(Finishing on Sunday a post I began yesterday, Saturday, and am posted in that slot.)
Here’s a longish essay by Damon Linker about conservative “intellectuals” who are trying to justify the takeover of America by Christian Nationalism. On what grounds, I wonder.
NY Times, guest essay by Damon Linker, 4 Nov 2023: Get to Know the Influential Conservative Intellectuals Who Help Explain G.O.P. Extremism
Long piece, presumably to be published in the print paper this weekend. Let me try to read this carefully. I’m always perplexed by what conservatives are for, rather than simply against. (As Adam Lee described about Mike Johnson in the last item in yesterday’s post.) They *say* limited government, but they don’t mean it, not when it comes to policing sexual conduct, reproductive behavior, and books in libraries. They *say* they want to control spending, but they’re not doing it by cutting the budget of the IRS and thus raising the deficit. What’s left? Well, obviously they’re for religion, in particular Christianity, in all walks of life, which to me means being against religious liberty for anyone who’s not Christian. They’re very self-centered that way. Or perhaps simply unimaginative. It boggles their minds that everyone does not see the world as clearly as they claim to do.
So, let’s stipulate that conservatives think their religion should dominate the culture, and they miss their ‘good old days’ when that was so and non-whites and sexual minorities were not seen. Do they have anything else? Any rational reasons why they think America is going to hell unless those two things are true? Like, actual economic policies, worldwide political issues, worldwide threats that need to be addressed? Anything?
Linker begins:
It’s easy to become inured to the extremism that has suffused the Republican Party in recent years. Donald Trump, the dominating front-runner for the party’s presidential nomination, spends days in court, in a judicial system he regularly disparages, charged with a long list of offenses and facing several trials.
In the House, Republicans recently chose a new speaker, Representative Mike Johnson, who not only endorsed the attempted overturning of the 2020 election but also helped to devise the rationale behind it.
We shouldn’t grow complacent about just how dangerous it all is — and how much more dangerous it could become. The efforts to overturn the 2020 election failed. We’re told that’s because the institutions held. But it’s more accurate to say that most of the individuals holding powerful positions within those institutions — the White House, the Pentagon, the courts, election officials in Georgia and other states — sided with the Constitution over Mr. Trump’s desire to remain in power.
But what if key individuals decide differently the next time they are faced with this kind of choice? What if they have come to believe that the country is in such dire straits — has reached a state of apocalyptic decadence — that democracy is a luxury we can no longer afford?
Now conservatives resist change, almost by definition, and some of them seem so panicked by change that they prophesy catastrophe at every turn. In this way they resemble the religious extremists (to the extent those two groups are distinct), always anticipating, even anxious for, the end of the world. So I like the term Linker adopts here:
A coalition of intellectual catastrophists on the American right is trying to convince people of just that — giving the next generation of Republican officeholders, senior advisers, judges and appointees explicit permission and encouragement to believe that the country is on the verge of collapse. Some catastrophists take it a step further and suggest that officials might contemplate overthrowing liberal democracy in favor of revolutionary regime change or even imposing a right-wing dictatorship on the country.
Well, we’ve just seen about how the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, doesn’t believe in democracy. He’s said so quite plainly.
Regarding the catastrophists, it’s important to understand that there have *always* been such doom-sayers, in every age. It’s part of human nature, to fear the worst, and even be anxious to participate in the end; being present for the end of the world makes one so special. So, once again — posing the question again — do any of their worries have anything to do with evidence, with factual matters about the economy or human health or the state of the world? Or are they merely in a tizzy about the discovery of transsexuals, which (albeit beneath their radar) have always existed?
The list of people making these arguments includes former officials in the Trump administration, some of whom are likely to be considered for top jobs in the event of a Trump restoration in 2024. It includes respected scholars at prestigious universities and influential think tanks. The ideas about the threat of an all-powerful totalitarian left and the dismal state of the country — even the most outlandish of them — are taken seriously by conservative politicians as well as prominent influencers on the right.
“Totalitarian”? Are they projecting again?
Linker goes on to discuss the “Claremont Catastrophists,” a group of intellectuals with ties to the Claremont Institution, a right-wing think tank in California — in Claremont, way east of Pasadena, coincidentally where my editor Gary Westfahl lives. One of these is Michael Anton, author of the infamous “Flight 93 Election” essay concerning the urgency of electing Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016. If Trump wasn’t elected, America was doomed. (Again, why…?) Another who agreed was John Eastman, who felt the same about the election of Joe Biden.
The prospect of Mr. Biden’s becoming president constituted an “existential threat,” Mr. Eastman said, to the survivability of the country. Would we “completely repudiate every one of our founding principles” and allow ourselves to be “eradicated”? Those were the stakes, as he viewed them.
Has Biden eradicated America’s founding principles? Has America not survived? What is he talking about? Linker comments.
Once a thinker begins to conceive of politics as a pitched battle between the righteous and those who seek the country’s outright annihilation, extraordinary possibilities open up.
Then, if I’m reading this right, Anton and has pal Curtis Yarvin decided the current state of America is — get this — a “theocratic oligarchy”! Look at the terms in which they think. The ones who are *not* part of the Christian Nationalist movement are “theocratic.” And of course their mission was to overthrow this oligarchy.
Linker goes on to discuss the “Christian Reverse Revolutionaries”.
Those on the right primarily concerned about the fate of traditionalist Christian morals and worship in the United States insist that we already live in a regime that oppresses and brutalizes religious believers and conservatives. And they make those charges in a theologically inflected idiom that’s meant to address and amplify the right’s intense worries about persecution by progressives.
(“Brutalizes believers”? Examples, please.) Linker then discusses Stephen Wolfe, Rod Dreher, and Patrick Deneen, who’ve all written books to justify the (perhaps violent) overthrow of the current government in favor of Christian Nationalism. Deneen, for example:
describ[es] the separation of church and state as a “totalitarian undertaking” that must be reversed so that American public life can be fully integrated with conservative forms of Christianity. He even affirmatively quotes a passage from Machiavelli in which he talks of the need to use “extralegal and almost bestial” forms of resistance, including “mobs running through the streets,” in order to topple the powers that be.
So yes they want to impose their version of Christianity on the rest of us. Linker comments,
Mr. Deneen and other discontented intellectuals of the religious right can perhaps be most accurately described as political reactionaries looking to undertake a revolutionary act in reverse.
Following discussion of a troll calling himself “Bronze Age Pervert,” Linker begins wrapping up by wondering if we aren’t paying too much attention to a small handful of “obscure writers talking to one another.” Yet, they do have influence on certain politicians, and certain media personalities.
Tucker Carlson has interviewed Curtis Yarvin and declared that with regard to the 2024 election, “everything is at stake. What wouldn’t they do? What haven’t they done? How will you prepare yourself?” Other right-wing influencers with large followings assert more bluntly that if conservatives lose in 2024, they will be hunted down and murdered by the regime.
“Hunted down and murdered by the regime”? These people are paranoid and sound like lunatics. Or they are projecting again? (Remember DeSantis promising to “slit the throats” of federal bureaucrats.) As Linker points out — first key concluding point:
It’s important that we respond to such statements by pointing out there is literally no evidence to support them. Other intellectual catastrophists are likewise wrong to suggest the country is ruled by a progressive tyranny, and we can know this because people on the right increasingly say such things while facing no legal consequences at all.
So the answer to my opening question is: no, they have nothing but grievance, grievance that their religion isn’t dominant over everything, and their paranoia that their culture is increasingly just one portion of a multicultural nation. Linker ends by discussing the principles of democracy and concluding with a second key point:
Those on different sides of these conflicts need to be willing to accept the possibility of losing. That’s the democratic deal: No election is ever the final election.
In refusing to accept that deal, many of the right’s most prominent writers are ceasing to behave like citizens, who must be willing to share rule with others, in favor of thinking and acting like commissars eager to serve a strongman.
There may be little the rest of us can do about it besides resisting the temptation to respond in kind. In that refusal, we give the lie to claims that the liberal center has tyrannical aims of its own — and demonstrate that the right’s intellectual catastrophists are really just anticipatory sore losers.
Yes, that’s what they (and Trump) sound like: sore losers.
