The Right vs. the Right: Conservative “Liberals” in the Age of Trump

Before the last presidential election, Adolph Reed Jr. argued that “electoral politics has captured too much of the political imagination of the American left—or, at least, of those occupying the cultural space that a left would if there were one in this country.” Reed lamented the culturally dominant “sensibility that approaches politics as largely performative, a theater for the expression of righteousness, or bearing witness for justice and against injustice.” As many radicals long predicted, this approach to politics has handed the whole of the national political conversation to the right, and this development will plague American society long after Trump is a memory. We’ve reached a point where Bill Kristol can be a featured speaker at a “liberal” conference. It’s hard, in this context, to know which way is up, yet we can see clearly that all ways now point rightward. Kristol is far from alone; this cottage industry includes a who’s who of bloody-handed, Bush-era conservatives who now pretend to care about the rule of law, when their whole careers were spent writing thin apologies for the many constitutional violations of the post-9/11 years. We would not be in this moment with MAGA lawlessness and authoritarianism were it not for the people behind The Bulwark, the Lincoln Project, and the various other groups and outlets that have emerged on the right since Trump. In the Trump era, these self-congratulatory spaces have made a cottage industry of rewarding demonstrably right-wing commentators for their empty gestures in the direction of “democratic norms,” even as their old commitments have gone unquestioned and largely remained intact. The predictable result is that the political spectrum recognized by the mainstream of our culture and politics has been dragged even further to the authoritarian, death-worshipping and -dealing right. In this era, under these dynamics, the American right has divided itself into a MAGA wing and an embarrassingly self-satisfied group of supposedly noble, Never Trump conservatives, embraced by a cohort of lifeless laptop liberals who largely share their still very conservative views. The effect of this reconfiguration of the political right is to bring forth a mainstream political spectrum that sits almost completely on the far right. Media Matters for America’s Craig Harrington remarked on this baneful phenomenon back in 2022: “Even the supposedly liberal outlets like MSNBC lurched to the right, soaking up castaway Republicans guilty of Trump apostasy. After Biden won? The same outlets rushed to hire more conservatives who jumped ship after January 6th.” It is possible to imagine a liberalism that opposes war and empire, fights mass imprisonment and the wholesale destruction of the criminal trial and the rights of the defendant, fights on behalf of working people, and meaningfully resists the police statism and rampant warrantless surveillance of both the red and blue political teams. But the “liberals” on offer today are generally not liberal in any substantive sense; they instead use the terminology to signal their dislike for Trump. Contempt for Trump has simply never been enough, absent any commitment at all to genuinely liberal values. Policy endorsements and commitments continue to be more important than vibes and self-serving self-descriptions. It is telling that the reflex reaction (and it is reactionary) of Beltway and elite “liberals” to Trumpism has been to sidle up to the most malignant and discredited aspects of the neocon right. It is difficult to find any way to reconcile all of the lovely liberal language with the policies of the war on terror, long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the brutalization of immigrants and mass deportation, an increasingly militarized and repressive police state, and rabid, unquestioning support of NATO and U.S. imperialism. The cheerleaders for some of the worst and most globally destructive policies of our lifetimes have been absorbed into and embraced by “liberals” completely without any serious attempt to reckon with their records or careers. The entire political axis apparently centers and turns on the person of Donald Trump. Opposition to Trump means that one can be a committed illiberal, a warmongering, civil liberties-destroying authoritarian, and still receive a warm reception amongst professional liberals. They seem to believe it is the word “liberal” that matters, not the substantive positions on issues. This has been deeply troubling for those whose positions truly align with values of freedom and equality. The practical upshot of these dynamics is that the “reasonable” range of positions now runs from the hardcore right to the further extremes of the right, with anything seriously anti-oligarchy, anti-empire, or anti-carceral is treated as unacceptable and even un-American. What the good-faith liberals aligning themselves with this reanimated corpse of the neoconservative right seem not to understand is that these dynamics, migrating the entire acceptable political spectrum firmly into the right, will long outlast Donald Trump. In the end, Trump will have had two terms as president. But the range of politically feasible options could remain bolted down on the far right for many decades or even longer. It seems to be the case that one of the reasons none of this can be challenged is because doing so would force this coalition to admit that it is not in fact defending liberalism in any deep sense. The driving force behind this phenomenon is a reordering of elite consensus in order to insulate and perpetuate that consensus. The absurd pretense of the “moderate” neocon as somehow a liberal hides the rightward lurch Harrington identified several years ago. What we see in the anti-Trump conservative coalition is a bit of sleight of hand: the idea that rather than coming up with any real criticism of war, extreme inequality and runaway corporate consolidation and power, prison slavery, or the treatment of immigrants, we can simply revert to defending elite institutions in their pre-Trump snapshot. Within this paradigm, it’s easy to rehabilitate the loathsome Bush-era right without any critical appraisal of their records of action. All of this perhaps shows that publicly used ideological labels can change much more rapidly than real policy commitments, and that, particularly in our appearance-is-everything, substance-is-nothing contemporary culture, the superficial label will be accepted as signifying something real. No evidence is needed. In fact, the bare label is strong enough to overcome mountains of evidence to the contrary. This dynamic creates an optical illusion, the impression that the political spectrum itself has not moved, despite the fact that it has been redefined and pushed even further toward the authoritarian right. Hating Trump cannot be enough to exonerate the conservatives who led us right to him. Those on the real left should not confuse what we’re watching: a struggle within and reorganization of the American right that is passing itself off as the entire set of available options. All of these conservative “liberals” remain committed to a version of corporate statism (read: fascism), corporate welfare and extreme exploitation of labor, the unconstitutional national security complex, and the idea that the U.S. should run the world through military empire forever. They are not going to present a criticism of the political-economic system itself, even as they may differ facially on questions of manners, vibes, culture, and identity. This is what happens when so-called liberals jettison any concern about actual, material inequality or confronting the billionaire ruling class in favor of mere symbolism, terminology, and jargon. “Liberal” conservatives in the age of Trump are never going to challenge the foundations of the elite, big-city professional political consensus. The reality is that virtually all of what we associate with Trump predates him by decades, if not much longer, and expanded under administrations the news told you were liberal. There has been broad-based, two-party support for the horrors we associate with Trump, or else it would have been impossible to get Trump. We stand in a long historical process. If constitutionalism, democracy, and the rule of law are taken to include strong protections for due process, real separation of powers, and any conceivable limit on the powers of the executive branch, then the bipartisan consensus has been much weaker than the rhetoric of Never Trump conservative “liberals” wants you to know. Theirs is a polite, boxed-in disagreement with MAGA over how extremely concentrated and unaccountable power should operate at a narrow margin. What it is not is a real debate about whether this kind of power is even desirable. Liberalism might’ve gone in a different direction, and indeed it still could. What we should have been discussing, particularly after 9/11, was the frightening normalization of a security-administrative state that governs completely outside of the Constitution’s three-party division and beyond the reach of the Bill of Rights. If we had had the clarity and ethical temperament to make this case, we might not be in a second Donald Trump administration today. There were so many chances to open our eyes, but when Wikileaks, for example, tried to get us there, the same conservative “liberals” made themselves busy calling for the heads of government’s critics. We sat dumbfounded as Washington handed more power to the imperial presidency, centralizing the prerogatives of all three branches and reorganizing the state around permanent coercive capacity. If anything, the language of constitutionalism and the rule of law was deployed cynically to legitimate this system rather than trying to hold it back. Along these lines, the real social and political function of the conservative “liberal” is to stabilize the political consensus of the ruling class and their handlers in the Outer Party or the PMC. Their flowery rhetoric is a way to launder the violence of the political-economic system. It is branding and marketing for our captors. When the Never Trump conservatives wax poetic about “our institutions,” they should be reminded that those are the institutions that made a good “liberal” president claim the right to murder American citizens anywhere in the world, with no charges or judicial process. Conservatives who wring their hands over Trump’s fascism had no problem with it for decades; their counterfeit anti-fascism leaves the structural state-corporatism of the U.S. system insulated from criticism. Their embarrassing respectability politics is one of fascism’s great historical defenses. Their defenses of norms and institutions are the way our elites have always disciplined the political discourse back into safe and comfortable channels where empire and corporate looting can continue unabated. In a recent post, the veteran PNW anarchist activist William Gillis distinguished between historical forms of liberalism whose adherents “saw themselves in a grand historical struggle between liberty and power” and a modern liberalism defined by hostility to this older, more principled form, the “Party of Order” that cynically passes for liberalism today. One of the tragedies of the Trump era is the reduction of all mainstream liberalism to the latter, the Party of Order, which is to say conservatism.