What I think I got wrong
It’s a real temptation and bad habit of mine to survey what’s going on and write, “See, I told you so!” For instance, I could do this with the recent Tucker Carlson interview with former Tory parliamentarian Jacob Rees-Mogg, where Carlson basically just repeated all the claims about Hitler not being such a bad guy and Britain making a mistake in fighting World War II from Pat Buchanan’s books. But to say that the story of the right over the past decade is simply the story of paleoconservative ascendancy would be indefensible. How then do we end up in a war with Iran? How do you explain the continued commitment to supporting Israel’s wars?
One way to do this—the paleo way—would be that the real American right is anti-Zionist and nationalist, but the commanding heights are still controlled by alien interlopers—Jews—who have not yet been pushed out; perhaps Trump himself has come under the sway of the subtle Talmudists. In its cruder forms, the explanation is patently antisemitic. It’s also just not really true. No pristine true red-blooded conservative core lies beneath the institutions, waiting to express its All-American worldview if the damned elites would just get out of the way. The fact of the matter is the conservative coalition still contains an enormous, genuinely popular pro-Israel constituency, above all among evangelical Christians and older Republicans. I’m not one to overly trust issue polling, but a recent Pew poll suggests that pure isolationism is hardly the overwhelming tendency on the American right: while the hardest-right factions are deeply hostile to NATO and foreign commitments, substantial Republican blocs remain favorable toward those alliances and an active American role abroad.
Does the mind rule the body, or does the body rule the mind?
One solution would be to say “paleo” and “neo” are labels for old coteries of intellectuals, made up by an intellectual themselves, and don't map neatly onto the actually existing right. In general, we already know that voters at large are much less ideologically clean-cut than the intelligentsia and often hold a variety of commitments that a real ideologue would find bafflingly contradictory. But clearly the right today is more "Buchananite" than before. Positions that were identified with Buchanan’s insurgency in the 1990s—immigration restrictionism, trade protectionism, anti-globalization, skepticism toward alliances, and a narrow, ‘America First’ conception of national interest—now occupy a far more central place in Republican politics. Not to mention that the right, under the reign of Trump, is much more openly and crudely racist than it was in the early 2000s and 1990s.
I’ve pointed out in the past that the neocon “lowbrows”—people like Mark Levin, Frank Gaffney, and David Horowitz—got on the Trump train while many of the high neocon aristocracy—Kristols, Kagans, Boots—went Democratic or NeverTrump, but I haven’t ever given a real reason other than Trump is a fellow vulgarian. Here’s my provisional explanation now: the rhetorical forms and political ontology of the paleocons became hegemonic, even though their entire policy program did not. Their way of imagining politics—as an existential struggle over sovereignty, borders, demographic cohesion, civilizational survival, and elite perfidy—became the common language in which very different factions increasingly must justify themselves. The subtext—and so often the text—became racial replacement, contamination, and decline. Alongside racial fears, there is also an anxious and insecure masculinity at work that requires constant loud dominance displays to fend off questions of its potency. (Often these anxieties are combined in ways that are quite pornographic.)
Clinging to old dreams
The reason this part of the paleoconservative worldview became dominant was what I’ve called enrabblement. This involves the growing conviction, across very different strata of the right, that the institutions claiming to represent the general interest are, in fact, hostile powers serving someone else. If all the grand institutions—the media, corporations, courts, and international bodies, etc.—no longer appear as the imperfect basis of a common world, but as alien and hostile forces, then politics necessarily gets reinscribed as betrayal, dispossession, invasion, replacement, existential combat, and so forth.
The clearest sign of enrabblement is the growing divide in educational attainment between Republicans and Democrats—though this is not in itself a sufficient explanation. Over the past thirty years, the two parties have undergone an educational sorting. In the 1990s, college graduates still tended to lean Republican, and Republicans were at least as credentialed as Democrats. Since then, the Democratic coalition has become dramatically more college-educated, while the GOP has become increasingly concentrated among voters without degrees. It should come as no surprise that this is the same period in which the Republican right has become progressively more estranged from universities, the professions, the bureaucracy, the mainstream press, and other institutions claiming cultural or epistemic authority. (No wonder the “highbrows” then defected in relatively large numbers: their talents are not really useful to the coalition anymore.)
Educational attainment is obviously not synonymous with class. Among Americans without a four-year degree, the rich are more Republican than the poor: just about two-thirds of upper- and upper-middle-income non-college voters identify more with the GOP, while poor non-college voters still lean slightly Democratic. It’s tempting for self-satisfied liberals to pose this as a smart/dumb thing, or even to lapse into their own eugenic language about human capital and IQ. But this is not about one’s abstract intellectual quotient, but rather one’s concrete relationship to civil society.
I think this is where Hegel’s distinction between a poor and rich rabble becomes useful. The poor rabble is produced by a sense of exclusion from the institutions and rewards of civil society: it experiences the social order as something that has failed to give it its due. The rich rabble arrives at a similar estrangement from the opposite direction. It enjoys the fruits of civil society while regarding its obligations, restraints, and universal institutions as annoying hindrances to its own self-assertion. (So, for one big example, Trump.)
A clear example of enrabblement on display is in the recent Rufo-Lomez podcast where Rufo derides the very idea of meritocracy. Only a few years ago, he mocked the left for depicting meritocracy as a mask for racial domination; now, confronted with Indian Americans succeeding under meritocratic institutions, he now warns that meritocracy can undermine the national substance. Hypocrisy and lack of principle are necessary but insufficient explanations here. What has shifted is the status of meritocracy itself: A principle that once appeared—or appeared useful, my cynical side must say—to conservatives as a way to prevent racial particularism increasingly appears as one more abstract institution that produces outcomes at odds with the interests of white people. The question is no longer merely whether the competition is “fair,” but whether the people who win it are your kind of people.
To paraphrase Morrissey of the Smiths, the characteristic enrabbled sentiment is, “I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving/America is mine, and it owes me a living/But ask me why and I'll spit in your eye.” So, the nation owes me recognition, security, status, prosperity; but I do not necessarily owe anything back to the institutions that make those goods possible. The poor rabble says, “society has failed me, so its claims on me are void!” The rich rabble says, “my success is mine alone, so society has no claim on it!” These are both variations on a more pithy Scorsesean précis of gangster ideology: “fuck you, pay me.” Again: Ergo the gangster chieftain, Trump.
At this point, I have to be careful not to simply reproduce the right’s own political ontology in liberal guise by making this “rabble” and “mob” category its own sort of alien horde assaulting a peaceful and good society—” barbarians at the gates” and so forth. No, the point is almost the opposite: Enrabblement is an endogenous product of civil society. It’s not irrational at all, but instead is the rationality of the system stripped of its good manners. It’s produced by the same institutions and incentives that constitute the social order itself; Enrabblement is simply the competitive logic of civil society served back to it cold. I guess the question we’re faced with is this: is there any way to stitch up the old institutional sutures without somehow making the competitive nature of our society itself less barbarous? Perhaps the problem is not that the sutures have come undone, but that we keep asking them to hold together a social body that is continually tearing itself apart.