For generations, conservatives offered a bold vision for America rooted in the defense of America’s founding principles and the championing of limited government, ordered liberty, national defense, free enterprise, traditional values and the rule of law. Though different factions within the broader conservative movement differed in points of emphasis, one could discern these core ideals across generations and presidencies. What united them all, ultimately, was an enduring confidence about America itself, its institutions and its founding ideals.
President Ronald Reagan often spoke of his vision of American exceptionalism as “a shining city upon a hill” for the world to look to and emulate. It was a vision that encapsulated what was once the standard ideal of those on the right and inspired generations of conservatives.
“I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it,” he said in his 1989 farewell address. “But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.”
For decades, this vision, however imperfectly or inconsistently followed, has been the guiding light for the American right. But the last couple of decades have been trying times for the country and that idealistic vision. Following vast discontent with the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the lingering ramifications of major crises like the Great Recession and the coronavirus pandemic, and rapidly declining trust in institutions of all sorts, the right is going through something of a populist identity crisis.
The increasingly fragmented intellectual landscape of the right is in large part powered by online influencers, who, when they’re not grievance mongering, are spinning tales of civilizational doom. If you spend enough time listening to right-wing podcasts or scrolling X, you’d come away with the idea that everything in America is actually in decline, that some “they” are ruling the world and ruining your life specifically to benefit some “them” out there, and that BlueChew and vapes are sacraments for young men.
Conservative commentator Matt Walsh’s complaint “that basically everything in our day to day lives has gotten worse over the years” is emblematic of one layer of discontent. “The quality of everything — food, clothing, entertainment, air travel, roads, traffic, infrastructure, housing, etc. — has declined in observable ways. Even newer inventions — search engines, social media, smartphones — have gone downhill drastically. This isn’t just a random ‘old man yells at clouds’ complaint. It’s true. It’s happening. The decline can be measured. Everyone sees it.”
True, true. What a terrible time to be alive when the average American is inundated with choices on what to eat, what to buy, what to do, break records seemingly every year for travel and have instant access to the knowledge world in their pocket. It’s truly awful.
But that sort of frequent pessimism aside, there is a growing rot in the core of the right. While there have always been fringe elements on the right, the fringe is going mainstream.
“Yes, we are ruled by satanic pedophiles who work for Israel,” declared commentator Candace Owens to her nearly 8 million followers. “Everyone needs to digest that fact now. Pray and prepare yourselves to continue this fight against who are working to protect them in government, media and church. This is the synagogue of Satan we are up against.”
If that sounds nuts to you — good — but the problem is that the right is littered with rhetoric and debates that would have you believe modern America is an unsalvageable hellscape.
Once you get past the various conspiracy theories, from “Great Replacement” to the latest “stolen” election, it really doesn’t take long to come across talk of repealing women’s right to vote and restoring a monarchy. Horseshoe theory is increasingly on display, as the right has come to embrace progressive figures like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. while flirting with the economic policies of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. And along the way you’ll run into the rantings of former kickboxer Andrew Tate telling young men to put women in their place as he shuffles between court appearances for rape and trafficking charges.
It’s no wonder younger Republicans are significantly likelier to self-report either being racist or anti-Semitic than older Republicans, more fixated on the idea that America is “too feminine,” while also being less committed to standard conservative stances like having a preference for cutting government over raising taxes. When the conservative intellectual ecosystem has swapped out Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley for BronzeAgePervert and Nick Fuentes, how can anyone be surprised?
Commentator Tucker Carlson perhaps personifies better than most the maddening of the American right. Once a straight-laced, bowtie-wearing mainstream conservative, Carlson is now preoccupied with space aliens-as-spiritual-forces, chatting up Nazi apologists, and arguing that the real issue the United States had with Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro was that he opposed gay marriage. Unlike cranks in past decades who had to cobble together a newsletter audience, Carlson has an audience of nearly 18 million people on X.
Carlson’s devolution has explicitly seen him reject influential conservatives of the past. During one podcast appearance, Carlson enthusiastically concurred with the idea that National Review founder and editor William F. Buckley Jr. was “one of the great villains of the 20th century.” Say what you will about Buckley and his famous clash with the far-right John Birch Society in the 1960s, but one would be hard pressed to place Buckley on a list of “the great villains of the 20th century.”
And of course there’s his turn against free-market capitalism. “Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You’d have to be a fool to worship it,” he said, adding that, “Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society. “
Yes, capitalism is just like a toaster. One makes sliced bread warm and the other facilitates wealth creation, enables people to live the lives they want to live and has proven itself to be the most powerful anti-poverty system yet discovered.
That aside, his more constructive ideas are of course as mushy as his reasoning but his idea of a healthy society that keeps families together harkens back to another increasingly common trope in modern right discourse, and that is the idea that everything went wrong with feminism and having a system “consistent with nature” is the key.
As he recently explained in a podcast with Chris Williamson when asked what such a system would look like, “It would look like what we had before Betty Friedan wrote ‘The Feminine Mystique,’ before lifestyle feminism dominated every institution in the west, before we started lying to ourselves about how we were totally disconnected from nature.”
He’s not alone. Large numbers of “Groypers” follow the aforementioned white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who on any given day could be praising Joseph Stalin, complaining about minorities or calling for a tyrannical president who “will break the back of the majority in both chambers, and will ignore the courts.” Like Carlson, Fuentes commonly invokes declinist rhetoric not just of America but western civilization as a whole, commonly blaming feminism as the root of the problem and lamenting ongoing demographic trends.
As he said of this latter point in one stream, “Is that going to be an improvement? Does anybody believe that for five seconds, that the country getting less white and becoming non-majority white — does anybody think that will be an improvement? I know people will say that’s racist. I know people will say that’s white nationalist or white supremacist, but they can’t say it’s wrong.”
While Fuentes is certainly on the more extreme end of the spectrum, these kinds of hyper-reactionary viewpoints have broad currency across the right. This includes the fairly new fixation on the so-called “Heritage American” and the rejection of America as a creedal nation.
In fact, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch recently exposed this very rift with his perfectly inoffensive articulation of the American creed, “That all of us are equal, that each of us has inalienable rights given to us by God, not government, and that we have the right to rule ourselves.” He went on to explain that America is not based on heritage, rather is “based on those ideas. We’re a creedal nation.”
Which is all to say that saving and reclaiming the American project is still within reach of the right if it still wants it. That will require ditching the fever swamps and recommitting to a positive vision of America once again.
As President Reagan said, “Yes, the torch of Lady Liberty symbolizes our freedom and represents our heritage, the compact with our parents, our grandparents, and our ancestors. It is that lady who gives us our great and special place in the world. For it’s the great life force of each generation of new Americans that guarantees that America’s triumph shall continue unsurpassed into the next century and beyond.”
The right can return to that line of thinking, or, I guess it can keep doing what it’s doing and follow people who are either willful or useful idiots of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Take your pick.
In the next installment, Steven Greenhut will look at the left and whether we are stuck worrying about the climate apocalypse and plotting a future of limits.
Sal Rodriguez is opinion editor for the Southern California News Group and a senior fellow with the Pacific Research Institute. He is the author of “Dynamism or Decay? Getting City Hall Out of the Way,” published by the Pacific Research Institute.