“Conservatism” Is Now Just a Domination Fetish
From states rights, a rules-based system, and limited government to a boot stamping on a human face—forever.
1. Fetlife
UPDATE: My convo with Heather Cox Richardson as been postponed because Substack kind of blew up this morning. Hoping to reschedule soon as possible. Sorry. I promise that I’m more disappointed than you are. —JVL
At 3:00 p.m. EDT today I’m talking to historian Heather Cox Richardson on Substack; I hope you’ll join us. The subject of our conversation is going to be political conservatism in the American context.
So let’s start at the very beginning: What did “conservatism” used to mean?
At the foundational, philosophical level, conservatism was about slowing the pace of change in order to avoid unintended consequences. Which is why the obverse of conservatism wasn’t “liberalism,” it was “radicalism.”1
Radicals wanted rapid, systemic changes. Conservatives prioritized three things that buffered systemic change:
The rule of law
Subsidiarity
Institutions
Radicalism insisted that change must come, as quickly as possible and by any means necessary. If laws stood in the way, then they should be overturned or obviated. If local or state governments were recalcitrant, then the federal government must overrule them. If institutions slowed change, then they must be either captured or scuttled.
It may sound like I’m loading the deck against radicalism, but I’m not. At various times in American history, the radicals have been on what we now deem to be the right side—most notably on revolting against British rule and abolishing slavery.
But the radicals haven’t always been on the side of the angels. Radicals wanted rapid systemic change away from democratic capitalism following the Second World War. Conservatives wanted to preserve existing systems.
This isn’t to cast either conservatism or radicalism as the “good” political philosophy. Each has had its time in the sun and more to the point: Every healthy society needs an element of both. It’s a yin-yang dynamic.
Instead, I want to suggest that:
American conservatism is now the radical political philosophy.
Its object is not “change” but domination.
I don’t think we even need to make the case that modern conservatism2 is no longer interested in conservation; we can just take it as read.
The people who call themselves conservative today are actively hostile to the rule of law, subsidiarity, and the mediating power of institutions. I do not think many of them would dispute this characterization.
Conservatives seem to agree with Trump’s dictum that, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” At the very least they agree that Trump should not be subject to the rule of law. This is not a mere partisan point of privilege—the conservative majority on the Supreme Court created an entirely new legal doctrine to insulate the presidency from the law.
Conservatives are also vehemently against subsidiarity. Conservatives in Alabama do not believe that the people of California or Massachusetts should be allowed to make their own decisions about their children’s education, or health care, or even what policies local businesses might have concerning the wearing of surgical masks. They prefer a universal, federally mandated approach.
And conservatives are actively hostile to independent institutions. This is why they have embraced economic warfare against universities, the media, and private business. They seek to use government power to either compel institutions to submit to them, or risk destruction.
Yet at the same time, I’m not sure that what conservatives want constitutes “change.”
I argued that, historically, the radical persuasion in American politics was bent on evolving the status quo. But the direction of that evolution differed from moment to moment. In one era, it desired independence from the crown. In another it sought to abolish slavery. In another it sought transformation of the social compact.
Today’s conservatives are certainly radical in their disposition—in the sense that they are hostile to the rule of law, subsidiarity, and institutions—but what they want isn’t so much change as domination.
They want to set the laws. To force others to live by their preferences. To be able to extract wealth from whatever corner of the system they like. They embrace, nay, they celebrate corruption.3 They are in favor of political violence, so long as it is carried out by actors sympathetic to their cause.4
This isn’t a program that’s primarily concerned with changing policies or systems; it’s a fetish for domination. Stephen Miller said this explicitly last week:
The power of law enforcement, under President Trump’s leadership, will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and, if you’ve broken the law, to take away your freedom.
As Andrew Egger said this morning, note that the concept of law comes last in Miller’s version of conservatism. The first principle is domination.
That’s not the only way to read modern conservatism, of course. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the subject, though.
And if you’re not a member of Bulwark+, I hope you’ll consider joining our community, because it’s a place where we try to have conversations like this, where we disentangle partisanship from philosophy and ideology and where we’re open to taking big swings at big ideas. Come ride with us.
2. HCR
[Remember: This is postponed now. Sorry. Again.] I’m looking forward to talking with
After World War II, leaders of both major political parties agreed that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, protect civil rights, and shore up a rules-based international order to try to prevent another world war. Republicans and Democrats contended, sometimes bitterly, over policies, but members of both parties recognized that they shared with the other a loyalty to the country and a general set of beliefs about what was best for it that encouraged them to seek common ground. . . .
But 1980 saw the takeover of the Republican Party by an extremist faction known as the “Movement Conservatives.” Their roots lay in 1937, when men who hated the New Deal legislation being put in place by the Democrats came together to destroy it. Businessmen who hated business regulations and taxes joined with southern racists who hated Black rights and with religious traditionalists who hated women’s rights and wanted the churches to control welfare programs so they could police behavior.
Calling themselves “conservatives” because they wanted to dismantle the laws and recreate the 1920s, the Movement Conservatives produced a list of demands. They called for deregulation, tax cuts, an end to social welfare spending, and an end to government support for workers, maintaining that those principles would protect the bedrock of the economy: private enterprise. They also called for states’ rights, home rule, and local self-government, by which they meant that southern states could maintain discriminatory laws against their citizens, no matter what the Fourteenth Amendment said. . . .
Trump is dismantling the government as Movement Conservatives have wanted for decades. But he has abandoned the small-government principles Movement Conservatives claimed to champion and is using state power to terrorize citizens. He has abandoned the due process of the law and states’ rights and is working to rig the system permanently in his favor. And now he has abandoned the free-market principles around which the Movement Conservatives organized in the first place.
From the beginning, “Movement Conservatism” was anything but conservative. Its supporters embraced the radical goal of dismantling a practical system that stabilized the country after the Great Depression and a devastating world war, a system that was based in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But now they are embracing something altogether different.
Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo explained yesterday on social media that “a new conservatism has emerged. We are leading a rebellion against the establishment and dismantling the elements of the left-wing ideological regime—not for the purpose of nihilism, but for the purpose of rebirth, or restoration, of our republic.”
Rufo’s statement is, as one commenter noted, “just textbook 1930s fascism.”
Please, read it all. And then watch this short video where HCR talks about the possibility of civil war.
She mentions the near-outbreak of a second civil war in 1876. I’m going to ask her about that, among other things.
See you at 3:00 p.m. EDT here.
3. Specialization
Later this week I’m going to talk about kids sports stuff. You might want to read this piece about the athletic-specialization process before then.
At 13, Jannik Sinner left home to train with a famed Italian tennis coach named Riccardo Piatti. It was the first time he had focused solely on the sport, and although he harbored big dreams, he stayed realistic.
“If one day I would have been top 100,” Sinner recalled, “I would be the happiest.”
He understood the odds, and he knew how expensive the sport would be. So he told his parents that if he was not in the top 200 in the world by the time he was 23 or 24, he would stop playing.
Considering where Sinner is now — world No. 2, winner of four grand slams and still just 24 — it would seem that he undersold his potential. However, Sinner did not have the usual tennis upbringing.
Born in northern Italy, in the German-speaking province of South Tyrol, he spent his early years as a competitive skier and dabbled in other sports. Until he began working with Piatti, tennis was only a part of his life.
Tennis, by form and tradition, is a sport of prodigies. The very best often pick up a racket as children, head to academy coaches by their 10th birthday and grind on the junior circuits for years. The pathway to success has long put the sport at the center of the youth sports specialization debate and the questions facing athletes and their parents: What is the best way to develop a young athlete? When is the best time to specialize? . . .
It also depends on the sport. When it comes to activities based on raw strength and speed — such as football or basketball — it is possible to specialize around the age of 16 to 18 and reach the top of your sport. In sports that require more technical skills, such as tennis, golf or baseball, it may make sense to specialize in mid-adolescence.
There are exceptions: Take gymnastics, a technical sport where athletes often compete before they’re fully mature. In instances of early specialization, Myer says, it’s critical to adopt training methods that mimic other sports and movement patterns to decrease the risk of injury.
At one point during his research, Jayanthi also began to ponder the true meaning of youth sports. Was it to have fun and learn life lessons? Was it a matter of public health? And what about the kids that had no realistic chance to play professional or even college sports but might benefit from the confidence boost inherent in making a team? What if they needed specialized training to do that?
“If your goal is to be the best 12-year-old in the neighborhood,” Jayanthi said, “then start them when they’re 6, train a lot and then get them to be the best 12-year-old. And you actually have a reasonable chance.”
Jayanthi refers to this as “short-term athlete development.” It may not help an athlete reach their full potential in the long term, and it comes with its own inherent injury risks. However, in the short term?
“It actually works,” Jayanthi said. “Sadly.”
Read the whole thing. It’s an excellent piece and it hints at one of the biggest problems with youth-sports specialization: It creates huge barriers to entry for non-specialized kids.
Once upon a time you could show up to 7th grade having never picked up a field hockey stick or run a cross-country race. You could join the team, learn the sport, and launch an athletic career for your teenage years.
Today that’s basically impossible. Maybe a true n00b could make his/her 7th grade basketball team, but they’ll never play. Making a high school squad without being part of the travel-sports circuit from an early age is extremely difficult in almost every sport.
Which forces an entire universe of kids out of athletics early in life.
That’s what I hate most about the specialization phenomenon. A lot of the research and conversation about specialization focuses on how it harms the prospects of the top 7 percent or so of athletes—the kids who are going to play in college or beyond. And the downsides for those kids are real.
But I’m more concerned with the impacts it has on the next 60 percent of kids and how it prevents many of them from progressing from the rec level to middle and high school sports.
We’ll talk about all of this later in the week.
As you’ll see in what follows, this is a discussion about the American context—but you could trace the lineage of some of it back at least to the French Revolution and Edmund Burke.
I’m going to use the word “conservatives” to mean the people who identify themselves as conservative today, even though my argument is that they no longer espouse what we used to consider “conservatism.”
This isn’t to say that one term was right at the other wrong. The meaning of words evolves over time. That’s just a fact of linguistics.
I would argue that corruption is just another way to describe domination. It is the pure distillation of will to power.
I should probably show my work on this claim, so:
Conservatives were generally against the prosecution of the January 6th insurrectionists and have been overwhelmingly in favor of Trump’s pardon of them.
They have defended several recent high-profile cases of violence: Derek Chauvin, Kyle Rittenhouse, and most tellingly, Daniel Perry.
When asked about right-wing political violence, Trump explicitly said, “I couldn’t care less” and then went on to alibi right-wing violence as being the product of people who understandably care about crime and immigration.
Please don’t make me list the conservatives who openly celebrated the attack on Paul Pelosi.
JVL + Heather Cox Richardson is postponed!
Hey guys: Substack kind of blew up today. The team is sorting out the problems now, but the end result is that the platform wasn't stable enough for us to do a big live.
I'm crazy disappointed and hoping we can reschedule HCR soon.
I grew up in a Republican household. My parents said that they voted for lower taxes, limited federal government, American strength abroad. They LOVE Trump.
It’s all been a lie. They voted Republican because they hate the Democrats. It took me a long time to realize that.
They don’t hate me, but they hate my principles. The thing is, I have principles, they don’t.