To Purify the Polity

The civic poison of right-wing populism

Former President Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a rally on August 05, 2022 in Waukesha, Wisconsin. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

After writing three substantive posts per week since I launched this newsletter on June 1, I am planning to take Labor Day off. That means I will be writing just two posts next week, with the first appearing on Wednesday. Enjoy the long weekend.

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I don’t regularly read American Greatness, the trashiest of the Trumpy spin-offs from the Claremont Institute. (You can read about the latter in illuminating detail in this excellent New York Times feature from a month ago.) Mainly I rely on my friend and former colleague Joel Mathis highlighting on Twitter the most egregious headlines and passages they publish. If Joel draws my attention to something especially off-the-wall or absurd, I’ll sometimes seek it out to read for myself.

But this week I came across something in AG by way of another friend—a staunch conservative on Facebook, who posted a link to an essay by Glenn Ellmers, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and author of a book about Harry Jaffa, philosopher-hero to the increasingly influential Claremont faction of the American right. My friend endorsed the piece wholeheartedly and challenged dissenters to make their case against it if they wished. I did so in a brief couple of comments, but I think the Ellmers essay has an illustrative flaw that’s worth examining and debunking at greater length—and before a bigger and broader audience than is likely to read a response to a Facebook post.

The Politics of Reaction

Ellmers’ essay, “MAGA and the Memory of America,” begins with several paragraphs extolling the political talent, intelligence, and education of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—at the moment the Republican Party’s most likely populist successor to Donald Trump. But before long, Ellmers begins to express concern that DeSantis lacks Trump’s spontaneous understanding of something vitally important about the country:  

Trump grasps intuitively something essential about America that is more basic and even more important than any academic discussion of political theory. He knows that America is supposed to be “for the people,” and that the government once defended the rights, interests, and prosperity of ordinary, working citizens. He further knows that the great crisis of our time is that it no longer does so. 

The rest of the essay unpacks these claims, which amount to a story of American decline: Where once we were free, with a government that deferred to the people, but now we have a government that’s run by and serves the interests of an elite class. Trump understands this and so is the country’s only hope to throw history into reverse and return the country to its past glory. The devotion Trump’s supporters show him is an expression of hope for such a return to American greatness—and DeSantis or any other Republican who aspires to succeed Trump needs to understand this and think hard about how to cultivate and mobilize it as Trump has.

I don’t doubt that some portion of the country views American history like this, even if only in an inchoate way—as a story of falling away from prior greatness and freedom into the mediocrity and tyranny of the present. It’s a potent story, and one that fuels the most reactionary impulses on the right.

That assertion, in itself, isn’t intended as a criticism. It’s a description. Liberals and progressives think history moves in a certain direction (toward justice understood as ever-greater equality) and that politics should contribute to this forward movement. Conservatives believe in slowing and managing change without necessarily presuming history moves with any underlying logic or direction. And reactionaries think things were better in the past, that there’s been a fall from that Golden Age, and that it’s possible to return to that prior state through an act of political will.

Ellmers’ essay is an expression and defense of such reactionary hopes. I think those hopes are badly misplaced. The Golden Age is always to some extent a fiction—and regardless, it’s never really possible to return to the past. Moreover, I fear such longings for an impossible return could inspire a dangerously radical form of right-wing politics that tries to tear down much that is good about the present, just as left-wing radicals aim to do the same for the sake of their forward-looking hopes. I’ve written about these themes many times in the past, and I’m sure I’ll have occasion to do so again in the future.

The Essence of Populism

But that isn’t what this post is about. I want to focus, instead, on one specific aspect of Ellmers’ argument—its populist dimension. I’m using the term “populist” in a very specific way, drawing on part of the definition offered by author Jan-Werner Müller in his book What Is Populism? (which I had a hand in publishing during my time working at Penn Press). A populist is someone, according to Müller, who declares that only some of the people (namely, his supporters) are the people. Everyone else is either a traitor to the true people or in some other way not fully of the true people.

So, for example, at a campaign rally in May 2016, Trump declared that “the only important thing is the unification of the people—because the other people don’t mean anything.” That is a crude statement of the populist essence. Ellmers offers a somewhat more sophisticated version of the same claim, asserting not that a specific (large) faction of the American electorate views things in the way he describes and must try and persuade more Americans to join them in these reactionary convictions. Rather, he considers Trump’s reactionary voters to be the people (“ordinary, working citizens”) whose “rights, interests, and prosperity” are being disregarded and even actively trampled by “elites of both parties and the many people who benefit directly or indirectly from this bona fide hijacking of American democracy.” 

This is both a nonsensical and civically poisonous thing to say.

It’s nonsensical because even if we assume every one of the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2020 endorses the reactionary goals Ellmers attributes to the 45th president, the fact remains that 81 million Americans voted for Trump’s opponent. I can assure Glenn Ellmers that lots and lots of those 81 million voters are “ordinary, working citizens” who simply don’t view the country’s past, present, and future in the same way as Glenn Ellmers. Yet by Ellmers’ definition, this difference in outlook entails that these Joe Biden voters—who also happen to outnumber Trump voters by 7 million—are somehow not really “the people.” Is there any way to make sense of this bit of analytical legerdemain other than to recognize it as an effort to excommunicate from the American polity anyone who voted for the Democrat two years ago?

If you suspect I’m being unfair to Ellmers by arguing about implications rather than things he says explicitly, consider another essay from March 2021 titled “‘Conservatism’ is No Longer Enough.” In this piece, Ellmers wrote that the roughly 80 million Americans who voted for Joe Biden are “not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.”

That’s where the civic poison comes in.

Ellmers doesn’t want to help his side to prevail politically by means of persuasion, winning power in a free and fair electoral give-and-take in which each faction takes its turn at ruling and being ruled. He’s defining his terms such that anyone who disagrees with him is declared anathema—cast out as politically illegitimate, worthy of being considered a traitor to the true America that he and his allies alone exemplify.

Once this mode of argument becomes commonplace, it can be applied in any number of ways. For a variation on it, see Dennis Prager’s recent essay, also in American Greatness, titled “Women Are Disproportionately Hurting Our Country.” The argument unfolds exactly as that title would lead one would expect: women are more likely than men vote for Democrats, to support the “woke” agenda, and to favor progressive policies. And they also hold most of the jobs teaching young children. The implication is clear: the United States would be much better off if the female half of the country’s population were put in its place and prevented from continuing to sabotage American self-government.

The Eliminationist Fantasy

Whether the enemy is defined as Biden voters, women, or “Third World foreigners,” all such approaches to political argument are guilty of indulging in a destructive fantasy. This fantasy can be distilled into the following statement: Everything would be great if only we didn’t have to share the country with THEM.

Politics is how the members of a diverse and pluralistic community seek to reach accommodation with one another, despite their differences. Populism, in this respect, must be understood as a form of anti-politics that encourages people to place their hopes in a pipe dream of uniformity and unanimity.

That pipe dream can only end in one of two ways: either disappointment when the demonized faction of the country fails to disappear—or civil violence when one side actively attempts to purify the polity by eliminating, expelling, or otherwise forcibly separating itself from the other.

Civil violence may well lie in our future. Recognizing that possibility is one thing. Actively courting it is something else entirely. Glenn Ellmers has unfortunately placed himself firmly in the latter camp.¹

1. To those tempted to defend Ellmers by indulging in a bit of whataboutism: I’m well aware that some on the left indulge in a similar fantasy of expelling conservatives from the country. I regularly call them out for it, because it’s bad when they do it, too. The fact that the left does things that are bad for the country in no way justifies the right giving itself permission to proceed with its own malignant acts.