The Right’s Tyrannical Temptation

And how it’s likely to produce the opposite of its intent

A member of the National Guard manning a security checkpoint near the U.S. Capitol on January 19, 2021, the day before Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration. (Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

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My Substack newsletter might be titled “Eyes on the Right,” but I’m hardly the only journalist, intellectual, or academic to pay anxious attention to what’s happening on the right side of the ideological spectrum these days. Among those covering this beat, one essay in particular raised eyebrows last week. That essay was John Daniel Davidson’s polemic in The Federalist, “We Need to Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives.”  

When Conservatives Become Reactionaries

The essay is hardly original. It’s the latest in a long line to appear in the years since Michael Anton wrote “The ‘Flight 93’ Election” in the summer of 2016 and Sohrab Ahmari penned his 2019 rant against “Drag Queen Story Hour.” All of these essays target with hyperbolic denunciation anyone who dares, in “our revolutionary moment,” to be less right wing than the author. Moderation, compromise, pondering conciliation with those who hold less extreme views—all of these less radical options get treated as betrayals of moral absolutes that right-wing politics must affirm and uphold without restraint.  

Davidson’s essay, in particular, does a very nice job of illustrating an analytical point I’ve made repeatedly over the years about the way conservatism can transform itself into a reactionary, or counterrevolutionary, sensibility. The analysis runs like this: Conservatism is possible only as long as there’s something to conserve. Once conservatives become convinced that too much has changed—that the left has accomplished a genuine cultural and moral revolution—they run the risk of becoming reactionaries who ultimately aim at counterrevolution, or the use of political power to force a historical reversal.¹

Hence Davidson’s rejection of small government: “The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life — and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.”

What would this look like in concrete terms? Davidson helpfully lists several policies the new counterrevolutionary right should pursue, including:

• The break-up of Silicon Valley tech companies

• The end of no-fault divorce

• The introduction of federal subsidies for families

• A complete ban on abortion, with no exceptions

• The outlawing of “Drag Queen Story Hour” at public libraries and the arrest of parents who take kids to drag shows

• The imprisonment and revocation of the medical licenses of doctors who perform “so-called ‘gender affirming’ interventions”

• The firing and jailing of teachers who expose children to sexually explicit material

Having proposed this great expansion in federal government power to curtail personal freedom across both red and blue states, including prosecution and jail time for a range of moral crimes, Davidson closes by explicitly addressing the question of whether there’s any reason for the right to be concerned about power corrupting those who wield it. While conceding the reasonableness of the concern, he quickly dismisses it as irrelevant for now. The right will worry about reining in or relinquishing its powers only once it has won “the war.”

For now, there are only two paths open to conservatives. Either they awake from decades of slumber to reclaim and re-found what has been lost, or they will watch our civilization die. There is no third road. 

Illiberal Anti-Democracy

I appreciate that Davidson at least pays lip-service to the risks of following his preferred program. Yet he skips over the more proximal problem, which is how the counterrevolutionary right would gain power in the first place. The fact is that the essay displays complete indifference to the question of public opinion. Davidson refers to no polling at all—either present day or longer-term trends. Neither does he think or talk through how the right might try and build support for enacting these kinds of measures through persuasion. He just asserts that these policies need to prevail and presumes they can be imposed on the country from above without any consideration of making the case for their political legitimacy.  

That’s especially noteworthy when you recall that the original moral and cultural revolution to which Davidson is reacting—the one that began in the 1960s—wasn’t brought about politically. Cultural change usually unfolds according to its own logic, with politics often running along beside and even behind it, playing catch up.

This doesn’t mean that a democratic government can’t try to play a role in shaping the behavior and moral convictions of citizens. But first there needs to be democratic support for doing so. Otherwise the political turn will not only be illiberal but also anti-democratic. If you doubt this, consider that the anti-abortion policy Davidson defends—a national ban on the procedure, with no exceptions, from conception through birth—is favored today by just 13 percent of Americans. Going all the way back to 1975, such an absolutist position on abortion has never been supported by more than 23 percent of the country. To propose the imposition of such a policy in the face of supermajority opposition is to advocate a wildly anti-democratic form of politics.

The contrast with Hungary, Poland, Sweden, and Italy is instructive. In all four places, the anti-liberal right has gained power in recent years through democratic election (yes, sometimes with a thumb or two on the scale, especially in Hungary, but not enough for the election to be called a complete sham). That makes these developments expressions of illiberal democracy.

But what American reactionaries like Davidson are advocating is considerably worse than that. They’ve become champions, in effect, of illiberal anti-democracy—or antiliberal authoritarianism.

When Imposing Moral Order Produces Civic Disorder

I find that very worrisome, but not primarily because I’m concerned about the counterrevolutionaries successfully seizing power and using the government to successfully impose their will on a recalcitrant country. As I explained in my appearance on the “Know Your Enemy” podcast in September, I’m more concerned with what happens when an effort to impose such a program collides with the innate American hostility to tyrannical government. The result, I fear, would be closer to chaos or anarchy than dictatorship.

Imagine: Two or six years from now, a Republican wins the presidency (quite likely without winning a majority or even a plurality of the popular vote) and tries to ban abortion with no exceptions, throwing women and doctors in jail, while also instituting an American version of Iran’s Guidance Patrol (or morality police) that begins taking children away from their parents, and arresting teachers and doctors, for violations of a hastily passed “Two Genders Only Act.”

How do you think the “blue” and “purple” American majority would react to that? In the late spring of 2020, the murder of a single black man at the hands of a white police officer in Minnesota sparked weeks of protests, looting, and riots across the country. How much worse would civil unrest be with a relatively tiny minority of the country attempting to impose its moral will on everyone else?

The obvious answer is that the unrest would be much, much worse. There would be widespread protests and violence, to which the right-wing government would likely respond by following Tom Cotton’s suggestion to “Send in the Troops.” All it would take is an overzealous crowd and a trigger-happy soldier for us to see something vastly worse than the Kent State shooting in 1970. Which would, of course, provoke far more intense protests, and a more severe crackdown.

Danielson’s counterrevolutionary program isn’t a plausible democratic governing program for the right, which may be why only reactionary intellectuals, and not (so far at least) Republican officeholders and office-seekers, are talking this way. But neither is it a viable path to American tyranny. What it is is a program that could spark a widespread breakdown in civil order, as the American polity succumbs to the centrifugal forces that have been intensifying for decades now, and finally ends up shattered.²

1. I first encountered the argument in the writings of my friend and former teacher Mark Lilla.

2. How far are we already along such a path? An NBC poll published Sunday morning shows that “81 percent of Democratic voters and 79 percent of Republican voters believe the political opposition poses a threat that, if not stopped, will destroy America as we know it.” That’s not good!