What Comes Next for the Radical Right?

The more it falls short at the ballot box, the more it will be tempted by tyranny and civil violence

Because I was trained to be a political scientist and currently work as a journalist/writer/intellectual, I tend to be interested in the intersection of politics and ideas. I work hard to avoid exaggerating the power of ideas to change the world, which is something intellectuals are prone to do. Still, I think it’s important to take political ideas—or ideology—very seriously as an influential force (among others) in the world.

Moves and Counter-Moves

Ideas exercise an influence by blending reason, interest, passion, and imagination to give us a mental picture of the way the world is and ought to be. And they usually aren’t held in an arbitrary way, careening from one image to another as moods or events shift around us. We commit to one set of ideas and then respond to changes based on the logic of those commitments. Every now and then, a crisis can inspire a more drastic alteration of our underlying commitments. But short of that, we move forward as on a chess board, following the rules that govern the pieces. Commit to X, and certain moves are opened up while others are foreclosed.

So, to use an example I’ve elaborated in the past: If you’re convinced that America was once great but has since been corrupted, your goal will be to make America great again by short-circuiting whatever caused the corruption. If the corrupting influence is mainly political, won through democratic election, your aim will be to gain that influence for yourself and your allies, either by winning future elections outright or changing the rules so that the corrupt lose more often. If the influence is mainly cultural, you will have to capture the cultural institutions the corrupting force uses to spread itself throughout the world or build new ones that can compete with and ultimately win out against that force.

But what happens if you believe that America was once great and that winning elections was once possible but no longer is, either because your opponents have irrevocably rigged the system against you or because so many of our fellow citizens have been corrupted that there aren’t enough virtuous ones left to vote the right way? In that case, other paths forward present themselves.

One option could be giving up on politics altogether, convinced things have gotten so hopeless that turning inward is the only viable alternative. That could mean cultivating private virtues to be passed down to the next generation, a remnant of the lost Golden Age to be preserved for a time of rebirth at some point in the future.

Another option is to remain political but to abandon hallmarks of liberal democracy, including the commitment to compete in and accept the results of free and fair elections as a precondition to gaining power, along with the peaceful handover of power to opponents when an election is lost. Such commitments presume that the other party is as fundamentally legitimate as one’s own. It also presumes that if the other side prevails in a contest, it will be possible for one’s own side to regroup, return, and try to win the next time. But if winning begins to seem impossible, with the stakes (the nation’s very soul) existentially high, continuing to play along with the rules of the game might come to seem like an expression of weakness, cowardice, or recklessness.

The Claremont Game

It should be clear by now that I’m talking about the ideological logic at work on the American far right, especially among those at the Claremont Institute and its many spin-offs. They have their own version of the logic I laid out above.

The Golden Age was the American founding, perfected even further by Abraham Lincoln. The Fall came with Woodrow Wilson and progressivism, which greatly expanded the role of the federal government in American national life, including planting the seeds of what became the corrupt and corrupting administrative state.

Over the next century, it grew well beyond the scope and power the original progressives dreamed for it, encouraging along the way various forms of moral and political corruption in the American people. By 2016, the nation had reached a moment of truth: Either Hillary Clinton would complete the transformation of the American regime into a progressive tyranny or Donald Trump, a populist troublemaker who embodied the very corruption he called out and denounced, would take a shot at changing course, moving at once forward and back to a virtuous past.

To just about everyone’s surprise, Trump (barely) won the election that year, and the result was a giddy four years for the far right, with hopes raised further and only occasionally dashed along the way. As the 2020 election approached, most of the Claremonsters (along with the incumbent president himself) convinced themselves that the only thing that could stand in the way of Trump’s re-election was foul play on the part of Democrats and their allies in the federal bureaucracy.

No wonder, then, that they sided so strongly with Trump when he refused to accept the results of the election. They simply had to believe the American people were on their side, despite the rarely mention fact that their candidate had lost the 2016 popular vote by nearly 3 million. That became 7 million in 2020, but in the only forum that counted—the Electoral College—Trump remained tantalizingly close to victory. Surely the truth was that he had actually won and had been deprived of it by the corruption of the system.

In the end, the gambit of providing Trump with arguments meant to justify a self-coup failed. That disappointing outcome no doubt contributed to further radicalization over the past two years that showed up in a sneering essay by Claremont senior fellow Glenn Ellmers, who treated Americans who voted differently than he did as beneath contempt and unworthy of being considered equal citizens of the American polity. (I wrote about the Ellmers essay a couple of months ago.)

The same radicalization probably played into Michael Anton’s decision to begin promoting (while very mildly criticizing) outright fascist ideas and giving Curtis Yarvin an expansive two hours on a Claremont podcast to lay out his case for American tyranny. Those are precisely the kinds of moves one would expect to see from people whose radical political hopes have been dashed by democratic elections.

The Next Step

Because of that process of radicalization over the past two years, I’ve been eagerly awaiting a reaction to the midterm elections. Claremont helped to mainstream and intellectually legitimize election denialism, but doing so didn’t help candidates who embraced it. In fact, they fared quite badly at the polls.

One possible response to the right’s disappointing showing would be a display of greater restraint and sobriety, a realization that political power will be foreclosed for the right altogether if it keeps talking and acting like it wants to shred liberal-democratic norms and the rule of law the moment it wins power.

But of course the other option is doubling down: greater despair and rage along with an increased commitment to acts of boldness and defiance in reaction to democratic outcomes. That’s what we saw in a piece published this week at American Greatness.