A decade or two ago, the values of liberal democracy seemed so securely entrenched in a hegemonic position in world thought, that many on the Left believed they could thumb their noses at them with impunity. Many of us thought that—in a world where seemingly every available shade of opinion in the mainstream parties fell somewhere within the liberal-democratic axis—the biggest threats to left-wing values could only come from "neoliberalism" and "neoconservatism."
This led many of us to make common cause with post-liberal conservatives, "communitarians," and "trad cons"—since they seemed, for the moment, to share the same enemies. This was the era when you could see Norman Mailer getting interviewed in the pages of the American Conservative, say, and think nothing of it. They both opposed the Iraq War—right? So what was there for them to disagree about?
(Though even in that old interview, the magazine does try to get Mailer to opine about the evils of mass migration. He does not take the bait. But we should perhaps have recognized the warning signs even then.)
Back in those days, the fact that the "trad cons" and post-liberals hated neoliberalism and neoconservatism almost as much as we did (or perhaps even more, come to think of it), made them seem like they were the "sophisticated" and the "nuanced" conservatives. And so—if you'd asked me circa 2012 or so, which branch of the modern conservative movement would be most likely to succumb to the siren call of a tinpot demagogue, I would not have pegged them.
Yet here we are. Trump came to power, promising to shred the liberal democratic postwar order; and he has largely succeeded. And it's not the neoconservatives I despised so much, ten to twenty years ago, who were to blame or who abetted his rise. It's all those smarty pants on the pages of the American Conservative who cheered him every step of the way.
Someone like Rod Dreher—the "crunchy con" who seemed so marginal a figure ten years ago as to be basically innocuous and non-threatening—indeed, who seemed if anything like his critique of capitalism might help the Left more than harm it—turned out to be an infinitely greater threat to the future of liberal democracy than Dick Cheney ever was.
And indeed, I confess—ten years ago, I would never have called it.
What's depressing about all this is how predictable and obvious people proved to be—so predictable, it surprised me, paradoxical as that may seem. Perhaps I should have always known that the "trad cons" were crypto-fascists. But I assumed they would be too sophisticated to ever show their hand so blatantly. I wouldn't have thought I'd live to see the day they were simply praising Franco openly and calling for theocracy.
But really—I should have known this was coming. It turns out that most ideologies—given the chance—revert to the worst and least imaginative version of themselves, as soon as they get a chance at power. The trad cons' seeming distance from any shot at political office, back in the Obama years, forced them to be "sophisticated" out of necessity. They had to defend themselves to an intellectual world that regarded them as alien and incomprehensible.
Now, they are actually close to running things. They have a man in the White House—or, at least, in the Naval Observatory. So, they can let their true colors show. And those colors turn out to be the black flag of darkest reaction.
How boring! How disappointing that a resurgence of interest in religion didn't actually convert young people to some new communitarian values that would challenge the consensus version of neoliberal capitalism and herald the coming of decentralized guild socialism or economic democracy or distributist property ownership.
How sad that all it spelled instead was what it would have spelled a hundred years ago—contempt for democracy, aversion to liberalism and individual rights, hunger for a demagogic strongman.
These guys turned out to be cast in the same mould as their nineteenth and early twentieth century forbears—the bad old days of Charles Maurras and the Action Française, when the default right-wing Catholic position was to be an anti-Dreyfusard who regarded the existence of the Third Republic as the work of Satan—merely because it was an elected government.
J.D. Vance, much as I despise him, has been—after his fashion—a rather faithful interpreter of this tradition. He too hates democracy. He too worships power for its own sake. He too believes it is best to lie about an innocent man, and leave him stranded indefinitely in a tropical dungeon, rather than to dare challenge the word of established authority (viz. the case of Abrego Garcia). He is an anti-Dreyfusard for our time.
How dull; how boring; how unexpectedly predictable and obvious they all turned out to be.
The Left for years had banked on the assumption that things had changed in the world. We went looking for new enemies. We thought: the real threat in the modern era must be coming from within the liberal democratic coalition. It must be from the neolibs. Or the neocons. "The call is coming from inside the house!" we said.
We were so convinced that the real diagnosis of our present danger had to be something clever, something interesting, something unexpected—that we never looked at the most obvious threat.
We should have heeded the words of T.S. Eliot (though he would have loathed the political interpretation I am giving them): "Do you need to be told that whatever has been, can still be?"
It never occurred to us that maybe Catholic reactionaries who hated liberal democracy, and backed fascist dictators like Franco, and tried to send an innocent man to a forever-prison because he happened to be Jewish, hadn't actually changed their political complexion much in the last hundred years.
We said stuff like: "the people most proudly prating about democracy [like the neocons] must be the real fascists of our time!" We liked that idea because it was unexpected and would reveal the "ironies" of history.
It never occurred to us that the "real fascists" would come—not waving the stars and stripes and speaking the hypocritical cant of democracy—but clad instead in the same old costumes they wore the first time around—sporting swastika tattoos, donning Klan robes, and praising Franco.
History turned out to be less "ironic" than we thought. History proved instead to be all-too literal-minded.
Maybe, it turns out, the old-school fascists and reactionaries and "traditionalists" were actually in the same place politically they always had been. Conservative religion didn't suddenly change its spots. The anti-Dreyfusards are still anti-Dreyfusards. They still hate democracy and popular rule. "Whatever has been, can still be."
Still the same old arch-conservative clerical reactionaries. Still the same old "bloody Faith," as Shelley called it—in a phrase that came echoing through my brain when I woke up this morning. As he put it in the poem:
[...] I know
Too late, since thou and France are in the dust,
That Virtue owns a more eternal foe
Than Force or Fraud: old Custom, legal Crime,
And bloody Faith the foulest birth of Time.
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