Straight to the point

In the wake of Biden’s rambling press conference, his answers dishonestly and mechanically padded with campaign boilerplate that wandered far away from the questions — you could see the Scotch tape on his synapses — America is wondering to what extent Biden is mentally impaired. This in itself is a symptom of national cognitive decline; the country seems to be losing its ability to focus. The pressing reality is not Biden, whose departure from the race is all but inevitable. The central drama now is about to happen next Tuesday, at the Republican convention in Milwaukee. Here the question of America’s fate will depend upon a larger question: whither the American Right? That is a complicated matter.

To even begin to understand it, you first have to understand the arc of contemporary mores. To put it crudely: behaviour that was once publicly unacceptable is now tolerated, even embraced. Trump’s abusive language and threats didn’t come from nowhere. America’s famous radical individualism has burst its last restraints. It is hardly a surprise that a major American political party will be anointing an apparent sociopath its king when, for example, some American schoolchild somewhere could still be responding to the TikTok challenge, “Slap-a-Teacher”. Trump didn’t drop from the sky. He grew out of a coarse transformation of American life.

Or to put it another way, just as liberal culture long ago assimilated a culturally avant-garde nihilism — moving from Dickens to Kafka to Fifty Shades of Grey — the conservatives are experiencing their own upheaval in morality. Liberals have Quentin Tarantino’s revels in meaninglessness and violence. Hard-Right conservatives can now be entertained by Marjorie Taylor Greene’s social media posts encouraging the execution of Democratic leaders.

This Right-wing assimilation of once subversive values and sentiments, however, had a long gestation. For the fringe energies on the Right — the calls for violence, the paranoia, the nativism, the xenophobia — to have come bounding into the mainstream, two things had to happen. The Right had to shift its attention from political issues to cultural ones. And culture had to become a highly personal, idiosyncratic matter. The disappearance of a mass culture, and the rise of countless streaming niches, has had an incalculable effect on politics. People no longer stand around the proverbial water-cooler talking about the TV show or the movie they saw the previous night. Now they sit in their cubicles and watch on their screens recaps of what they saw the previous night. And few people saw the same thing as other people. A good part of Trump’s appeal is simply that he is someone who gets lots of people to poke their heads out of their cultural niches and pay attention to him, the way people used to go en masse to a movie theatre instead of sitting home alone in front of their screens (where they are now all following Trump). This great divider is also, for masses of people, a great uniter.

The story of the contemporary American Right is a tale of fringe to mainstream, of a long, slow embrace of what was once unacceptable. It took some time, but an adversarial energy was its mother’s milk from the beginning. Today’s take-no-prisoners, radical American Right was born in opposition to the New Deal and to what appeared to be Soviet communist threat. The Right has been and will always be a counterpunch. Trump is a born counterpuncher.

In the Thirties, class was the focus of both Right and Left. With the legislative triumph of FDR’s New Deal, though, the liberal idea of material hardship as something to be ameliorated by the state established itself, forevermore, as the dominant political ideology in America. The Right-wing counterpunch occurred quickly. But it found no real outlet in national politics, fulminating instead in print and in the new medium of radio. It was exemplified by the ideas of Father Charles Coughlin, the radical Right’s chief demagogue at the time. Coughlin was a pastor in a small Michigan town who had turned sharply from a supporter of FDR and the New Deal to a vicious opponent of both, using radio broadcasts and a magazine he published called Social Justice, to attack communism, bankers, and Jews. Coughlin began as an advocate for the economically disenfranchised, but his Left-populist rhetoric gradually evolved into pro-Nazi tirades. At his height, his broadcasts had a staggering 30 million listeners — he was proof of concept for the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson. Though Coughlin’s sentiments found no political platform, their incendiary quality threatened public order, especially after America entered the Second World War. The federal government shut down Coughlin’s magazine in 1942 for violating the Espionage Act, and the Catholic Church put an end to his radio broadcasts at the same time.

Coughlin had been silenced, but his enmity toward liberalism seethed under the surface of American life. Yet as the New Deal became a welcome permanent condition for most Americans, as the country grew prosperous after the Second World War, and as accelerating industrialism slowly eroded the moral fabric of small-town America, Coughlin’s focus on class lost its pull. Enter Senator Joseph McCarthy, who replaced class consciousness with an obsession with seditious elites. This shift in emphasis was a virtuoso move. McCarthy’s anti-communism provided an intellectual style of its own for the masses of people alienated by the liberal intellectual class. McCarthy became a sort of cultural mandarin from below, simply by virtue of his attacks on the cultural mandarins who ruled from above. This was the first step, by the Right, out of politics into culture.

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McCarthy was exposed during the televised 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings as vapid, venal and heartless. And as a result of its tribune’s public discrediting, the Right lost much of the following McCarthy’s conspiracy theories had won for it and settled back into the political margins. There the fevers McCarthy had unleashed were soon embraced by the ill-tempered John Birch Society, which represented the return of Father Coughlin’s dark populist zeal. Like the Tea Partiers and MAGA enthusiasts who eventually followed them, Birchers blamed moderate elites in the Republican party, just as much as Democratic elites, for an expanding universe of entitlements — and also for the seemingly unstoppable growth of international communism. William F. Buckley, routinely praised for purging the conservative movement of its extremist fervors, in fact gave the Birchers an appreciative wink as he finally, and with finely calibrated ambivalence, seemed to usher them out the door in 1965 with a series of scathing editorials that he published in his weekly magazine, National Review, at the time a highly influential force in conservative life. After all, Buckley’s seminal 1951 God and Man at Yale lambasted cultural elites across the political spectrum in a way that held great appeal for the Birchers.

Coughlin’s original economic populism had never caught on with conservatives, who were, and always will be, the party of banks and big business. But with Buckley’s book, a strenuous argument for replacing the teaching of secular humanism in universities with the propounding of Christian principles, the Right found its most powerful appeal and its true purpose: the battle over who owns American culture. The shift from the conservative pursuit of class conflict to its pursuit of a culture war was almost achieved. Once you draw a bead on the liberal elites, the liberal elites train their attention back on you. The result is that you share their visibility, and their glamour. Bob Dylan in 1962:

So I run down most hurriedly
And joined up with the John Birch Society
I got me a secret membership card
And started off a-walkin’ down the road
Yee-hoo, I’m a real John Bircher now!
Look out you Commies!

The American radical Right was well on its way to being mainstreamed.

The Left, clutching their Gramsci, followed a similar path, as they embarked on their long march through the cultural institutions, mainly the universities. In 1989, the Catholic conservative Michael Novak published, in Forbes magazine of all places, an essay titled “The Gramscists Are Coming”, in which he urged conservatives to adopt the principles of Gramsci’s Kulturkampf — what Gramsci called a “war of position” — in order to head off the Left’s incursions into culture.

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Three years later, at the 1992 Republican convention, the Right-wing Catholic populist Patrick Buchanan — Father Coughlin with an urbane, smiling face —declared: “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.” The cosmopolitan Buchanan was shrewd about empowering people who felt left out by the ruling elites: he gave them an intellectual framework of their own. A “cultural war” is, after all, a form of culture. The Right-wing motion from politics to culture was complete.

In response, the Left’s grip on the universities hardened into identity politics and “political correctness”, the ancestors of today’s “woke” crusaders. And in response to that, but mostly to the election of the country’s first black president, the Tea Party briefly rose to prominence, bringing the virulent sentiments of Father Coughlin and the Birchers, which had always lingered on the fringes, into the Republican mainstream. Yet the Tea Party’s feral energies were too much, it went too far in its refusal to compromise in Congress — and wiped itself out.

Trump would later incorporate the Tea Party base into the GOP by elevating the Tea Party’s cultural animadversions — they, like Trump, believed that Obama had not been born in the US, and that he was secretly a Muslim and a socialist — over its radically libertarian economic agenda. Trump played down his radical free-market economic agenda — it pretty much went without saying for a GOP candidate who was also a successful businessman anyway. Instead he played up a rhetorical Grand Guignol of feral sentiments. He abandoned the Tea Party’s intransigence over the budget. And made a bullying, derisive intransigence the substance of his politics. Trump is the only American president to be loathed by liberals, not for his policies and actions as president — as Nixon, Reagan and Bush had been — but simply for being an asshole.

Nowadays both Right and Left accuse the other of inflaming passions over culture to conceal an economic agenda; but with the triumph of neoliberalism, the economic agenda of the two sides has become strikingly similar in many respects. The war over who owns the culture, though, is where the irreconcilable differences lie. Not over tariffs on China, or managing Social Security, or even the need to curb illegal immigration. There is middle ground on all those issues. There is no middle ground over the belief in the fungibility of biological gender, or the certainty of the existence of inherent racism, or the issue of whether to teach both to children in school. The emergency in the way people expect their most intimate realities to remain constant is what is largely inspiring them to protect Trump from the destabilising assaults upon him.

Surprising as it may sound, the culture war in America has been, to a meaningful degree, a clarifying, sometimes bracing, dispute in the absence of the communist menace on the one hand, and of a shared water-cooler culture on the other. But America’s culture war has now, like pretty much every public experience in America, begun to vanish into the labyrinth of the American psyche.

Just as late capitalism has made the commodification of psychological life — Mark Zuckerberg is the Cecil Rhodes of our time — its last commercial frontier, American politics now is more and more a matter of mental states; no wonder that Taylor Swift’s lyrics often sound like middle school meets Munch’s The Scream. It is fitting that the entire country should be obsessing over the fraying synapses of its two presidential candidates. Ideology is out. What you think people are actually thinking behind the veneer of what they want you to think they are thinking, as you are trying to figure out what you actually think or should seem to be thinking yourself: that is in. Unmasking deep psychic truth, once the project of high art and modern sociology, is now a common reflex.

Forget all the talk about the administrative state, and the deep state, and Hayek and Strauss and Agamben; forget libertarianism, and Catholic integralism, and neo-conservatism, and the Claremont Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, and Project 2025, and the slick, hustling Right-wing New Dealers. Think instead of that great emblematic American experience: driving on a highway.

Everyone is a centrist behind the wheel. You drive according to the speed limit when you have to, exceeding it when you are alone or when everyone else does. You mostly stay in the middle lane, or in one of the middle lanes, changing to the left lane to pass or to the right lane to exit the highway. So long as everyone else driving near you behaves in the same way, everything goes smoothly. Your life is fine, it will be fine, all will be fine. There is no reason to think or feel radically different about anything. All of sudden, though, someone cuts you off. You fly into a rage and want to follow them to wherever they are going, pull them out of their car and beat them into extinction. In much the same way, patriotism and ideology instantly vanish from the minds of soldiers in battle, who care only to survive.

As American life fills with conveniences, inconvenience begins to feel more and more like a broken promise. Responsibility itself comes to be experienced as a betrayal of free will. In this carnival of sovereign impulses, the space between politicians — and every public figure; think of those postgame press conferences in which athletes have to atone to viewers for their mistakes during the game — and the people who elect them disappears. It’s not enough to vote someone out, or vote against them, when they cut you off, as it were. You have to destroy them. Ideology is irrelevant, except as someone’s pretext for enraging you, and as your pretext for striking back.

The rise, in Europe, of fringe parties in the mainstream, is one result of a democratic politics that regresses, more and more, to the appetites of the individual. In America, where the sense of community has always been elusive, such bespoke politics, if you will, is becoming more and more prevalent. You might also call it streaming, or niche politics. Something for everyone; nothing for all.

This atomised political consumerism is why, professed liberal amazement and outrage to the contrary, there is nothing contradictory about an American Right in which Mitch McConnell and Marjorie Taylor Greene share the same (ultimate) fealty to Trump. Having its roots in opposition to the New Deal, then to godless Ivy-educated elites, and now to progressive commandments to transform human life from the genitals, to the kitchen, to the highway, the American Right, like any person ruled by anger, is open to the most intense emotions, no matter how contradictory. In a blurry, mentalised time, Trump’s own anger is downright enlightening for many people.

In Milwaukee, Trump will continue to capitalise on the American Right’s movement from fringe to mainstream, from politics to culture to psyche, and turn himself into a syncretic masterpiece. He is, all at once, a fractured Picasso and a reassuring Hudson River landscape; a Buckley-like cosmopolitan exerting a clownish appeal to born disrupters and, in the eyes of prim liberal elites, “losers”; a convicted felon who can now present himself as an American anti-hero on the order of Christ himself. And, to top it all off, the Democrats are becoming, before everyone’s eyes, the party of sclerosis, dishonesty, concealment, and sanctimonious hunger for power.

That is to say, the erstwhile party of the New Deal is now retreating into the shadows, while the party of Father Coughlin has emerged from the shadows once and for all and, short of the Lord himself intervening with Josephus Bidenarius Caesar, ready to take centre stage.

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