Skribent: Paul Rowan Brian
Bildet: Fredrik Wiig Sørensen
The 1950s fusionism of political philosopher Frank Meyer was planted in fertile soil: the West was in a Cold War with the Soviet Union, and national politics revolved around that axis. The claim that freedom of markets, people and expression all went hand-in-hand against an authoritarian, anti-capitalist foe made sense to many Westerners. In the United States, big business joined up with religious conservatives in a friendship of convenience: it was a fresh recipe for right-wing electoral success. Wealth and virtue would flourish if the government just kept its grubby hands out. This was the new American “conservatism,” a kind of Diet Coke, sucralose-saturated simulacrum of the Founders’ vision. Ronald Reagan later rode to power on the same message, and many Republicans still wave this flag when it suits them.
But the flag is fading fast, perhaps because it’s from the dollar store, made with multinational-run slave labor and purchased by Americans whose jobs have been replaced. In fact, the American right has a long minority tradition of discontent with consumerist, capitalist ideology and the kind of hollowing out of society it engenders. The difference is that in the past few years that fringe is getting increasing time in the spotlight. This is because technology and globalization have brought the harsh realities of global capitalism home to many Americans and Westerners in ways that are harder and harder to ignore, both socially and economically.
It’s become all too obvious that a corporation’s bottom line and the wellbeing of Main Street are often at odds, if not sometimes diametrically opposed. What does the health and happiness of a family have to do with the profits of Raytheon or success of a giant agribusiness conglomerate like JBS? In fact, all too often their interests are opposed because multinational corporations can make more profits by offshoring or forming de facto monopolies that put small business at the wrong end of the stick. Conservatives are beginning to focus more on lobbyists, monopolies and large corporations who don’t care about them, and they’re very angry. Where anti-capitalism has traditionally been the domain of the left, critiques of “neoliberalism” and “crony capitalism” now run rampant on the right, being trumpeted by figures like Tucker Carlson and Glenn Beck.
Amplifying this trend is the fact that many large corporations from Disney to Bank of America have made headlines for adopting “woke” positions that alienate the middle and traditional sectors of society. “Woke capitalism” and its progenitors have never been less popular, and the idea that prosperity and the free market are necessary partners has never been more contested on the right.
Instead, the free market is increasingly conceived of by large sectors of the right as a tool being wielded by “globalists” to destroy the American family and nation. This is done by outsourcing manufacturing and impoverishing the working class, forcing them to sell off their land cheaply and take whatever low-paid work they can get and continuing a global cycle of disenfranchisement and deracination. The right-wing response that has been advanced thus far is to wield American industrial and government power back at the free traders and globalists, punishing companies and countries who try to give US workers a raw deal.
“Tariff is the most beautiful word in the dictionary!” former President Donald Trump proclaimed at an Oct. 19 campaign rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania to raucous cheers. He went on to mock establishment liberals and conservatives who were too “stupid” to realize the power of tariffs and protectionism in the service of US national interests in the recent past.
“The return of protectionism to the Republican Party was welcome, because putting America first is a necessary first step to putting our families first. Faith, hope, and charity begin at home,” writes journalist Michael Warren Davis in his 2021 book The Reactionary Mind: Why ‘Conservatism’ is Not Enough.
“Home—the family—should be the focal point of our economy as well.”
There’s a strong argument to be made that Trump’s deregulation, tax cuts and big business-friendly administration in his first term went directly against many of the populist promises that buoyed his journey to the White House – but the energy that underpinned his victory was decidedly underpinned by populist and even anti-capitalist emotions. The “forgotten men and women” railing against the “establishment” was all about a rising blue collar conservative base, particularly in the Rust Belt and deindustrialized areas that used to vote reliably Democrat. There’s no doubt various fatcats backed Trump and continue to do so, but GOP insiders aren’t touting their “Goldman Sachs jackets” to MAGA folks by any means.
Trump’s movement takes much of its power from unforced errors made by the left as the Democrat party and similar establishment parties around the world seek votes outside the traditional proletarian base. They often seek to appeal to bourgeois sentiments and socially divisive issues that can be termed “progress” and avoid any real pro-worker reform to labor or the economy. Issuing new pride flags every few months and expressing passionate belief in identity issues is the new bread and butter of growing areas of the establishment left, leaving the door wide open to the right to capture almost everyone who isn’t enchanted by the bait-and-switch.
As conservative journalist John O’Sullivan presciently remarked in a 2017 lecture given in Australia, “almost everywhere one finds that the mainstream Left is losing its traditional base in the blue-collar working class as it designs its policies to attract the middle-class urban professionals with progressive views, especially those working in the public sector and in the ‘third’ sector of the media, NGOs and the academy.”
A growing number of people don’t feel the need for a Wall Street banker-turned-politician to tell them they are a good person with correct opinions. Especially for those who have lost a stake in the system, promises of validation by the system rapidly lose their hold. They want to rock the boat. They want to capsize the boat and hoist the captain on the mainsail. If that’s Trump or Bernie Sanders who does the hoisting, many are open to either possibility. Indeed, covering the 2015 presidential primary in New Hampshire I was shocked by how many voters expressed positive feelings about both Trump and Sanders, saying either candidate was great to them as a way to shake things up and piss off the right people.
Talk of free trade has become a byword on much of the pro-Trump right and “neoliberal” is no longer something you hear solely on the activist left. Trump’s bitter comments in 2012 about China and free trade were mocked at the time, but by 2016 30% of the country ate it up and asked for more, cheering on protectionism without a second thought. People want preference for their own families, communities and nation, and support for a free market no longer fits in that picture for many. The paleoconservatism of Pat Buchanan, once derided by the mainstream as paranoid rambling was repackaged in a muscularly nationalist message to great effect by Trump in his victorious 2016 campaign.
One can almost hear Buchanan urging his followers to grab their pitchforks in many of the statements of Trump, including his “Closing Argument” campaign ad before the 2016 election which slammed a “global establishment” that was sucking America dry. This populist anger against the “establishment” and free trade is straight out of the Buchanan platform. A fierce critic of the Iraq War and America’s foreign empire, Buchana’s words were later echoed by Trump in his debate stage mop-up of Jeb Bush and derision for the “establishment” right and its trade and foreign policy ideas. “On Bush ‘Free Trade’ policies, the Republican Party has signed off on economic treason,” Buchanan wrote in his 2001 book Where the Right Went Wrong.
Where Buchanan roused primary voters against the threat of outsourcing posed by Japan and the loss of domestic manufacturing centers among once all-American brands like Harley Davidson, Trump rallied the masses against China and unfair trade policies hurting the “forgotten men and women” of America. Brandishing brazen anti-free-trade, anti-Bush, anti-NAFTA lines to great effect in his 2016 wildcard run for the Oval Office, Trump tapped into a growing current of right-wing, pro-worker populism. And this time it worked. As Tim Alberta put it, “Pat Buchanan won after all.”
It’s also no mistake that JD Vance was Trump’s pick for VP, nor that Vance has shown a real willingness to cause trouble for big business while still being a savvy venture capitalist who is willing to shake the right hands and keep important money flowing in important places. In 2023, Vance teamed up with Senator Elizabeth Warren to try to crack down on big banks who fail, and make it harder for them to obtain a bailout. His backstory of being raised in a troubled and poor forgotten community in Appalachia forms the crux of Vance’s ethos as the new generation’s America First champion: making it big but never forgetting the value and worth of the hardworking men and women who comprise the “real America” and fight back against heartless (often woke) mega-corporations and their big government allies.
“Big Business and Big Government have been best friends since childhood—at least since the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the arrival of the New Men,” Davis writes. “In this sense, the Left and the Right acted as the two arms of centralization, drawing all wealth and power into the hands of a small, well-connected, super-affluent elite.”
While one must also obviously recognize the influence of longtime Congressman Ron Paul for mainstreaming many conspiratorial narratives, rightist critiques of “globalists” and calling out a rigged establishment, Paul is nothing if not a passionate advocate of Austrian economics. He emphasized his view that “real capitalism” had rarely been tried and that America was in the grip of a false kind of capitalism that funded the “welfare-warfare state.” But Trump, instead of pointing to an ideal form of “real capitalism,” simply promised to wield all the ugly power of the executive and administrative state for the benefit of the American people against a hated class in both government, business and the institutions. And millions of conservatives and independents ate it up.
Trump, seen as a traitor to his class, has been all the more loved by conservatives for how he seems to humiliate so many of his high society peers and make them feel ruffled and awkward with his brash statements and actions. He doesn’t pretend to just be a “regular guy” flipping burgers: he keeps his shirt and tie on. But he talks normally and mocks many of the effete customs and convictions of his liberal compatriots. Finally a rich prick who’s on our side!
Reaganism and neoliberal Democrat policies just don’t sell like they used to. Talking about how America has been the victim of a global funny money hit-and-run done by China with help from traitors inside the USG gets you much further. Indeed, you don’t see many Democrats bragging about NAFTA these days or talking about more trade with China. Now it’s about America first, being raised middle class (as Kamala Harris loves to repeat) and about respecting the working man and woman who make the country and the world tick. But this instinct to reform comes from different directions.
As Peter Kolozi writes in his book Conservatives Against Capitalism, the left broadly-speaking considers inequality to be a product of social conditions, while the right considers social inequality and differences in intelligence, capacity and productivity to be a natural fact of life. The right’s rise against capitalism isn’t so much a rise against the inequality produced by capitalism as the universalism engendered by capitalism. The ubiquity of measuring everything through markets inevitably erodes community and identity, staking primacy over rooted community, faith and flag.
“Like communism, capitalism is based on an egalitarianism that refuses to distinguish between one consumer’s dollar and another,” wrote proto-Trump figure Sam Francis. “The reductionism and egalitarianism inherent in capitalism explain its destructive impact on social institutions.” At the time his writings were seen as kooky contrarian ramblings by many mainstream conservatives. The later adoption of such anti-capitalist critiques by the alt right eventually hit home in influential ways, forming part of the anti-establishment case built up by key Trump victory architects like Steve Bannon.
Bannon adapted many of the ideas of young internet shitposters, challenging the idea that global capitalism and the free flow of goods and human beings around the world was a net positive, and arguing that it hands American workers a raw deal. He claims it is just a way to use the United States as a money laundering service for global financial interests while depressing domestic wages. Bannon has joked he is a kind of “Leninist” because of recognizing the efficacy of Lenin’s strategy of waging a working-class war against the entrenched power structure. “To be serious you’ve got to be anti-imperial,” Bannon has memorably quipped, calling even populist Democrats “neoliberal neocons.”
“Once you talk about how the system is financed, they are fucking furious,” Bannon has said of his War Room audience, adding that “there will be a revolution in this country, one way or another.”
Fervent Trump supporter and country music artist John Rich embodies this mythos of a down home, patriotic worker fighting back against an elitist, monied establishment, particularly in his 2009 hit “Shuttin’ Detroit Down”. The core of the song is about the double standard in the 2008 financial meltdown when banks were bailed out and auto factories were shut down or had massive layoffs. This points to the disconnect between hardworking patriots and white collar monied interests with no link to the real people on the ground or their wellbeing. As Rich sings:
“Because in the real world they're shuttin' Detroit down,
While the boss man takes his bonus pay and jets on out of town.
DC's bailin’ out them bankers as the farmers auction ground.
Yeah while they're livin’ it up on Wall Street in that New York City town,
Here in the real world they're shuttin' Detroit down.”
This points to another key aspect of Lenin’s thought that the anti-capitalist right has adapted, namely the idea that the primary zone of battle isn’t just capital versus workers but national capital versus international capital. Rich mentions DC and New York, two urban centers well-known as centers of international banking and business and counterposes them with Detroit: a real American place where people actually make things, and a hapless victim of these vampiric international interests.
The fact that such a critique of global capitalism as found in Rich’s song could be appealing to many on the right as part of a nationalist message is obvious, even if it clashes with the conception and universalist ideals of strict anti-capitalists on the left. While the right ties international capital to an agenda to replace first world workers with undocumented workers and underpaid foreign labor, the left tends to see the undocumented workers as victims of the very system that needs an international, rather than national, solution. Essentially, the postliberal right and left have serious points of intersection against unbridled capitalism but disagree fervently on who comprises the in-group and out-group.
Indeed, the unspoken truth of this Che-ward turn on the right is that there is little mention of the raw deal that global capitalism has been handing workers of the developing world for centuries. However, the fact that a harsher microcosm of that is coming home to roost in ever more dramatic ways inside the United States has made free markets and “up by the bootstraps” rhetoric a harder sell.
As Anti-Flag put it in their 2006 song “The WTO Kills Farmers”:
“They tell you that you're out of luck
While people fall they watch their profits rocket up…
Geneva to Washington, Cancun to Seoul
The Corporate Welfare State running out of control.”
Many of these issues about right-wing anti-capitalist dissidents strike at the heart of the question: what is the right? What is conservatism? What is tradition in a world that has largely left behind the Throne and Altar? The debate has existed since the beginning of time, of course, and since some amount of change is inevitable, conservatism becomes the discussion of what is worth preserving and how to do so. As Gustav Mahler famously put it, “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the transmission of fire.”
The strands of right-wing anti-capitalism come from many directions: the fascism of Werner Sombart and Gregor Strauss, the distributism of Hilaire Beloc and G.K. Chesterton, the anti-industrialism of Ned Ludd, the anti-Reformation endeavors of Girolama Savonarala, the integralism of Thomas Pink, Adrian Vermeule and Carl Schmitt, the paleoconservatism of Buchanan and the illiberal possibilities present in a religiously-derived government. They all rest upon the conviction that the unfettered workings of modern liberal society is, at base, exploitative, vacuous and ultimately nihilistic.
These threads reacting against the mercantile class and its overthrow of established religious order have always existed as, essentially, a desire to form a new aristocracy that returns to pre-French Revolutionary ideals. However, once mixed with the heady frontier freedom of the American experience, this became a real kind of fusion: the desire for an aristocracy of the people, by the people and for the people – a paradox to be sure. But in such a dialectic, many possibilities are present.
Of course, with all the criticisms of out-of-control global capitalism, remarkably little is being done against it structurally or substantively. The amount of actual reform to multinational corporations, arms profiteers and corporate welfare state issues remains minimal as well, of course. But the bulk of the people are no longer buying a copy-paste capitalist argument: not when conservatives see socially leftist corporations rigging the game economically and politically, and not when leftists see giant companies colluding to maintain their capture of the institutional left.
“Traditionalists are allowed, even encouraged, to talk about conservative principles in the abstract, but they may never challenge the consumer-capitalist-globalist consensus of free markets, free trade, and foreign policy internationalism, even when policies excused under these guises undercut American workers, American families, American traditions, and American national interests,” notes Davis. “This is the insanity of modern conservatism…”
This points to a crucial truth about the post-liberal, anti-capitalist right: it involves a lot of talk but not much action. Strategic alliances and multinational business interests haven’t disappeared or lessened by any means. They have simply learned to cloak themselves in more effective disguises. Just as the left is awash in “greenwashing” and fake environmentalism designed to sell green products, the right is awash in pro-populist, anti-corporatist rhetoric that’s more about emotional appeal and rallying the masses than real pushback against the global order.
Despite this, there’s a certain irony contained in every inevitably co-opted political movement: even if the top-down rhetoric contains a lot of pretense, the changes that occur as a result of mass movements on the ground level can be very much real. Real resistance can come from figureheads, and a purely performative actor can evoke real emotions and real reactions in the audience.
The American left demands universal healthcare, affordable housing, environmental protection and regulation against out-of-control financial speculation and a rigged market in favor of the oligarchy because of a belief in universal rights. The right demands an end to global capital as the natural way of things, because of the growing recognition that it hollows out the kind of family, faith and roots necessary for a true national identity and national patriotism. The liberal left screams that the anti-capitalist right is the next iteration of fascism; the liberal right shouts that the anti-capitalist left is the next coming of communism.
Both fail to see how even their darkest warnings are ineffective because liberals of the left and right variety are offering no real alternative except an open-ended march “forward” into some kind of vague utopian technocracy where insults are policed more closely on X and everybody is legally required to validate and celebrate everybody else’s life choices.
At the deepest level of postliberal politics and economics, there is a restless insecurity of meaning that transcends discussions of labor and capital. Liberalism was the first modern system claiming to offer direction for society based on “reason” instead of any supernatural or divine order. Emerging from Protestantism and the capitalist, mercantile system and the modern “representative democracy” it engendered, the liberal ideology holds that political authority and civil order can be created from legislatures and constitutions rather than any inherent right or wrong, divine order or agreed upon scripture.
Indeed, another of the key reasons for the right-wing disenchantment with free market capitalism is obvious: capitalism just isn’t very conservative. As Christian Alejandro Gonzalez notes for City Journal, “capitalism isn’t particularly conservative, at least if conservatism is defined as a preference for order, continuity, and organic change. Over the past two centuries, capitalism has radically transformed the world, often uprooting communities and traditional ways of life in the process. As one might expect, therefore, many conservative thinkers have voiced opposition to capitalism.”
As Russell Kirk put it: “Mine was not an Enlightened mind, I now was aware: it was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure. I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful.”
In an age of record levels of loneliness, suicide and social alienation, not to mention the erosion of entire sectors of the workforce, voters are not susceptible to vague promises of “progress” or a future techno-utopia. Taking a pill for loneliness isn’t going to fill the vacuum of community and livelihood that used to be there.
While centrists and liberals continue to have faith in the news ticker on CNN, the egregore of reality churns away in flaming lava beneath their feet. It’s just a matter of time before its spread accelerates beyond anyone’s control.
“We take all this “progress” for granted. Yet the economic system of family farmers and independent craftsmen born in the Middle Ages lasted for well over a thousand years, while the history of industrialism has undergone countless revolutions and mutations in just two centuries,” writes Davis. “Whatever else you want to say about it—no matter what you find to praise or blame—our status quo is far from inevitable. Capitalism, no less than communism, is horribly unstable, and no necessary champion of freedom.”
Whichever angle one views the political trajectory of the United States, it’s clear that opposition to global capitalism and all it brings along is accelerating. The idea that the market economy and capitalism are one and the same has slowly begun to dissolve, and more and more ordinary people of all political stripes are expressing opinions – and casting votes – for those who call out the capitalist ruling class as exploitative and rigged.
As Russell Kirk put it, the possibility of conservatives allying with socialists, “is more nearly conceivable than the coalition of conservatives and libertarians. The socialists at least declare the existence of some sort of moral order; the libertarians are quite bottomless.”
Comentarios