A Brief Guide to the New American Right
American politics is in a mangled state. Some would say this is hardly a new condition; others would diagnose a terminal illness without a known cure. Both could be true, but one is a question of history and the other a claim on the future, neither of which I’m interested in here. By mangled state I mean fractured and contorted, and this is especially true of the American right, which, although lacking proper qualifications, I aim to give the zoologist’s treatment below. I will distinguish, classify and describe the main groupings from Hillary Clinton rightwards.
The first group are often referred to using the vague term ‘moderate’, making them seem quite boring when compared with the zanier sets below. However, they were at one point considered quite fanatical. Following Tariq Ali this group shall be referred to as the Extreme Centre, and they earn their place on the political right through an allegiance to market liberalism. They slid into the political world soaked in the afterbirth of Reaganism, and came of age during the 1990s — the triumphalist decade of confident neoliberalism. They like their prices cleared without the dull and equalising hand of government, their trade agreed through ten thousand-page legal texts, and their finance capital free from all barriers and regulatory boards. More than any other group in this tapestry of reaction, they are likely to receive sponsorship from the Koch brothers, the most likely to be offered and wilfully accept lobbyist donations by virtue of their ‘electability’, sacrificing moral clarity at the expense of campaign funding. On ethical questions they might argue among themselves, leading some to social liberalism and others to social conservatism, but on the basic economic questions there is little room for disagreement. They can be found once a year at Davos, along with their market liberal counterparts from across the aisle.
Taking social conservatism as the next point of departure, the next group accepts Grover Norquist’s narrowing of the Republican agenda to abortion, guns, and taxes as if it were chiselled into stone tablets and held atop Mount Sinai. They base these rudimentary concerns on a single divine assumption: should Jesus once again take a material form, this is what he’d be concerned with too. The son of God would protest outside a Planned Parenthood clinic while open-carrying an AR15 and complaining loudly that tax is theft. This group is the Religious Right. The anti-intellectual sentiment that plagues American public discourse is strongest among this set. Broadly speaking, they insist on a right to life, but not all the things that make life go well. They insist on the possession of guns, but deny this has anything to do with frequent massacres and homicides committed using firearms. They insist on minimal taxation, then without irony complain of rundown infrastructure. If we had to identify a joker in this deck, this group would be most worthy of selection.
Hanging on to the firearm eroticism and dislike of taxes, but muting or removing completely the religious fervour and anti-abortion sentiment, next we encounter the Gentle Libertarians. They might consider themselves Tea Partiers, especially if they retain their faith. They might have read Robert Nozick and agree the only justifiable size of the state is small enough that it may be “drowned in a bathtub”, to again reference Norquist. They might read the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog and argue against an interventionist state on efficiency and even equity grounds. It is in examining this group that we find a libertarian sub-spectrum — different species within the same genus. They might, as per Charles Murray, advocate for bipartisan policies like the Universal Basic Income as an alternative to the obese and clumsy welfare state, perhaps in the spirit of Milton Friedman’s negative income tax. Treading further along the sub-spectrum, we arrive at anarcho-capitalism. For the anarcho-capitalists, taxation is a sin worthy of punishment alongside other abrogators of property in Dante’s seventh circle of Hell. There is no ‘public’ in the sense of a resilient civic society or collective will. There are only individuals who have a right to property and this is a fact of reason or history — either will do. Individual freedom, in Isaiah Berlin’s negative sense of ‘leave me the fuck alone’, becomes the operative principle. Farthest along the sub-spectrum, in the windy and desolate region people call the ‘fringe’, we find rare instances of those who agree with Murray Rothbard’s proposal of a market for unwanted children. This is libertarianism adrift from the calm shores of sanity. Sadly, things only get weirder from here.
Keeping libertarianism as a constant and religiosity as a variable, the next group turns up the volume while adding thick layers of conspiracy. They are the Patriotic Libertarians. For this group, the state is not merely unjustified or inefficient when large, but is, in collusion with other world powers, actively trying to construct a global slave colony controlled by the New World Order, using all manner of nefarious methods to do so. These range from false-flag terrorist attacks to surveillance operations, chemical-spraying aircraft, carbon taxes, wars, famines, and a catalogue of de-population techniques. They listen to the coarse, megaphoned voice of Alex Jones, and when his world of conspiracy is accepted it has for the believer near-shatterproof explanatory power; when the narrative is basically tenable, everything then becomes conspiracy — on every outrage, bombing, and hushed international treaty they see the fingerprints of this very much unseen cabal. They have an obsession with the U.S. constitution that goes beyond folky romanticism. And they suffuse all of this with a mythic kind of patriotism, a love affair with a faded polaroid of a country that has never actually existed.
From here, the American right becomes unruly, an overgrown garden of prejudice, flawed suppositions, meme culture, online trolling, bad history, terrible science, and ultimately, alienation. The Libertarians have at least a semi-respectable foundation beneath their worldview: a kind of constitutionalism mixed with fragments of classic liberalism — the intellectual property of early capitalist radicals. But the remaining groups lack solid ground. They are referred to collectively as the ‘alt-right’, a term which forms a gulf between them and the Extreme Centre and cements a memorable collective identity. But to consider them as an insoluble whole is a mistake.
There is no ideological collective noun for the first of these unruly groups because it is a modern and fairly loose set that I see as largely reactive. They are the Rightwing Identitarians — the gnarled reflection of left liberal identity politics, the Mr. Hyde to the identity left’s Dr. Jekyll. They exist largely online, to the extent that their political activity mainly involves meme-warfare and trolling Social Justice Warriors on Twitter, Reddit, 4Chan, and those graveyards of reason, YouTube’s comment sections.
They hide behind avatars while declaring a commitment to a medieval notion of masculinity on Return of Kings. They are defiantly ‘uncucked’, and decry the erosion of manliness in the era of political correctness, the institutions of state and society overrun with feminists or in the butch clasp of the LGBTQ movement. They might call this ‘cultural Marxism’, suggesting unfamiliarity with both cultural change and what Karl Marx had to say. As with the identity politics left they are a very much postmodern phenomenon, with political conflict occurring across the faultlines of language and address, their solipsistic terms of debate ending where they begin: the Self, and how the Self chooses to identify. Their heroes likewise reside online, whether sex pests such as Roosh V or paedophilic trolls like Milo Yiannopoulos.
The demarcation between this group and the next is faint, and has been recently drawn, but is clear enough to warrant separate classification — the Ethnic Nationalists. The focus on identity is retained, but race becomes the primary identity-referent. They haunt the same online dungeons, frequenting additional sites like American Renaissance to reinforce their bigotry with pseudoscience. For the unversed, this is edited by the smug intellectual pygmy Jared Taylor, who longs for a homogenous and peaceful society descended purely from Europeans, even though actual European society did little but wage war on itself for thousands of years until the mid-Twentieth Century.
While there are factions within this group, in the main they follow the well-dressed punching bag Richard Spencer and the output of his website AlternativeRight and think-tank the National Policy Institute. Rather than deride the identity politics left, Spencer actually admires their claim that individual or group identity is a good basis for political life. He and his followers simply arrive at a different conclusion: America is fundamentally a white nation, and should return to being a white nation. ‘Racial pride’ is thus the celebrated emotion.
The members of this group regularly post cheap genetic test results online to prove their whiteness or express their despair when, to their horror, they discover African or Native American or even Slavic ancestry. They similarly find use for the nebulous concept of ‘cultural appropriation’, but use it differently to the identity left just as the left today uses it differently to Stuart Hall and the other progenitors. As Bernard Crick warned was possible, Taylor and Spencer and the other white supremacists (the ‘1488rs’ posting on Stormfront) have furnished their pub landlord’s idea of the nation with a dog breeder’s understanding of race. Theirs is not a movement of geneticists and anthropologists — far from it; it is a subset of people who wish for social exclusivity based on prejudices that should’ve died in a bunker in Berlin in 1945.
At base, both of the identity groups, at least the millennial members, are victims of the same disempowerment as those across the political spectrum. Like many on the left, and like those who consider themselves apolitical or unpolitical, their lives have been stripped of purpose, job security, and capabilities for flourishing. Put another way, they are alienated, their condition being all the more tragic because of their ugly reaction to it.
No political guide, even a brief one, is complete without some comparative analysis. Are there any areas of overlap among the groups? Only that they share a dislike of Barack Obama, for their respective reasons. Beyond this, there is more to divide than unite them.
Some in the Extreme Centre would prefer gun control, putting them in opposition to the majority in this guide. Some are pro-choice, putting them in opposition to at least the Religious Right. Some of the Extreme Centre, and a few Gentle Libertarians, remained loyal to the slogan ‘Never Trump’, either disgusted at the President’s personality or defensive over what they see as their realm, their officialdom, against an unknown and untrustworthy outsider. The social conservatives within the Extreme Centre, and the Religious Right as a whole, dislike the libertine morality of other groups, especially that of the social liberals and libertarians.
The Gentle Libertarians, especially the anarcho-capitalists on the fringe, disapprove of the technocratic approach to government associated with the moderates, even when it favours market-based solutions to allocation. Many libertarians do not simply wish for less regulation, as with the Extreme Centre. Rather government should guarantee private contracts and uphold the constitution and that is the entirety of the role of the state. Of all the groups in this guide, the libertarians are most opposed to war and the war system that wages it, out of either pacifist principle or the presupposition of massive government spending.
Moreover, every group from the Patriotic Libertarians onwards despise the ‘mainstream’ and all it stands for, which would in the terms used here mean the Extreme Centre. It is associated with corruption, illegitimate power, and, for the identity-centric groups, a preference for narrow economic benefit over tribal concerns like immigration. These betrayals have led to the epithet ‘cuckservative’ to describe centrist Republicans.
Indeed, the latter two groups, bonded by their identity politics, differ from the rest through the lack of an answer to the economic question. Some might veer towards markets and a small state, others towards socialist programmes, protectionism and regulation. But more than a lack of consensus, for the identity-centric groups the economic question is treated as if it already has an answer, and is no longer worth discussing. (The identity left is similar in this regard). The questions of belonging, culture, and group sensitivities take precedence over the questions of ownership, distribution, and class. In this tacit acceptance of the economic mainstream, some critics have argued that identity politics is neoliberalism.
The above guide more or less covers every groupuscule within the mangled thing we call the American right. But considering the recent election, and surveying all groups from the Extreme Centre to the Ethnic Nationalists, we are left asking where the Trumpists fit into all this.
Trump’s campaign was a museum of contradictions, but this meant he could loan support from all of the above groups. He is not a mainstay of the political establishment, so naturally his support isn’t overwhelming in the Extreme Centre; nevertheless, some either adopted the fawning role of surrogate or, after gagging their conscience, appealed to a pathetic kind of pragmatism. The Religious Right gave Trump their support, but then there were only four boxes to tick: after he stated his dedication to the Bible, the unborn foetus, the 2nd Amendment and low tax rates, he was their candidate. In theory, the libertarians ought to abhor Trump’s vague economic nationalism, but this doesn’t seem to be the case, especially among the more conspiratorial who found his outsider credentials and hat-based loyalty to America attractive. Then finally, the Rightwing Identitarians and Ethnic Nationalists saw Trump as their champion, their cufflinked saviour of America, for the obvious and decrepit reasons: he’s loud, brash, male, wealthy, white, casually racist, anti-immigration, and pro-‘Merica. The identity right likes heroism, and in Trump’s talk of grabbing pussy, building walls and banning Muslims, they found their hero.
The Trumpists, then, are a mongrel grouping, an interspecial mass that transcends the distinctions made above. Trump’s cabinet is a microcosm of this diversity, with Reince Preibus representing the Republican mainstream, Mike Pence from the Religious Right, and Stephens Bannon and Miller from the identitarian and nationalist sets. By some accounts, the contest for influence within the White House is fought along these lines.
If there is any consolation the American left may take from the election of Trump, it is that the right may in power, but they are not unified in terms of strategy or ideology. This fractiousness leaves them susceptible to arrogance, in-fighting and sluggishness, meaning policies like the Muslim ban are devised by secretive cliques, improperly screened for legality, then badly implemented, so unsurprisingly deemed unlawful; if fascism provides any light relief, it is watching it fall over like a drunken racist uncle in a vomitous and incompetent heap.
At the same time, these fractures may yet be smoothed over; this squalid set of free-marketeers, religious fanatics, populists and supremacists may yet find unity. If this guide has any use-value, it is in demonstrating the urgent need for solidarity and coherence among the American left in the face of such an unsettling prospect.
