If there is one thing Republicans want you to know, it’s how much they bleed red, white and blue for America. None of their gatherings is complete without dozens if not hundreds of American flags, attendees sporting flag-themed costumes (some veering close to obscene mockery), Uncle Sam suits or Lady Liberty getups. Jimmy Cagney’s old schmaltz vehicle "Yankee Doodle Dandy" looks restrained by comparison.
Democrats, on the other hand, have borne the stigma ever since the Joe McCarthy era, if not the New Deal, of hankering after alien creeds — a suffocating European “socialism” (meaning anything to the left of Calvin Coolidge) or maybe outright Marxist-Leninism. Conservatives with intellectual pretensions have blamed progressives for following French deconstructionist philosophers. The cabal around Paul Weyrich, an early leader of the Heritage Foundation who left it because it was insufficiently conservative, held that every supposed evil in modern America was a consequence of the left employing the "cultural Marxist" ideas of the Frankfurt School (one of the right’s many antisemitic conspiracy theories) as a blueprint to conquer the culture.
These two contrasting identifications have embedded themselves in the national subconscious to the point that the media instinctively reflects them. Hence the anthropological expeditions to the “real America” (somewhere away from the coasts, where Bass Pro Shops outnumber Starbucks) to find a diner where genuine Americans congregate. By contrast, the press happily played along with the efforts of Vietnam-avoider George W. Bush's campaign to portray John Kerry, an actual Vietnam combat veteran, as decadently French. One half-expected Kerry to be taking along the works of Michel Foucault as beach reading to Martha’s Vineyard.
To the extent there is any truth to this caricature, it serves as a superficial explanation of the GOP’s xenophobia (remember “freedom fries?”) and near-pathological parochialism. It also dovetails with an aggressive anti-intellectualism: One would no more expect a Republican politician to speak a foreign language than to play the cello.
What, then, accounts for the GOP’s adulation of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán? As one observer puts it: “The American right’s love affair with Hungary seemingly knows no bounds.” That country’s wannabe dictator is now a regular feature at the annual CPAC convention (think of that event as the Burning Man festival, except for wingnuts), and luminaries of the American right regularly troop to Budapest to confer with Orbán and his cronies. American conservatives’ enthusiasm for foreign-based authoritarianism, and their readiness to cooperate with grandees like Orbán or Vladimir Putin, is now well established, a phenomenon I witnessed in its embryonic stage as early as 2016.
Nearly every historically conscious person is able to trace at least some aspects of contemporary conservatism to their roots in early America. Present-day Republican hostility to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act has a straightforward genealogy: back to Nixon’s "Southern strategy," then to the Southern agrarians of the 1930s, to the post-Civil War Lost Cause movement, then the 1861-1865 secession itself and finally back to John C. Calhoun and his own ideological predecessor, John Randolph of Roanoke, who still receives sympathetic treatment from the conservative propaganda mill.
From Randolph’s dyspeptic political rants to the agrarians’ nostalgia-drenched manifestos, all the reflexes of the present-day American reactionary are prefigured: hatred of industry, cities, public education and internal improvements (the old term for infrastructure); distrust of cosmopolitanism, sophistication and the new; a worship of “tradition” that amounted to stultification; an equation of democratic principles with mob rule. Above all, a fundamental distaste for human equality, especially racial equality, but including political and social distinctions of gender and class.
Curiously, the agrarians, ur-Americans of Southern Protestant extraction, were influenced by the leading figure of the French Counter-Enlightenment, the arch-reactionary ultramontane Catholic Joseph de Maistre. Even in the present day, a Southern apologist for slavery has written a screed for something called the Abbeville Foundation extolling Maistre’s hatred of republics. Evidently, despising the very governmental foundation of the United States has become fashionable for a certain type of reactionary conservative.
Those are hardly the intellectual roots of American conservative philosophy that post-World War II salesmen of conservatism like William F. Buckley Jr., Russell Kirk or George F. Will chose to peddle. They professed to find the source of their ideology with Edmund Burke, the 18th-century Anglo-Irish philosopher and politician.
Among Burke’s epigrams are such unexceptionable Rotary Club maxims as “All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter,” and “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Very uplifting, but hardly in the spirit of present-day conservatives, for whom compromise is betrayal.
Maistre, on the other hand, fits the dogmatic spirit of their creed. He considered the executioner to be the indispensable backstop of civilization, the better to save wayward souls: "Man cannot be wicked without being evil, nor evil without being degraded, nor degraded without being punished, nor punished without being guilty. In short ... there is nothing so intrinsically plausible as the theory of original sin.”
Maistre, though less well-known than Burke, embodies the essential points of the American conservative mind at a deeper level than taxes, spending or size of government. His Catholic zealotry prefigures present-day Catholic ideologues like Patrick Deneen and Leonard Leo, not to mention their political marionettes Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. Isaiah Berlin, the great historian of Western ideas, considered Maistre the true father of reactionary Western conservatism, and, indeed, a precursor to the past century's fascist movements.
Although worldly enough to have served as the Kingdom of Savoy’s ambassador to Russia, Maistre detested science and secular learning. And he positively wallowed in violence, in near-pornographic fashion: “The whole earth, continually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world, the extinction of evil, the death of death.”
That orgasmic vision is pretty strong meat for a tradition that claims to defend ordered liberty. But running through American conservatism like a red thread is a creepy fascination with violence, not to mention a habit of apocalyptic thinking and a longed-for showdown with satanic forces. Amid the invasion of Iraq, when self-righteous stupidity was en vogue, neoconservatives Richard Perle and David Frum wrote "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror," a paean to redemptive violence as a cure for violence.
Maistre hits many of the key themes of American conservatism: religious dogmatism, belief over evidence, anti-scientism, the imperative of obedience to hierarchy and a habitual brooding over violence. But those themes do not satisfy certain paradoxical values that also make up the conservative mindset: a rather irreligious appetite for worldly possessions, and the desire for a pseudo-empirical justification for greed.
Here one might be tempted to believe that conservative economic theory rests on solid domestic foundations: rugged American individualism, the Horatio Alger fable and the (entirely spurious) quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich."
To be sure, America was largely founded on greed, exemplified by land-grabs, gold rushes and real estate flimflams, not to mention the institution of slavery — the theft of others’ labor. But it lacked a sophisticated theoretical foundation, and its justification was sorely wanting in the wake of the Great Depression and the New Deal’s widely popular efforts to combat the ill effects of greed through fiscal stimulus and the creation a social safety net.
Ironically, then, just as 20th-century socialism rested on German thought of the previous century, post-World War II conservative economic thinking in America was largely based on the groundwork of German-speaking intellectuals.
Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises are generally considered to be among the principal founders of radical free-market doctrine in the postwar era. Hayek, the more famous of the two, described himself as a pragmatist and empiricist, but, as is common in the transmission of ideas, his followers dogmatized his theories to the point where they became a materialist religion, a mirror image of Marxist-Leninism. Hayek is frequently invoked in the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, the Pravda of the American overclass.
Hayek, like other founders of neoliberal economic theory such as Wilhelm Roepke, claimed that their championing of laissez-faire was a remedy for the horrific wars and state oppression that plagued Europe between 1914 and 1945. But in later life, he appeared to develop a soft spot for authoritarianism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Hayek was feted by Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean military dictator who seized power (with help from the CIA) in 1973. In the course of several visits, Hayek claimed he had “not been able to find a single person, even in much-maligned Chile, who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than under Allende” (the elected social democrat overthrown in the 1973 coup). Doubtless Hayek did not have many encounters with the relatives of the roughly 3.000 people murdered by the Pinochet regime.
Mises, an economist who in the early 1930s had advised the Austrofascist chancellor of Austria, Engelbert Dollfuss, settled in the U.S. in 1940. His laissez-faire views were so uncompromising that even Milton Friedman, most people’s idea of a hardcore libertarian, considered his thinking overly inflexible. Mises became the namesake of a tax-exempt foundation in Auburn, Alabama, that's so far out on the libertarian fringe it makes the Cato Institute look like the Ford Foundation. Its bullpen of “scholars” have included neo-Confederate apologists, crackpots out to disprove Einstein’s relativity theory and — wait for it! — crusaders for the legalization of drunk driving.
Perhaps the most influential European of all — at least to Americans in permanently arrested adolescence — was the Russian immigrant, Hollywood screenwriter, novelist and cult leader Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, better known as her Promethean alter ego, Ayn Rand. Her works achieve the difficult feat of synthesizing a coma-inducing dullness with piercingly shrill extended diatribes to create reverse masterpieces worthy of the most risible North Korean propaganda. To an even greater extent than the neoliberal economists, she fashioned an ideology that is simply the worst of the Marxist-Leninism she escaped stood on its head, with a heroic Übermensch substituting for the proletarian masses. It is a pity the film version of "Atlas Shrugged" hasn’t featured on "Mystery Science Theater 3000."
Such is Rand’s cult following that former Republican congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul, a senior fellow of the Mises Institute, saw fit to name his spawn Rand, who is now the junior senator from Kentucky. Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was an enthusiastic fan of Ayn Rand, supposedly requiring his office interns to read "Atlas Shrugged," a clear example of unfair labor practices. Oddly, Ryan claimed to be an observant Catholic, yet idolized an author who contemptuously called Christianity a “slave religion.” Such is the syncretic nature of contemporary conservatism that blatantly contradictory elements can be fused into the monstrous ideological confection we see all around us.
Functional adults can dismiss Ayn Rand and her petty tyrannizing over acolytes, her psychodramatic love affair with cult deputy Nathaniel Branden, and her continuing ability to inspire teenagers with a Nietzsche complex. But how can we account for the fact that Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve for 20 years, was an early member of her circle, and that her writings have sold 37 million copies? Unreadable doorstops her books may be, but they would seem to reveal something about the psychology of a significant slice of Americans.
Other sources of modern conservative ideas have a somewhat less direct influence on the current right-wing American zeitgeist. Carl Schmitt, the 20th-century German jurist, political theorist and Nazi official, never set foot on U.S. soil, and remains mostly unknown here. He believed that the fundamental concept in the political realm from which all else flowed was the distinction between friends and enemies, and that to be a sovereign meant being completely unrestrained by law.
Schmitt employed his judicial and political theories to defend the early Nazi-era Enabling Act (which suspended the Weimar Republic's constitution), to justify Hitler’s assumption of dictatorial rule and to support Joseph Goebbels’ campaign to burn “decadent” books. After the war, Schmitt refused to submit to denazification, and remained completely unrepentant of his prewar beliefs.
Just before the Nazi seizure of power, Schmitt had a Jewish follower and protégé, Leo Strauss, who was able to emigrate from Germany for employment by the Rockefeller Foundation thanks, ironically enough, to a supportive letter from Schmitt. According to surviving correspondence, Strauss and Schmitt had previously carried on a political dialogue in which Strauss agreed with the jurist on most points, sharing a distaste for liberal democracy, a belief in authoritarian rule and a contempt for the masses. It seems he bought into the rising tide of European fascism on all issues except antisemitism.
Strauss arrived in the U.S. in 1938, and taught philosophy, most notably at the University of Chicago, for the rest of his life. He focused mainly on the works of Plato and Aristotle and their application to politics. His method was ambiguous and esoteric — using rhetorical concealment, with a surface meaning for general readers and a hidden truth for the wise — and usually avoided any direct statement of the immediate political relevance of Greek philosophy.
Living in a liberal democracy that had given him refuge from the Holocaust, Strauss soft-pedaled his earlier enthusiasm for fascism, but consistently emphasized the authoritarian implications of Greek philosophy while praising the American constitutional system with faint damns. He also highlighted to his students Plato’s belief in the necessity of “the noble lie,” the veneer of comforting falsehoods with which wise rulers must placate the untutored masses while going about the serious business of exercising power.
A large number of Strauss' students and followers became prominent neoconservatives, including Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Francis Fukuyama, Harvey Mansfield, Gary Schmitt, Walter Berns and Abram Shulsky, who all later achieved notoriety either as political operatives or publicists advocating for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq based on false claims of hidden weapons of mass destruction.
Once the wheels began to fall off the Iraq crusade, critics, pivoting off the earlier work of political theorist Shadia Drury, began to notice the sheer number of Straussians in high places who had been among the war's most vociferous proponents. Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh related that Straussians filled the Pentagon’s ad hoc Office of Special Plans, and had bulldozed the government’s intelligence agencies in order to cherry-pick dubious evidence to fit their preconceived notions. They even called themselves the “cabal,” in what seemed a parodic tribute to Strauss’ clique of wise men.
In March 2003, on the eve of war, I staffed a House Budget Committee hearing in which Wolfowitz, at the time the second-ranking official in the Pentagon, predicted that total U.S. casualties from the invasion and occupation of Iraq might amount to fewer than those suffered in the recent U.S. military intervention in the Balkans. (In other words, nearly none at all.) Did a man with access to the most extensive intelligence apparatus in the world actually believe what he told us, or was this a textbook example of Plato’s noble lie?
Considering that Strauss was a relatively obscure academic who had been dead for many years, it was surprising that revelations of his influence on the neocons produced such a well-organized and extensive pushback. The New York Times, which had vigorously supported the Iraq invasion published four op-eds defending Strauss, polemics that employed ridicule and condescension against the unsophisticated critics who supposedly didn’t “get” the philosopher’s subtle arguments. Ever since, there has been a cottage industry of conservative academics writing books and essays supporting Strauss, which almost invariably receive laudatory notices in right-wing vehicles like National Review or the Claremont Institute.
Strauss apologists never directly engage the points raised by critics. They are mostly mute on Strauss’ early dalliance with fascism, such as in a 1933 letter where he endorses “the principles of the Right — fascist, authoritarian imperial and not the pathetic and laughable imprescriptible rights of man.” He never repudiated any of those early statements, and Straussians went to some lengths to conceal from critical scholars the more controversial writings in his collected papers.
If Strauss, an unworldly academic lecturer, had no conceivable link with the neoconservative project to unleash redemptive war and exalt untrammeled executive power, why did two of his followers, neocon operatives Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt — who had both held government positions in foreign intelligence — write a 1999 essay crediting Strauss with having helped them conceptualize intelligence matters? Apparently the Platonic method of ferreting out hidden meanings was key to the neocons' certainty that Iraqi WMDs existed. Whatever Strauss intended, his followers applied what they held to be his teachings to justify a disastrous war of aggression based on imaginary evidence.
The neocons were always a small fraction of the conservative movement, and their sheer, agonizing incompetence in engineering the Iraq debacle all but finished them as a driving influence by the end of George W. Bush’s presidency. As the conservative movement became cruder and more extreme, it no longer cared to perform analyses of Plato to guide its ideology. And as the culture wars became a right-wing obsession, the locus of coercion and violence was transferred from foreign crusades to domestic soil. But it still found a foreign model to help guide it.
As everyone knows, Donald Trump admires Vladimir Putin, and so a large portion of the Republican Party admires Putin in an imitative and slavish manner. But even before Trump became a candidate, the most regressive elements of conservatism — the paleoconservatives who developed around former Nixon and Reagan staffer (and Hitler apologist) Pat Buchanan, Christian nationalists and reconstructionists inspired by Francis Schaeffer, and the tech-obsessed neoreactionary movement fueled by Silicon Valley money, which has produced JD Vance — discovered how much there was to love about Putin’s Russia.
This New Right also seems to have an easy familiarity with the theorists of totalitarianism. In an interview this June with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, Vance invoked the legal architect of Nazi rule, Carl Schmitt — in an effort to blame liberals, the very people Schmitt despised, for wanting to carry out his precept of power over justice. As most people in the reality-based community have noticed by now, operatives of the right habitually project every desire they dare not express onto their opponents. One also wonders where Vance gained his expertise on Schmitt; I doubt the Nazi jurist was a subject in the Yale Law School curriculum.
A moment’s reflection suggests the reason behind the right’s tendency to lavish praise on foreign regimes and their theoreticians: The right does not much care for America, as its leading voices have been telling us over and over for years. Donald Trump, the exalted leader of the gang, habitually refers to his native land as a “third-world country” or a "laughing stock,” and has called fallen U.S. service personnel “suckers” and “losers;” According to one of his social media posts, “WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION!” Vance, his running mate, makes similar disparaging remarks about the country he wants to run.
All of this is logical enough, in that it necessarily flows from their views. The right has told us for some time that it has no use for non-subservient women, minorities, college students (excepting Turning Point USA’s storm troopers), non-Christians, bureaucrats, public school teachers or any other group it wants to target. A Venn diagram of all these groups certainly adds up to more than half the population. The right scorns America as it is, and, contrary to conservatives’ anti-historical nostalgia, as it always has been.
The logical weakness of reactionary movements has actually been their political strength. The seemingly contradictory elements of their platform do not bother their adherents; as we have seen countless times with the GOP, a new party line that flatly negates supposedly timeless Republican principles elicits barely a murmur among the true believers. If the leaders of the party know this fact, they are certainly not going to wise up their foot soldiers.
Perhaps the biggest contradiction of all is that the so-called thought leaders of the GOP — a party that wraps itself in the flag and feels called upon to judge the patriotism of others — are profoundly alienated from the real America as it exists today, the America in which normal people quietly live their lives, work and raise families, and dream their own private dreams. Unable to find solace in such petit-bourgeois domesticity, the socially estranged scholars of Claremont or Hillsdale or some mother’s basement have no problem ransacking the intellectual underworld of Europe during its most blood-soaked eras to find voices that can articulate their grievance, and their rage, more eloquently than they themselves.
As Austrian writer Robert Musil observed, “A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage."
