Nazis at CPAC Demonstrate the Pre-Fascist Problem on the Right
A new illiberal right is acting as a bridge between fascists and the mainstream right
It has been reported that, at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Nazis who openly identified as national socialists turned up and mingled with mainstream conservative personalities. This has predictably and justifiably generated alarm, given that CPAC is arguably the most important and prestigious gathering of the right in America. This event is also a reminder of the recent trend where fascist or fascist-adjacent activists have gained more and more proximity to the mainstream right, something unimaginable just a few years ago. So how did we get here?
It turns out that it is a pretty long story. Ever since the 2003 Iraq War and the global financial crisis, there has been a crisis of identity and philosophy on the right. The Bush-43 administration which presided over these events, and the neoconservative ideology it represented, was increasingly rejected by people on the right. During the Tea Party era (roughly 2009–15), alternative ideologies like libertarianism, paleoconservatism and the like rose and fell with the fashion of the day. More controversial ideologies like neoreactionism and the alt-right also gained an audience. There was plenty of cross-fertilization of ideas too. Most of these strands eventually fed into the Trump movement by 2016. Their differences were not fully appreciated by many people until after Trump left office in 2021, in part because they were often just seen as manifestations of Trumpist populism.
However, when people weren’t paying attention, a particularly authoritarian strand of thinking arose on the right. Its worldview is that Western society is in a state of social degeneration, due to society being run by the wrong people. The solution, then, would be to fundamentally change the people who run society. And it’s not limited to the government either: universities, expert bodies, journalism, the entertainment industry, even the corporate world, would all need a ‘regime change’. Based on this worldview, I believe the ideas of the neoreaction, in particular, have been influential in the birth of this new tendency. However, intellectuals from other traditions, like Catholic Integralism, have also wrote in support of similar ideas. The 2019 drama over the debate on Drag Queen Story Hour and the appropriate role of government in the cultural sphere also hints at further influence from religious authoritarians. Moreover, in recent years, gatherings like the National Conservatism Conference (NatCon) have brought together many thinkers sympathetic to this worldview to differing extents. NatCon has provided a platform for thinkers generally advocating for a more illiberal social and political order. While some saw their work as lending intellectual justification to Trumpism, I see the opposite: this illiberal-right intellectual movement is the incubator for a new, highly illiberal politics, and they want to use Trump (among others) as the vehicle to introduce this politics. More recently, the Heritage Foundation’s much talked about Project 2025 also fits into this new illiberal-right trend, and they, too, want Trump to put their plan into practice if he returns as President next year.
What we need to understand is that, this new illiberal-right is certainly not conservative, no matter what it likes to call itself. Conservatism necessarily means the conservation of the existing social and political order and its institutions in a given nation. It is inherently opposed to the kind of ‘regime change’ type talk that is found everywhere from NatCon speeches to Project 2025. In the English-speaking West at least, conservatives would also uphold basic classical liberal values, because this is fundamental to our political tradition. Centuries of English-speaking conservatives from Edmund Burke to Ronald Reagan upheld classical liberal values to a large extent. However, the new illiberal-right is fundamentally hostile to any sort of classical liberalism. Instead, they often prefer to look to Eastern Europe, to import ideas from a much more authoritarian foreign tradition, to help realize their political ambitions.
That the new illiberal-right is clearly not conservative begs the question of, what exactly are they? Which political tradition in Western history do they most closely resemble? If we look for parallels in Western history in the past two centuries, the closest parallel would indeed be fascism. Twentieth century fascists based their whole politics on the worldview that society had become decadent, because the wrong people were in charge. They hated both liberals and conservatives, because both would continue the decadence, however they still tried to attract the support, or at least tolerance, of conservatives who feared the rising far-left at the time. Once in power, they tried to remake society in a highly authoritarian way, justified by what they believed was necessary to rescue the country from the decadent state it was in. All their authoritarian policies, their racism and antisemitism, and their embrace of everything from eugenics to conspiracy theories stemmed from this worldview. Hence, I would argue that this worldview, the view that society has become decadent because the wrong people are in control of it, and that authoritarian means are justified to rescue society from this situation, is by definition pre-fascist in nature. It is pre-fascist because it is the necessary, and apparently sufficient, worldview to justify the adoption of a dangerous fascist politics, even if it is not fascism itself (yet).
That the new illiberal-right harbors a pre-fascist worldview means that it shares a fundamental common ground with actual fascists. This, in turn, makes it much easier for them to mingle and cooperate with each other. This stands in contrast to Reaganite conservatives, who have no natural common ground with fascists, given their commitment to limited government. This, plus the fact that the new illiberal-right has found inroads into the mainstream right in recent years, means that they are effectively functioning as a bridge between actual fascists and the mainstream right. Therefore, I believe, without the rise of the new illiberal-right, we wouldn’t be seeing actual fascists increasingly finding a way into mainstream conservatism. The new illiberal-right, the bloc of anti-liberal thinkers, activists, and donors and politicians sympathetic to them, are the problem here. We can’t stop the mainstreaming of fascistic ideas, and ultimately the inclusion and normalization of actual fascists in the mainstream right, without taking a strong stance against the illiberal-right.
Of particular note is how the illiberal-right successfully gained prominence on the back of the frustration with ‘wokeness’. The illiberal-right has sought to take control of the discourse within ‘anti-woke’ circles. They promote the idea that it is too much liberty, and the weakness of the existing order, that has allowed ‘wokeism’ to influence society, i.e. that liberalism is to blame for ‘wokeness’. To defeat wokeness, they would have to trample on both long-standing norms of liberty and long-standing institutions and arrangements, in order to change who is in control of academia, culture, and the corporate world. (Note how neoreaction-like this is.) This worldview is reflected in the ‘emergency mode’ rhetoric often coming out of the influencers and culture warriors promoting this kind of ‘anti-wokeism’. Also notable is how the emergency mode rhetoric seems to have only gotten louder, even as wokeness itself has objectively subsided over the past three years. Given that this particularly authoritarian form of ‘anti-woke’ rhetoric has been able to find a receptive audience, we need to develop ways to argue against it, if we are to stop the march of the new illiberal-right. This is why I have long argued for the need to maintain a classical liberalism-based anti-postmodern discourse, even if wokeness appears to have subsided at the moment.
Originally published at https://taraella.substack.com.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series, which argue that liberalism is still the most moral and effective value system for the West.
She is also the author of The Trans Case Against Queer Theory and The TaraElla Story (her autobiography).
