THE NATIONAL RIGHT

Recently, conservative pundit David Brooks reported on his experience at the National Conservatism Conference held in Florida in the Atlantic magazine. Brooks, an unapologetic conservative, was dismayed by what he heard and saw there:

“Rachel Bovard is one of the thousands of smart young Americans who flock to Washington each year to make a difference. She’s worked in the House and Senate for Republicans Rand Paul, Pat Toomey, and Mike Lee, was listed among the ‘Most Influential Women in Washington Under 35' by National Journal, did a stint at the Heritage Foundation, and is now policy director of the Conservative Partnership Institute, whose mission is to train, equip, and unify the conservative movement. She’s bright, cheerful, and funny, and has a side hustle as a sommelier. And, like most young people, she has absorbed the dominant ideas of her peer group.

“One of the ideas she’s absorbed is that the conservatives who came before her were insufferably naive. They thought liberals and conservatives both want what’s best for America, disagreeing only on how to get there. But that’s not true, she believes. ‘Woke elites—increasingly the mainstream left of this country—do not want what we want,’ she told the National Conservatism Conference, which was held earlier this month in a bland hotel alongside theme parks in Orlando. ‘What they want is to destroy us,’ she said. ‘Not only will they use every power at their disposal to achieve their goal,’ but they’ve already been doing it for years ‘by dominating every cultural, intellectual, and political institution.’

“Bovard has the place rocking, training her sights on the true enemies, the left-wing elite: a ‘totalitarian cult of billionaires and bureaucrats, of privilege perpetuated by bullying, empowered by the most sophisticated surveillance and communications technologies in history, and limited only by the scruples of people who arrest rape victims’ fathers, declare math to be white supremacist, finance ethnic cleansing in western China, and who partied, a mile high, on Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express.’

“The atmosphere is electric. She’s giving the best synopsis of national conservatism I’ve heard at the conference we’re attending - and with flair! Progressives pretend to be the oppressed ones, she tells the crowd, ‘but in reality, it’s just an old boys’ club, another frat house for entitled rich kids contrived to perpetuate their unearned privilege. It’s Skull and Bones for gender-studies majors!’ She finishes to a rousing ovation. People leap to their feet.

“I have the sinking sensation that the thunderous sound I’m hearing is the future of the Republican Party.”

Brooks concluded:

“Finally, there is something extremely off-putting about the NatCon public pose. In person, as I say, I find many of them charming, warm, and friendly. But their public posture is dominated by the psychology of threat and menace. If there was one expression of sympathy, kindness, or grace uttered from the podium in Orlando, I did not hear it. But I did hear callousness, invocations of combat, and whiffs of brutality.”

When one looks at what the National Conservatives - they term themselves NatCons - prescribe as the solution to the problems they see facing the country, one thing becomes clear: none of this is conservative:

Rod Dreher, a writer at The American Conservative who is considered a leading intellectual voice of this movement, has argued that because the left controls the commanding heights of the culture and the economy, the only institution the right has a shot at influencing is the state. In these circumstances the right has to use state power to promote its values. “We need to quit being satisfied with owning the libs, and save our country. We need to unapologetically embrace the use of state power.”

Two other “leading intellectual lights” of the movement are far right Israelis.

Yoram Hazony, an Orthodox Jew who went to Princeton before moving to Israel who spoke at the conference to great regard by the audience, argues that you can’t have a society that embraces government neutrality and tries to relegate values to the private sphere. The public realm eventually eviscerates private values, especially when public communication is controlled by a small oligarchic elite. If conservatives want to stand up to the pseudo-religion of wokeism, they have to put traditional religion at the center of their political project.

This was echoed by the other, Ofir Haivry, who argued that Americans shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that a nation is built out of high-minded liberal abstractions, like the Bill of Rights. A nation is, instead, a cultural tradition, a common language, a set of rituals and beliefs, and a religious order - a collective cultural identity.

Reading this, one is reminded that a warning was sounded against exactly this kind of thinking 67 years ago, by American political scientist Richard Hofstadter, in his seminal “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt”:

“There is, however, a dynamic of dissent in America today. Representing no more than a modest fraction of the electorate... It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative — I borrow the term from the study of The Authoritarian Personality published five years ago by Theodore W. Adorno and his associates — because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleased with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment as it is represented by the Eisenhower Administration. Their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways — a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive clinical evidence.

“From clinical interviews and thematic apperception tests, Adorno and his co-workers found that their pseudo-conservative subjects, although given to a form of political expression that combines a curious mixture of largely conservative with occasional radical notions, succeed in concealing from themselves impulsive tendencies that, if released in action, would be very far from conservative. The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, shows ‘conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness’ in his conscious thinking and ‘violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere. . . . The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.’

“Who is the pseudo-conservative, and what does he want? It is impossible to identify him by class, for the pseudo-conservative impulse can be found in practically all classes in society, although its power probably rests largely upon its appeal to the less educated members of the middle classes. The ideology of pseudo-conservatism can be characterized but not defined, because the pseudo-conservative tends to be more than ordinarily incoherent about politics...

“The restlessness, suspicion and fear manifested in various phases of the pseudo-conservative revolt give evidence of the real suffering which the pseudo-conservative experiences in his capacity as a citizen. He believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and outrageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything that has happened in American politics for the past twenty years. He hates the very thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt... He sees his own country as being so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world... cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed.”

Sixty-seven years later, what Hofstadter identified as a movement that wasn’t as “fringy” as those at the time thought the people participating in it were is today’s mainstream of the Republican Party.

Theodore Adorno created the term “pseudo-conservative” because he understood that most people in America would reject his use of the proper term for the movement, but he knew what he was seeing because he had seen it before in Germany before he was forced to flee for his life in 1938.

The term these people now use to describe themselves, “National Conservative” echoes the term “National Socialist.” In both cases, the movement using the terms is neither “conservative” nor “socialist.” Those terms are used by them because they represent popular ideas with the part of society this movement wants to reach and mobilize. “Socialism,” as we have seen this year, is a “boogey-man” term in America; it even bothers those who are nowhere close to being National Conservatives. But “conservatism” has been an acceptable political term in America for a long time. Thus, “National Conservative” rather than “National Socialist,” but notice how close the self-used descriptor “NatCon” is to “Nazi” - put that word into English and one gets “NatSoc”, which interestingly is the name of the political party that is subservient to Big Brother in Orwell’s “1984.” What Orwell was pointing out by so doing is that Totalitarianism is Totalitarianism, whether it describes itself as coming from the Right or the Left.

They are indeed “Pseudo” - pretend - “Conservatives.”

If you want to see a clear demonstration that this movement in America is Totalitarian, you need look no further than the actions of Mark Meadows this past week. He’s written a book (which comes out tomorrow) in which he talked about what was going on in the Trump White House in its final year in office, and he stated that Donald Trump had contracted Covid at least a week before it was publicly admitted when he was taken by ambulance to Walter Reed Hospital, during which time, while he became progressively more contagious, he exposed fellow Republicans, Gold Star families, and his political opponent to a potentially-deadly virus. When the news came out, Trump labeled it “fake news.” Within a day of his saying that, Meadows showed up on Fox News to proclaim his leader right and himself a liar, in an act reminiscent of the “confessions” made by the Old Bolsheviks at the Stalinist Show Trials during the purges of 1937-38. It was functionally the equivalent of Winston Smith admitting that when his interrogator was holding up four fingers, he was actually holding up five as the man said he was.

That is how Totalitarianism works.

We don’t have to look much further to see the manifestation of this throughout American political life. There isn’t a day that goes by that some observer doesn’t point to the actions of Kevin McCarthy in his unwillingness to call out the far right extremism that now dominates his party in the House of Representatives, or the failure of Republican leaders in the Senate, the party itself - nationally or at the state level - to oppose this takeover.

The proper term for what we are looking at is Fascist.

The argument that the state must control both personal life and economic life is the heart of fascism - whether it calls itself communist, fascist, or any other name. Fascism is the essence of Totalitarianism.

Hofstadter’s portrait of his day’s “pseudo-conservatives” can be seen around us today. Consider:

“No doubt the circumstances determining the political style of any individual are complex. Although I am concerned here to discuss some of the neglected social-psychological elements in pseudo-conservatism, I do not wish to appear to deny the presence of important economic and political causes. I am aware, for instance, that wealthy reactionaries try to use pseudo- conservative organizers, spokesmen and groups to propagate their notions of public policy, and that some organizers of pseudo-conservative and ‘patriotic’ groups often find in this work a means of making a living - thus turning a tendency toward paranoia into a vocational asset, probably one of the most perverse forms of occupational therapy known to man.”

There is the Conservative Entertainment Complex, described perfectly, 40 years before it came into existence.

And this description can be found as an explanation/excuse by too many people today for excusing the Trump voters:

“Elmer Davis, seeking to account for such sentiment in his recent book, But We Were Born Free, ventures a psychological hypothesis. He concludes, if I understand him correctly, that the genuine difficulties of our situation in the face of the power of international communism have inspired a widespread feeling of fear and frustration, and that those who cannot face these problems in a more rational way ‘take it out on their less influential neighbors, in the mood of a man who, being afraid to stand up to his wife in a domestic argument, relieves his feelings by kicking the cat.’ This suggestion has the merit of both simplicity and plausibility, and it may begin to account for a portion of the pseudo-conservative public. But while we may dismiss our curiosity about the man who kicks the cat by remarking that some idiosyncrasy in his personal development has brought him to this pass, we can hardly help but wonder whether there are not, in the backgrounds of the hundreds of thousands of persons who are moved by the pseudo-conservative impulse, some commonly shared circumstances that will help to account for their all kicking the cat in unison.”

Hofstadter gets to the heart of what has to be understood if one is to effectively oppose this movement with this passage:

“Why do some of us prefer to look for allies in the democratic world, while others seem to prefer authoritarian allies or none at all? Why do the pseudo-conservatives express such a persistent fear and suspicion of their own government, whether its leadership rests in the hands of Roosevelt, Truman or Eisenhower? Why is the pseudo-conservative impelled to go beyond the more or less routine partisan argument that we have been the victims of considerable misgovernment during the past twenty years to the disquieting accusation that we have actually been the victims of persistent conspiracy and betrayal - “twenty years of treason”? Is it not true, moreover, that political types very similar to the pseudo-conservative have had a long history in the United States, and that this history goes back to a time when the Soviet power did not loom nearly so large on our mental horizons? Was the Ku Klux Klan, for instance, which was responsibly estimated to have had a membership of from 4,000,000 to 4,500,000 persons at its peak in the 1920’s, a phenomenon totally dissimilar to the pseudo-conservative revolt?”

Hofstadter goes on to say, as most people would - both then and now - that this movement is on the wane, that those who warn it could grow and become dominant are themselves paranoid. “ I do not share the widespread foreboding among liberals that this form of dissent will grow until it overwhelms our liberties altogether and plunges us into a totalitarian nightmare.”

He does, however, conclude with a bit less confidence: “However, in a populistic culture like ours, which seems to lack a responsible elite with political and moral autonomy, and in which it is possible to exploit the wildest currents of public sentiment for private purposes, it is at least conceivable that a highly organized, vocal, active and well-financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.”

That day is here. Now. And those who refuse to recognize this reality for what it is will find themselves as confused when it takes power as were the majority of Germans in the spring of 1933. As a dear departed friend who survived what he called “the twelve bad years” once explained to me: “The Nazis didn’t elect Hitler, the conservatives did! They believed him when he told them he was one of them, a lie they discovered too late.”

What we are facing today is something that has been here for as long as the United States has been the United States, even before we were a country. It’s no surprise that Hitler and the Nazis looked at a state that had existed before as the realization of the kind of governing and social system they wanted to impose: the Confederacy.

So, to those who say “It can’t happen here,” I reply, “It already did.”

Comments are for Paid Subscribers. If another 100 of the 600 readers who regularly open these posts were to subscribe, That’s Another Fine Mess could operate full time. That’s what $7/month, or $70/year can produce.