly violent, but equally dangerous form of communism; communism merely the most radical expression of liberalism.

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Escalation after the end of the Cold War

This also helps explain why the Conservative Movement reacted to the dissolution of the Soviet Union not with moderation, but with significant escalation.

Immediately after the end of the Cold War, ethno-nationalist forces inside the Republican Party believed their time had come to stage a revolt against the GOP establishment. Uniting behind Pat Buchanan as their standard bearer, these self-proclaimed “paleo-conservatives” challenged incumbent President George H. W. Bush in the 1992 Republican primaries.

Buchanan openly professed an aggressive ethno-nationalism and explicitly embraced a vision of white Christian domination. His hostility towards the party leadership endeared him to a Conservative Movement that emerged frustrated from twelve years of Republican rule in the White House. Instead of actually implementing the rightwing agenda, conservatives bemoaned, Reagan and Bush had caved to establishment pressure and appeased liberal domination.

The paleo charge came too early in 1992 and did not manage to dislodge the establishment. But the revolt, which had been met with a lot of support on the Republican base, had a lasting impact. Buchanan was instrumental in shifting the Right’s focus more explicitly to what came to be called the “culture wars.” A new generation of Republican politicians believed to have found the model for the future of rightwing politics. Newt Gingrich, who led the GOP in the House of Representatives, embodied this much more aggressive style of politics that took inspiration from the paleo-conservative insurgency.

The embrace of an aggressive culture war was intimately connected to an increasingly open turn to an authoritarian vision of governmental power. If restoring dominance over American “culture,” broadly defined, was ultimately the goal, democratic politics simply didn’t offer a path to get there. As long as the government’s reach into people’s beliefs and private lives was constrained by the democratic norms of political power, imposing the kind of all-encompassing culture change the Right envisioned would prove impossible. In the minds of the reactionary Right, the inevitable focus on the “culture war” therefore necessitated and legitimized the pursuit of a much more authoritarian form of politics.

The timing of this revolt, right as the Cold War ended, was not a coincidence. Seen from today, what is most striking about the paleo insurgency of the early 1990s is the sentiment that fueled it. The political protagonists of the American far right and leading movement conservatives did not think the downfall of the Soviet empire was a reason to relax or moderate. Buchanan and his allies were excited, believing the end of the Cold War offered a world-historic opportunity, as the crumbling of the former Communist superpower had just demonstrated that large-scale change was possible, even if it had seemed unimaginable mere years earlier. However, they were convinced that the forces of leftism, “globalism,” and liberalism – all variants of the same “communist” threat – were in fact advancing more rapidly, and a much more radical politics was urgently necessary to stem the tide.

The self-declared paleo-libertarian Murray Rothbard, who was among Pat Buchanan’s closest confidantes and who, not coincidentally, some of today’s extreme thinkers in the rightwing intellectual scene have rediscovered as a major inspiration over the past decade, warned a gathering of paleo-ethnonationalists (Opens in a new window) in early 1992:

“But we must not rest content with this victory. For though Marxism-Bolshevism is gone forever, there still remains, plaguing us everywhere, its evil cousin: call it ‘soft Marxism,’ ‘Marxism-Humanism,’ ‘Marxism-Bernsteinism,’ ‘Marxism-Trotskyism,’ ‘Marxism-Freudianism,’ well, let’s just call it ‘Menshevism,’ or ‘social democracy:’ Social democracy is still here in all its variants, defining our entire respectable political spectrum, from advanced victimology and feminism on the left over to neoconservatism on the right.”

Rightwing pundit Joe Sobran, another one of Buchanan’s closest advisors, described the project (Opens in a new window) of the “paleo-conservatives” like this: “Now that democracy has overthrown communism, we can turn to the problem of how to overthrow democracy.”

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Trumpism stands in a long tradition

There is a direct line from “Race Mixing is Communism” in the 1950s and 60s to “the real enemy is liberal democracy” in the early 1990s to today’s Trumpist assault on the civil rights order and democratic self-government.

In fact, these exact ideas fueled the Right’s large-scale planning operations during the Biden interregnum. In his Foreword to Project 2025’s policy agenda (Opens in a new window), for instance, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, explicitly declared that in his view of the world, there was really only one enemy, one devil, that sought to destroy America: “The promise of socialism – Communism, Marxism, progressivism, Fascism, whatever name it chooses is simple: Government control of the economy can ensure equal outcomes for all people.”

Notice how Roberts not only collapses all distinction between anything he deems “leftist,” but also, curiously, adds fascism to the mix as a variant of what he calls “the promise of socialism.” Analytically, I certainly hope we can all agree this is complete nonsense not worth engaging with on substance. But there is that idea again that has such a long tradition on the Right: That all the “anti-American” evils in this world are merely different disguises of “socialism.”

In today’s thoroughly Trumpified rightwing intellectual sphere, such ideas are most aggressively formulated by a faction we might refer to as “West Coast Straussians.” Take, for instance, the report produced by the infamous 1776 Commission (Opens in a new window), the advisory committee established by Donald Trump in the fall of 2020, with the explicit goal of guaranteeing “patriotic education.” It is a remarkable document, as it captures these long-standing trends precisely.

Actual historians had little influence on the 1776 Report – instead, the Commission was stacked with rightwing politicians, activists, and political theorists from a particular political and intellectual eco-system, often associated with Hillsdale College, one of the country’s most unabashedly reactionary private colleges, or the Claremont Institute, a rightwing think tank based in Southern California. In terms of their ideological perspective, many of them can be described as West Coast Straussians (Opens in a new window) or West Coast Straussian-adjacent. These terms point to a specific school of thought on the Right that goes back to political philosopher Leo Strauss, whose 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 (Opens in a new window) in the late 1970s. Today, West Coast Straussians are undoubtedly the most Trumpian strand of the rightwing intellectual sphere, and the Claremont Institute is the closest thing they have to an institutional home.

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. The 1776 Report explicitly makes this argument, claiming that progressivism is akin to fascism. Just like Mussolini, the Report claims, the progressive movement “sought to centralize power under the management of so-called experts.” The Left’s end goal, we are given to understand, is inevitably a totalitarian society.

At this point, you might be asking: Who cares about the ramblings of people who deem themselves the intellectual vanguard of the Right when, in reality, neither Donald Trump nor the movement he leads are driven by ideas or devoted to some grand intellectual vision of history, “conservatism,” or “nationalism”?

Fair enough. But my point here is not to suggest that when Republican politicians attempt to vilify their political opponents (including their voters) as a bunch of anti-American communist traitors they are taking their ideas from these intellectuals. The reason why it is useful to grapple with what these rightwing thinkers are saying is that, in their attempts to intellectualize the anti-democratic radicalization, to provide justification, they are most clearly articulating the underlying sentiment, ideas, and perceptions that define today’s Right. Everyone of consequence on the Right exists in this climate, they have been stewing in these ideas, they absorb them, until their perception of reality is entirely built on such assertions. These underlying conceptions have so pervasively shaped the ecosystem in which the leaders of today’s Right as well as your average MAGA dweebs exist that this is just what’s bubbling out of them when they start riffing and raging – like JD Vance did in his press conference.

They do, in a crucial way, really believe this

I have been getting this question perhaps more than any other over the past few years: Do they really believe any of this?

When Republican politicians declare millions of people (Opens in a new window) protesting against Donald Trump in the streets to be America-hating anarchists and professional agitators paid by a “globalist” conspiracy to destroy the nation; when they fear-monger against Democrats as communist traitors (Opens in a new window) who must never be allowed to win an election, let alone govern – do they really believe any of this?

Obviously, there is an element of rank opportunism, political strategy, and vile propaganda. To some extent, they are just trying to attach a scary label to their opponents that is intended to mark them as “Un-American.” And when leading figures in MAGA world rage against “the Left,” there is also an element of posturing. Such are the incentives on the Right: If you want to get Trump’s attention, endear yourself with the rabid base, and be successful in the rightwing media landscape that monetizes fear, outrage, and anger, you must seek out a camera and find ever more aggressive ways to proudly declare how much you hate large swaths of the American population.

But when the leaders of the American Right talk about millions of their fellow citizens as the enemy within, they also mean it. Beyond the opportunistic propaganda, there is also a founding belief on the modern Right that all versions of “leftism” and liberalism are merely variants of the same fundamentally illegitimate political project of leveling hierarchies of race, gender, religion, or wealth.

Frankly, if they were all just cynical opportunists, we would be in a less dangerous situation. Because it is that underlying belief, that dogma of rightwing politics, that provides the basis on which the Republican Party, the conservative establishment, and the reactionary intellectual sphere have all given themselves permission to radicalize and self-Trumpify: If the stakes are so high, if the other side is out to destroy all that is good about America and not only tear the nation’s moral fabric apart, but erase the “natural order” of hierarchies in the process, moderation, restraint, and patience are not an option.

The Right is now dominated by forces and ideas that have long defined the stakes as existential - destroy these subversive “leftist” threats or the nation and with it the “natural order” cease to exist! If that’s the case, what line are you not justified to cross in this supposedly noble struggle?

If we want to properly understand what drives and fuels the Right’s ongoing radicalization, if we want to adequately gauge the danger we are in, we better start from the position of imagining these people as “true believers.” Maybe not in Trump, the person, but in the political project Trumpism stands for: The white grievance politics that seeks to forever preserve America as a place of strict hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth.

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