Anti-egalitarian politics have regularly proven to be politically potent, with many citizens in seemingly advanced democracies repeatedly showing themselves willing to support political factions that challenge liberalism’s most cherished ideals. These hierarchies, however, are not without their defenders. That this idea will strike many readers as banal speaks to the success of the liberal democratic project, which has taken a premise that challenges every historical hierarchy and elevated it to the level of received wisdom. Modern democracy is, at heart, premised on the liberal ideal of equality: that because no person is inherently superior to any other, all deserve to help shape the rules that govern society as a whole. Its leaders managed to exercise some control over radicals in the specific context of Cold War America - but the effort was fated to fail eventually.Īnd now it’s threatening to bring American democracy down with it. Conservative doctrine never truly captured the hearts of a mass audience to attain power, the movement needed to ally itself with forces of far-right reaction who raged against the idea of equality at the heart of modern democracy.Īmerican conservatism was an attempt to tame the untamable: to domesticate this reactionary impulse and channel it into electoral politics in service of an elite-driven agenda.
This state of affairs is perhaps the inevitable endpoint of the American right’s decades-old strategy for attaining power. Mitt Romney - find themselves on the outside looking in. Those few Republicans in power willing to stand up to the rot of Trumpism - like Rep. The GOP’s future belongs to the radical forces represented by Trump and the members of the establishment most willing to cater to them. The right has extraordinary political power, but its traditional leadership seems less capable than ever of imposing limits on how it is wielded. But this victory required that they cede control over their movement to an unstable demagogue.Īmerican conservatism is thus simultaneously ascendant and in crisis. With Trump’s election, the conservative establishment succeeded in cementing its control over the Court. “The first thing that came to my mind was the Supreme Court,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told the Washington Post in a recent interview. Yet Republicans elevated him to the world’s most important job, and have made no secret of why.
That Donald Trump would incite violence in pursuit of power was not only predictable but predicted - including by his Republican opponents in the 2016 primary. A key answer to that question will be found not in White House call records or intercepted Proud Boys texts, but in a document released publicly last week: the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. The January 6 committee has been investigating, among other things, how it is that such a grievous attack on the Capitol could have happened in the first place.
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