How the Right Lost Its Mind

by Charles J. Sykes

  The Alt Right not only wanted walls; they wanted the doors firmly shut. To their credit, many of the leading voices of the conservative movement spoke out forcefully against both the Alt Right and the winking tolerance of its message. Jonah Goldberg repeatedly insisted that the movement needed to draw a definitive line. In an appearance on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, Goldberg argued: “What we should say is this is not your group to them, too. These are not disaffected Tea Partiers. These are people who we have a fundamental, first principle disagreement with. And any movement that has them in it, doesn’t have me in it, and vice versa.…”

  HH: And they have to be driven out of the Republican Party.

  JG: Yes.

  HH: I’m speaking as a partisan now. As William F. Buckley led the effort to drive the Birchers out of the party, so must genuine conservatives drive out what you and I agree is the core alt right.

  JG: Right.46

  But Buckley was no longer around and there were no longer any gatekeepers with the authority to issue edicts of condemnation that could be enforced. Writers like Noah Rothman, Ben Shapiro, Peter Wehner, Jonah Goldberg, and others could pen scorching jeremiads about the Alt Right’s racism, but none of them had the authority that Buckley once wielded. In the 1960s, Buckley could deny the Birchers access to his magazine, forcing them further to the fringes and denying them the media platform they would need to disseminate their message. But now, in an age when everyone can be their own publisher, that is no longer possible.

  None of that would have mattered, however, if Trump had forcefully distanced himself from the Alt Right, or even if he had been defeated. Recall that Barry Goldwater had encouraged and backed Buckley’s expulsion of the Birchers. In contrast, Trump’s campaign enabled the movement to rise to a prominence it could never otherwise have imagined. As a result, conservative pundit Matthew Continetti wrote, the “Nasty mouth-breathers Buckley expelled from conservatism have returned.”47

  In early 2017, the organizers of the annual CPAC convention initially named Milo Yiannopoulos as one of the event’s featured speakers, giving the Alt Right provocateur a platform to be the face of conservatism for a new generation. Organizers defended the choice as a blow for free speech; but that was never the issue because the American Conservative Union (ACU), which ran CPAC, was a private organization that retained the ability to choose its spokesmen and set its own standards. Peter Wehner, who is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, called the invitation “more evidence of the moral decay of conservatism.”

  Given the group’s history, the decision to invite the Alt Right figure was also ironic. Nicole Hemmer notes that the American Conservative Union had originally been founded in 1964 precisely “to clean up conservatism’s image, to make it responsible and respectable.” Like Buckley, the founders of the ACU saw extremism on the Right as “an existential problem.” The whole point of the ACU was “to police the lines of conservatism, to toss out any groups that might tarnish the right’s image.”48

  After a video surfaced in which Milo expressed support for sex between grown men and children as young as thirteen, CPAC rescinded the invitation. But the episode was nonetheless revealing; while the advocacy of pedophilia was a bridge too far, the conservative group had been willing to overlook Yiannopoulos’s racism, anti-Semitism, Alt Right Nazi trolling, and his bullying. Lines had been crossed; far from being expelled, the Alt Right had been normalized.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE BINARY CHOICE

  [The devil] always sends errors in the world in pairs—pairs of opposites. He always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking about which is the worst. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them.

  —C. S. LEWIS, MERE CHRISTIANITY

  AS TRUMP’S CANDIDACY SURGED in February 2016, Rush Limbaugh laid out the stark choice faced by conservatives. The Left was not simply wrong about a variety of issues, it was out to destroy almost everything Americans held dear:

  These people have to be defeated. They have to be overwhelmed. And then after they’re defeated they cannot be allowed to bully whoever wins into cowardice and caving in … if you believe in a certain cultural America, it’s under siege. There’s nothing to join with on the other side in preserving it. They want to tear it down, transform it, and rebuild it. They have to be defeated. This is why the Republican Party’s worthless. They don’t even think this way. The Republican Party’s thinking about showing they can work together, they can cooperate, make Washington work.…1

  Everything was at stake, he insisted, suggesting that this election might be the Right’s very last stand.

  We’ve got people coming at us that are gonna try to wipe us out and eliminate everything and pretend it didn’t happen, corrupt, sabotage, undermine. Whoever the next president is, and whoever’s running the next Congress, and whoever nominates the Supreme Court justice, if it’s a conservative, you have no idea what’s gonna be brought to bear! We’re gonna need people with such backbone and guts and steel and iron to hold up and to withstand what’s gonna come at ’em, you can’t even imagine it.

  For many conservatives steeped in the Right’s alternative reality media ecosystem, politics had come down to a starkly binary choice. This reflects our new politics: As the essential loyalties shift from ideas to parties to individuals, choices are increasingly framed as us vs. them; red vs. blue; good vs. evil.

  In this binary world, where everything is at stake, everything is in play, there is no room for quibbles about character, or truth, or principles. If everything—the Supreme Court, the fate of Western civilization, the Constitution, the survival of the planet—depends on tribal victory, then nothing else really matters. In a binary political world, voters are told they must not merely surrender their principles, but must also accept bizarre behavior, dishonesty, crudity, and cruelty. The other side is always worse; the stakes require everything to be sacrificed or subsumed in the service of the greater cause.

  With each election, the apocalyptic rhetoric has been ratcheted up and the urgent language of fund-raising letters—ACT NOW! DON’T WAIT—was echoed throughout the Right media. Every election was the tipping point—potentially the end of America. “It’s just a win at all cost obsession,” wrote blogger Ben Howe. “And throughout all this time Republicans infected their base with that same urgency. Every election was do or die. Every election is 1776 reborn. I know this because I not only fell for it, I took part in spreading the idea.”

  The key, of course, was the relentless demonization of the opposition, who literally (yes, literally) wanted to flood the country with criminal refugees and rapist immigrant hordes. Hillary Clinton was not merely an ethically challenged liberal retread, she was evil personified. “We have reached a point of hyperbole where people regularly tell me that Hillary Clinton is literally Satan,” Howe wrote. “That in fact, if the actual source of all evil in the universe was running opposite Hillary, they’d vote for the Prince of Darkness.”2

  Appearing on the Christian Broadcasting Network, former congresswoman Michele Bachmann declared: “I don’t want to be melodramatic, but I do want to be truthful. I believe without a shadow of a doubt this is the last election. This is it. This is the last election.”3 Appearing on the same network, Trump said essentially the same thing—unless he won, “you’re going to have illegal immigrants coming in and they’re going to be legalized and they’re going to be able to vote and once that all happens you can forget it.” Electing Clinton would mean “a whole different church structure. You’re going to have a whole different Supreme Court structure … we’re going to end up with another Venezuela, large-scale version. It would be a disaster for the country.”4

  This argument that the choice was strictly binary had powerful appeal among conservatives, inclu
ding some conservative intellectuals who insisted that the danger to the country was too ominous to sweat the details about “principles,” or questions of “character.” One of the more thoughtful conservative talk show hosts, author and ethicist Dennis Prager, argued that a Democratic victory in 2016 meant the country might not “survive as the country it was founded to be. In that regard we are at the most perilous tipping point of American history.” More perilous, apparently, than the Civil War, the Great Depression, or two World Wars. “Leftism is a terminal cancer in the American bloodstream and soul,” Prager argued. “So our first and greatest principle is to destroy this cancer before it destroys us. We therefore see voting for Donald Trump as political chemotherapy needed to prevent our demise. And at this time, that is, by far, the greatest principle.”5

  Perhaps the most startling reversal was former education secretary and drug czar Bill Bennett, who had once written that it is “our character that supports the promise of our future—far more than particular government programs or policies,” but now derided concerns about Trump’s character as a sign of “vanity.”6

  Historian Victor Davis Hanson similarly acknowledged that Trump was crude and “mercurial,” but argued that his defeat would lead to left-wing control of the Supreme Court and a $40 trillion national debt. Like other West Coast thinkers, he expressed impatience with traditional conservatives who were reluctant to back the nominee. “One does not need lectures about conservatism from Edmund Burke when, at the neighborhood school, English becomes a second language, or when one is rammed by a hit-and-run driver illegally in the United States who flees the scene of the accident,” insisted Hanson.7*

  THE FLIGHT 93 ELECTION?

  Capturing the full apocalyptic mood among conservatives, the normally low-profile Claremont Institute published a lengthy article entitled “The Flight 93 Election,” which linked the election to the doomed flight on September 11, 2001, on which passengers stormed the airplane’s cabin to stop hijackers who planned to ram the plane into the Capitol.8 Everyone on board died.

  The author, Michael Anton, writing under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, begins, “2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die.” He goes on to state: “You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian roulette with a semiauto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.”*

  Despite the warnings against Clinton, the gravamen of the piece was a root-and-branch denunciation of mainstream conservatism, both its ideology and its tactics. While ostensibly designed to persuade wavering conservatives to get on board, Conor Friedersdorf noted, the essay “doubles as a barely disguised rejection of conservatism itself, stoking panic in hopes that conservatives embrace what is essentially right-leaning authoritarianism.”9

  Indeed, you simply cannot read this essay side by side with Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative, with its emphasis on freedom and limited government, and imagine that they represent the same political philosophy or tradition. Whereas Goldwater’s book was a manifesto of antiauthoritarianism, Anton/Decius’s call to arms was a trumpet blast of strongman politics in the service of virtuous causes. It was precisely the sort of appeal that Goldwater had warned against, but that was now being embraced by influential voices on the Right.

  Perhaps because Anton’s article oozed with disdain for constitutional niceties and the conservative tradition of restraint, it appealed powerfully to Rush Limbaugh. As he read long passages on his radio show, Limbaugh explained, “The point of this whole piece is that Donald Trump’s the only hope, that conservatism no longer applies.” Anton declared:

  If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff. [Emphasis in original.]

  But it’s quite obvious that conservatives don’t believe any such thing, that they feel no such sense of urgency, of an immediate necessity to change course and avoid the cliff.10

  Friedersdorf called that over-the-top argument “flagrant sophistry that should embarrass The Claremont Institute,” which described itself as being dedicated to restoring the values of the American founding. But Anton’s argument was that the ends—the conservative agenda—must be achieved by any means necessary. As legal scholar Greg Weiner later noted, that argument “is what Michael Oakeshott would call telocratic—directed toward substantive ends—rather than classically liberal, which is nomocratic, providing boundaries and rules that allow individuals to choose ends of their own.”11 But, Anton now argued that the crisis was so dire, extinction so close, the only solution was to shake off those impediments and trust our fate to the Man on the White Horse.*

  Noting Anton’s theatrical language, Weiner wrote that he “accepts the anticonstitutional and thus anticonservative proposition that the President straddled the Constitution like the Colossus stood astride the harbor at Rhodes.” By accepting the notion of an Imperial president, Weiner wrote that Anton was “rejecting the adequacy of a Constitutional framework that survived a British invasion, slavery, the Civil War, the Great War, the rise of fascism and Communism, Jim Crow—and that will obviously survive four years of Hillary Clinton.”12

  Friedersdorf was not alone in noting that Claremont had published an essay that seemed based on a central Alt Right premise. “As a reader sympathetic to that movement put it, the alt-right ‘rejects the procedural fetishism of parliamentary and representative democracies.’” The Anton/Decius essay argued from the same premise: He contended that “conservatism grounded in the principles of the Founding, in the Declaration and the Constitution, should be abandoned,” wrote Friedersdorf. “The essay would be more honest if it forthrightly declared its belief that conservatives are wrong and should wake up to their mistake—that the right must abandon cultural, economic, and political conservatism to rally around an authoritarian, because that’s the only way to stop what the essayist regards as what’s most important.”13

  Like the Alt Right, Anton characterized mainstream conservatives as feckless losers. “The whole enterprise of Conservatism, Inc., reeks of failure,” he writes, ignoring decades of demonstrable successes.

  To the extent that you are ever on the winning side of anything, it’s as sophists who help the Davoisie oligarchy rationalize open borders, lower wages, outsourcing, de-industrialization, trade giveaways, and endless, pointless, winless war.… Their “opposition” may be in all cases ineffectual and often indistinguishable from support. But they don’t dream up inanities like 32 “genders,” elective bathrooms, single-payer, Iran sycophancy, “Islamophobia,” and Black Lives Matter. They merely help ratify them.

  This found a receptive audience in talk radio, but it was errant nonsense. Ben Shapiro noted that there was a legitimate case to be made for voting for Trump, but that “this diarrheic mess of jabbering drivel by a faux intellectual substituting classical references for wisdom ain’t it.”14

  Indeed, Anton’s rant is a randomized word salad (“open borders, lower wages, outsourcing, de-industrialization, trade
giveaways, and endless, pointless, winless war”) that described few, if any of the conservatives he was targeting. Like Shapiro, I have never been to Davos, nor do I know any of the “Davoisie oligarchy.” I’m from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, so we don’t travel in those circles. But the new populism needed an enemy, an “elite” or an “establishment,” to blast, even if it had to be fabricated.

  WE WERE WARNED ABOUT THIS

  Enthusiasm for the strongman has been a fixture in Europe’s right wing but, until recently, seldom among American conservatives. Rather, the warnings against demagogues and political bullies run deep in American history. Abraham Lincoln, who did not hesitate to use the broad powers of the presidency when it was warranted, nevertheless in his 1838 Lyceum address had warned against the strongman who would seek to overturn the nation’s institutions and laws. Perhaps naïvely, Lincoln imagined that the Napoléon-like figure would be a man of “towering genius” rather than a celebrity entrepreneur. But the warning is still relevant. No foreign enemy would ever be able to subdue the country. Even the most powerful army, he said, “could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.”

  Instead, the danger would “spring up amongst us” Lincoln warned. “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.…” Lincoln described the “towering genius” as a figure who “thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.” It seemed likely that such a figure would eventually arise here. “And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.” Lincoln anticipated that the great man might be a builder of things, at least for a while. “Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.” The only bulwark against such a homegrown tyrant, Lincoln argued, was to cling to the nation’s laws and founding documents as “the political religion of the nation.”15