Better Late Than Never?

The Right Wakes Up to Fascism...Kinda

Last week, conservative broadcaster Erick Erickson published a piece on his Substack entitled “The Midwestern Führerbunker Driving the Right Off the Cliff.” He tells the story that a radical current has moved from the margins of the American right into a real institutional ecosystem linking multi-millionaire ideological warlord Charles Haywood, the Claremont Institute, the Society for American Civic Renewal, American Reformer, and adjacent Christian-nationalist networks, while a separate but convergent Groyper-Nick Fuentes milieu has been cultivating younger activists from below. This account should not surprise anybody who has read this newsletter or Laura Field’s Furious Minds in the past few years. The question is why it should have surprised Erickson at all. This has been going on for a decade at least. It feels like deja vu all over again.

Erickson strongest observation is that these forces don’t need to be coordinated to reinforce one another: one supplies money, institutions, intellectual justification, and cadres, while the other supplies subculture, militancy, and a mass political language. But Erickson is unable to identify the correct causal mechanism for this breakdown, attributing it to the corrupting “infection” of the ideas of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and ultimately to Satan himself. That may be convenient rhetorically, but it is intellectually remiss. It performs the right wing’s favorite diagnosis: the healthy body infected by an outside agent; it exhibits no curiosity or understanding of why or how the right is susceptible to this “takeover.” As Cassius said to his co-conspirator, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Erickson is structurally unable to recognize the process, because he’s part of it. He suffers from the selective blindness of conservative intellectuals—I’m using that term very generously.

Erickson wasn’t blind to what Trump represented from the beginning. In 2015, he disinvited Trump from the RedState Gathering over his remarks about Megyn Kelly and publicly argued that there were lines of decency a conservative movement ought to enforce. In 2016, he refused to vote for Trump and described him in stark moral terms. Yet by 2019, after three years in which the alt-right, Charlottesville, Steve Bannon’s White House role, and the general transformation of the Republican coalition had made the nature of Trumpism much harder to misunderstand, Erickson reversed himself. He announced that Trump and Pence had “earned my vote,” explaining that while his concerns about Trump’s character remained, the administration’s policies were worth supporting; shortly afterward, he told the Trump White House that he was “happy to help them” and met with Vice President Pence.

That sequence matters because it shows that the problem was never simply total ignorance. Erickson recognized the rupture, recoiled from it, and then accommodated himself to it once the new regime proved capable of delivering substantive conservative victories. He was hardly alone—look at the names The National Review Trump issue cover for just one example. That process of accommodation is precisely how a movement changes without ever quite admitting that it has changed: yesterday’s disqualifying tendencies become today’s regrettable excesses, provided the coalition still delivers judges, tax policy, abortion restrictions, or whatever other victory over the left. The boundary of respectability moves after the political movement has already moved it.

The same pattern repeats after January 6. Erickson wrote that conservatives had allowed QAnon and election conspiracies to “seep” into the movement, that some conservative media figures had actively harnessed the anger, and that the right needed an internal accounting. He conceded that the phenomenon was “far more pervasive than I thought.” But even this language is revealing. Once again, radicalization appears as something that has seeped into conservatism, rather than as something actors within conservatism had repeatedly tolerated, instrumentalized, and normalized. So, even when Erickson recognizes the political consequences, he reaches instinctively for the metaphor of contamination.

His own earlier career supplies an even clearer version of the contradiction. During the Tea Party period, Erickson explicitly argued that conservatives had to purge birthers, truthers, and other “crazy” fringe elements lest they discredit the movement. In other words, he understood very well that the relationship between respectable conservatism and its fringe was an internal political problem requiring boundary maintenance. What he has difficulty recognizing is that boundary maintenance can fail not because some foreign doctrine suddenly crosses the walls, but because actors inside the walls repeatedly decide that policing the boundary is less important than preserving the coalition.

That is why Carl Schmitt and Satan are such convenient explanatory agents: They externalize the cause. If Schmittian ideas infected the right, then the respectable conservative—like the United States itself—remains fundamentally the victim of an alien intellectual pathogen. But Erickson’s own history points toward a less comforting explanation: the transformation proceeded through choices made by conservatives who saw enough of what was happening to object, yet repeatedly concluded that accommodation was politically preferable to rupture. The process did not require them to become fascists themselves. It required only that they redraw the line of acceptable association each time the movement crossed the old one.

The striking thing, then, is not that Erickson failed to predict the far right’s advance. He recognized major elements of it very early. The failure lies in his inability to incorporate his own accommodation into the causal story he now tells. He can see the radicals, and he can see the ideas, but he cannot quite see the respectable conservatives who kept making room for them—because at crucial moments he was one of them.

He and others must do this because, like Brutus and Cassius, they are underlings: Conservative intellectuals are not in the driver’s seat. The knowledge- and discourse-producing class on the right doesn’t have an organic function within their movement: they do not help organize the forces they work with; they have to react to them. Their role is retrospective: justifying, rationalizing, excusing. They are what Robert F. Carley has called “conjunctural intellectuals”; they appear at a particular point of political rupture, ride its waves opportunistically, provide it with arguments and rhetorical firepower, but cannot command its development. Erickson himself is a product of an earlier radicalization of the Republican Party. He emerged nationally during the Tea Party revolt, as one of the intellectuals and media entrepreneurs urging conservatives to use insurgent energies to capture the GOP from within. What he has difficulty recognizing now is that the process did not stop at the political boundary he preferred.

The double move of accommodation and repudiation practiced by Erickson and so many other conservative intellectuals is structurally determined by their position within the movement. This is an old, old story. William F. Buckley is remembered in conservative mythology as the intellectual sovereign who drew a bright line between respectable conservatism and the lunatic fringe, most famously by expelling the John Birch Society. But as historians like David Austin Walsh and Nicole Hemmer have shown, the line was never so bright. The modern conservative movement itself emerged from a much wider right-wing popular front in which respectable anti-New Deal politics mingled with conspiracy theories, racism, antisemitism and outright fascism. Buckley’s relations with this world were intimate and prolonged, and his acts of exclusion tended to come only when particular allies became liabilities to the larger project. The supposed gatekeeper was therefore less the sovereign author of the movement’s boundaries than their manager: compelled to keep contact with radical energies while periodically sacrificing their most embarrassing representatives in the interest of respectability.

The pattern persisted after Buckley became an emeritus figure. In 1991, National Review subjected Pat Buchanan to a lengthy inquiry into whether he was an antisemite; only months later, as Buchanan’s primary campaign against George H. W. Bush gained momentum, the magazine recommended that discontented conservatives cast a tactical vote for him. In the political world I examined in When the Clock Broke, marginal figures such as Murray Rothbard and Sam Francis were already attempting to construct a new right out of nationalism, racial and cultural resentment, economic dislocation and hatred of established elites. They didn’t yet have a social basis to make that possible. The respectable conservative intelligentsia did not create these forces and could not finally suppress them. It alternately condemned, appropriated and rationalized them.

The Tea Party produced another generation of the same type. Erick Erickson rose to national prominence as an intellectual and media entrepreneur of that insurgency, urging conservatives to use popular revolt to discipline and capture the Republican Party while continuing to police its most disreputable fringes. Trump and the alt-right demonstrated the limits of that position. Erickson initially recognized the break and repudiated Trump; once Trump became the effective leader of the Republican coalition and began delivering conservative policy victories, Erickson accommodated himself to him. Now, another turn of the wheel later, he discovers Haywood, the Groypers and Christian-nationalist institutions with renewed horror.

The content of the insurgency might change, but what remains remarkably stable is the role of the conservative intellectual. He does not command the movement from above or organically organize it from within. He occupies the unstable space between a respectable institutional world and popular forces he can neither afford to embrace completely nor safely abandon. He therefore oscillates between legitimation and excommunication. Buckley did it with the Birchers; National Review did it with Buchanan; Erickson did it with Trump. The point is not that these men secretly wanted every development they later condemned. It is that their political function continually placed them in a relationship of dependence on movements whose direction they did not control.

The irony here is that Erickson misses what is actually instructive about the Carl Schmitt story. Schmitt is less useful as an example of an evil thinker whose ideas somehow infected a political movement than as an example of the conjunctural intellectual. Schmitt did not create National Socialism. Much of his major theoretical work preceded Hitler’s rise, and he was not originally a Nazi partisan—he was even an opponent of Nazism who suggested using the state against them. But after Hitler took power, Schmitt opportunistically accommodated himself to the victorious movement, translated his existing intellectual apparatus into its political vocabulary, supplied legal rationalizations for its violence and exclusions, and briefly became its most celebrated jurist. The regime did not emerge from Schmitt’s books; the regime created the conjuncture in which Schmitt could become “the crown jurist of the Third Reich”—before they cast him off. They had little need for intellectuals at that point.

In that respect, Schmitt is much closer to Erickson than Erickson realizes. Both are intellectuals produced by political conjunctures whose movements repeatedly outrun them. The difference is that Schmitt accommodated himself catastrophically far more completely to the victorious force. But the structural temptation is recognizable: the intellectual discovers that the political movement has moved somewhere he did not anticipate, adjusts his concepts to remain relevant to it, and later narrates the movement as though ideas rather than political forces had been doing the moving.

I’m sure many younger people on the right who aspired to intellectual roles didn’t envision themselves as legitimators of these energies at the start of their careers, but the need for career opportunities made it a necessary accommodation—if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

J.D. Vance, the ultimate opportunist, has his read on the present conjuncture and therefore will not attack the far right. When Nick Fuentes correctly observes that Vance "panders to the far right but simply doesn't want the baggage of associating with the far right,” he’s noting that Vance is a politician who needs a coalition and cannot jettison potential allies willy-nilly if he hopes to advance. What he recognizes, like Francis and Rothbard before him, is that the far right—the racist right—is an organic part of American conservatism—it is not some infection that comes from without.