Close Encounters with the Reactionary Right

I’ve been embroiled in the same arguments for thirty years, pointing to the same gaps in the thinking of those on the most radical fringes

Funerary Temple at Palmyra, Syria (Stock photo / Getty Images)

I take it that no one who subscribes to this newsletter will be surprised to learn that I used to be on the right. I refer to it a lot. And that background helps to explain my current ideological orientation as a liberal centrist. (I became more of an anti-Republican than a devoted Democrat.)

But it’s important to understand how I thought of the right even when I was a part of it. I was a dispositional conservative who was as opposed to radicalism on the right as I was to radicalism on the left. I broke from the Republican Party when I sensed that it had begun to act recklessly—in invading Iraq, in talking about the United States as a Christian nation with a God-ordained mission to defeat the enemies of freedom around the world, in attempting to win a presidential election by mobilizing anti-gay sentiment behind a push to pass an anti-same-sex-marriage amendment to the Constitution.

In light of what’s happened since, it’s almost quaint how benign those bad decisions seem to me now. I regret nothing about my shift to the center-left in 2004. But I really didn’t foresee how much worse things would get on the American right—how much more radical, even revolutionary, it would become. One of conservatism’s core convictions—one that informs my own liberalism to this day—is the belief that it’s easier to destroy than to create and therefore that change should be enacted with caution and care.

There is nothing cautious and careful about the second Trump administration.

Initial Exposure

The occasion for these reflections are a post by N.S. Lyons, a right-wing Substacker. I’m grateful to Noah Smith, another Substack scribe, for drawing my attention to the Lyons post. I’ve read a few things by the author, and I assigned his thoughtful interview with Matthew Crawford in my course on “Conservatism in Theory and Practice” last semester. Lyons is very smart, but also very much a man of the reactionary right.

My first close, personal encounter with the reactionary right was in graduate school at Michigan State University during the mid-1990s.