Using Old Tactics To Beat The New Right
The GOP’s turn towards illiberal nationalism is dangerous. To stop them, Democrats need only retvrn to tradition
There’s a growing trend of mainstream political journalists who are fascinated with the nascent “national conservatism” movement on the right but are unable to really explain what it’s about. Ezra Klein, ever the wonk, sought to delve into their policy program in a multipart podcast series but mostly got nowhere. Others have fared better, if only by sticking to reporting on the vibes at the National Conservatism Conference instead of taking a look under the hood to see what makes the movement tick.
But now that Republicans have nominated two Peter Thiel-backed nationalist Republican candidates for Senate this year, J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona, it seems worth taking a look at what this strain of conservatism is all about and how Democrats might counter it. After all, it doesn’t actually take much poking to reveal what the national conservatives are up to. As John Ganz wrote, it’s fascism:
This new right is essentially a secular party of the aggrieved mittelstand that feels the national substance has been undermined by a group of cosmopolitan elites who have infiltrated all the institutions of power; that believes immigrants threaten to replace the traditional ethnic make up of the country; that borrows conceptions and tactics from the socialist tradition but retools them for counter-revolutionary ends; that is animated by myths of national decline and renewal; that instrumentalizes racial anxieties; that brings together dissatisfied and alienated members of the intelligentsia with the conservative families of the old bourgeoisie and futurist magnates of industry; that looks to a providential figure like Trump for leadership; that has street fighting and militia cadre; and that has even attempted an illegal putsch to give their leader absolute power. If only there was historical precedent and even a neat little word for all that.
Obviously, national conservatives don’t want to admit as much in public, even as they praise Viktor Orban, support the January 6 insurrection, and fantasize about dismantling the executive branch and installing a monarch (or a pope). Instead, the more savvy national conservatives have focused on a legitimate critique of American society: that unfettered capitalism’s promise of prosperity for all was a sham; that in reality, the turn to neoliberalism over the last 40 years eroded many of the social bonds that tied Americans together and created meaning in their lives by subsuming life to the market. National conservatives promise to reverse this trend, if only for people who look like them, by “wielding the levers of state power…to reward friends and punish enemies,” as Hillsdale College’s David Azerrad puts it.
The problem for most Americans is that national conservatives draw the same line between friends and enemies that the modern Republican Party always has. While national conservatives may promise economic populism, what they’re truly interested in is dismantling American democracy so they can legislate social hierarchies that put rich white Christian men at the top. That they phrase this as fighting a culture war on behalf of the working class might obscure their project, but it doesn’t change its goals1. As Erik Baker writes, “the postliberal right seeks to deploy the tools of ‘culture’ to keep [the working class] permanently in its place.”
To make this more concrete, a look at the legislative proposals from some of the National Conservatism Conference headliners in Congress shows little in the way of a transformative economic program for the working class they claim to valorize. Marco Rubio’s big overture to empowering workers is little more than a suggestion box meant to undermine organized labor. His “pro-family” agenda, released in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, excludes the poorest families from the Child Tax Credit and cuts parents’ Social Security benefits in exchange for paid leave. Josh Hawley’s supposedly pro-worker minimum wage hike bill is actually a taxpayer-funded subsidy for corporations. The national conservatives in Congress are much more interested in banning abortion and inflaming the latest anti-LGBTQ panic. As much as they claim to stand up to big business, the enemies in their crosshairs are decidedly not the CEOs dodging capital gains taxes or undermining unions, but rather the CEOs who help their employees get an abortion or voice support for Black Lives Matter.
An illustrative example of where national conservatives’ true priorities are is a conversation between Sohrab Amari and Ross Douthat in which Douthat asks Amari why he identifies with the right and not the left. After sounding an awful lot like a liberal, criticizing the right for opposing a government-provided “substrate of material safety” that affords Americans the freedom to start and grow their families how they want, Amari admits that the real reason he’s not a leftist is because progressives have corrupted corporate HR departments with wokeness.
As Sam Adler-Bell summed it up during a recap of last year’s National Conservatism Conference, the ideology on display was not about “giving people the material conditions to make choices for themselves about what kind of family they want to have,” but rather about “returning to the natural order” as conservatives conceive of it. The irony, he notes, is that the social order national conservatives want to recreate - communities made up of single breadwinner nuclear families headed by a man doing honorable manual labor - is the product of the very postwar liberalism that modern American conservatism was created to oppose.
National conservatives may have deluded themselves into thinking that culture war is class warfare, that picking fights with CEOs over social issues is the same as fighting with them on behalf of the working class. But as long as their party remains an organization funded by rapacious billionaires and dominated by America’s gentry, their overtures to economic populism will be little more than a hollow ploy for votes, devoid of any meaningful redistribution.
If 2022 is any indication of the future, our next few election cycles will be dominated by Republican candidates who will try to get credit in the media for tipping their hat in the vague direction of the working class while normalizing a horrible project of brutal capitalism and social hierarchies. And if it wasn’t obvious already, the success of this project hinges on whether voters buy national conservatives’ bullshit about building a party for the working class. With the stakes clear, it's puzzling that liberals have at best been slow to come up with a viable strategy to counter these conservatives, and at worst repeated the failed tactics of the 2016 election.
Faced with a Republican who tried to break with his party’s orthodoxy of opposing social welfare spending while doubling down on an agenda aimed at keeping white men at the top of American society, Hillary Clinton decided to portray Donald Trump as an offensive bully rather than someone who would cut health care and Social Security benefits, as Trump eventually tried to do. To be fair, it wasn’t entirely clear at the time that this was a bad strategy. But there’s no need to make the same mistake twice2.
In fact, Trump’s success at moderating on conservative economic orthodoxy is the reason national conservatives have been emboldened to adopt some of the left’s economic rhetoric. It’s popular as hell and it works. Voters really do want the welfare benefits national conservatives claim to support: a higher minimum wage, public health insurance, and programs to make having children more affordable. They like unions and support policies to help make their workplaces less hellish. They want to raise taxes on the rich. The fraud at the heart of the national conservative political project is that, despite their rhetoric, they don’t actually want to do any of this.
The path forward for Democrats is one that reveals this scam for what it is and fights the right on these terms. National conservatives have given the left a gift: a growing bipartisan consensus that our current economic system is destructive, alienating, and unsustainable. Their refusal to deliver on the economic populism they promise (let alone even utter the phrase “climate change”) should be all Democrats need to recommit themselves to their roots as a party fighting for organized labor, civil rights, and the working class, as well as enact a coherent plan to pull us out of the looming recession.
The recently introduced Inflation Reduction Act is a step in the right direction. That every Senate Republican will likely vote against legislation to raise taxes on rich people and big tech companies in order to finance American manufacturing, energy production, and health care services should tell voters everything they need to know about the sincerity of national conservatives’ attempts at populism. It’s up to Democrats to make sure they get the message. Failing to do so, whether by doing nothing or doubling down on shoddy economic policy, would be consigning the country to the worst impulses of the budding fascist movement on the right.
As J.D. Vance likes to say, “culture war is class warfare.” To him, this means the key to improving the lives of the working class is to ban abortion and porn.
This is not to say that Democrats should ignore Trumpian attacks on America’s minorities. “Politics is always a matter of making choices from the possibilities offered by a given historical situation and cultural context,” wrote the political scientist Charles W. Anderson. Stopping the right’s culture wars by shifting this cultural context to be more favorable to women, immigrants, the LGBTQ community, and racial minorities should be a major project of the left. At the same time, part of politics is also realizing what your opponents do and don’t want to fight about. When Democrats face off against people who would rather talk about slides from corporate diversity training seminars instead of unionizing efforts at those same companies, the choice seems clear about what the left should emphasize.