Some thoughts on conservatism and radicalism, based on John Ganz’s masterful new book:
In the early 90s, the “counterrevolutionaries” still existed mostly on the margins of the mainstream. Today, they define the Right’s identity.
New piece:
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thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-origin...
One thing that really stands out about the early 1990s: All the protagonists on the Right in “When the Clock Broke” are convinced that it is not enough to be conservative, that a more radical politics is necessary to stem the tide of leftism, and globalism, and liberalism. 2/
That is what David Duke and Pat Buchanan promised: The conservative establishment needed to go because they were simply not up to the task; time for something – and someone – a lot more radical. 3/
This general diagnosis, this defining sentiment is most explicitly spelled out by the far-right intellectuals whose arguments John Ganz presents with wonderful clarity and dissects with surgical precision – especially Sam Francis and Murray Rothbard. 4/
Paleoconservatives like Francis and “paleolibertarians” like Rothbard dreamed of what they explicitly called a counter-revolution – they saw themselves as the vanguard of a “radical right” in hostile opposition to “bourgeois conservatism.” 5/
Rothbard wanted to “take the offensive at long last” and longed to “launch a counterrevolution in government, in the economy, and the culture.” After Clinton’s 1992 victory, Francis raged that “we are not fighting to conserve something; we are fighting to overthrow something.” 6/
The parallels to what is happening on the Right today are striking. The general sentiment that it is no longer enough to be “conservative,” that traditional conservatism needs to be replaced by a much more radical form of politics, is currently being echoed across the Right. 7/
People at the center of conservative politics are now rejecting the label “conservatism” and “small government” principles outright: Reactionaries don’t fear the authoritarian state, they want to mobilize it against their enemies. 8/
“The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life – and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed,” The Federalist in October 2022, adding that “the necessary task is nothing less than radical and revolutionary.” 9/
As Claremont-affiliated far-right thinker Glen Ellmers put it in an infamous essay published in Claremont’s online magazine in the spring of 2021, channeling the ghost of Sam Francis: “Conservatism is no longer enough.” 10/
Ellmers outlined a vision of redrawing the boundaries of citizenship and excluding over half the population: Anyone who is not an “authentic American,” as he put it – literally every single Democratic voter, who he derided as “zombies” and “human rodents.” 11/
For “authentic America” to survive, Ellmers was sure, a different kind of leader needed to emerge: “What is needed, of course, is a statesman who understands both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure.” 12/
What are we to make of these striking parallels between the early 90s and today’s reactionary intellectual sphere? Such frustration with a conservative establishment that is supposedly too soft and calls for a more radical politics are indeed a constant feature of the modern Right. 13/
The Right is best approached as a coalition of forces, ideas, people who struggle over how to respond to what they see as the existential the threat of multiracial democracy, with more extreme voices always trying to pull the coalition towards a more radical politics. 14/
The question, then, is why these calls for a more radical politics were more successful at certain moments, why these revolutionary desires succeeded in some situations and constellations, but not in others? 15/
Once we ask that question, we can trace significant shifts and radicalizations on the Right: In the early 90s, the counter-revolutionaries still existed mostly on the margins of mainstream politics, and Buchanan did not win the Republican nomination. 16/
Today, “Conservatism is not enough” - the lust for militant radicalism - has become the defining characteristic of even the rightwing mainstream.
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Your review was informative. This could explain in part the rise of the Reform Party in Canada during the ‘80s & ‘90s, and perhaps the UK with their current election post Brexit. With a 2 party system in the US, the old school GOP provided a cover for this pernicious radicalism to gain hold.
