Bye Bye MAGA. Meet the “New” Right.
National Conservatism: The Movement Working to Overturn Democracy and Build a Global Reich.
Written by H.E. Bibbs | Narrative is a weapon. So I write.
Follow @wordsbybibbs.bsky.social on Bluesky
As Americans brace for the next wave of Trump’s military occupation, the National Conservatism Conference convened in Washington, D.C., on September 2, 2025, to hold a requiem for the former Republican Party and to cast a vision for the New Right—the post-MAGA coalition working to dismantle the Constitution and bring an end to the revolution of freedom in America.
“The battle for our future is not between democracy and autocracy, capitalism and socialism, or even “Right” and “Left,” in the old meaning of those terms. It is between the nation and the forces that would erase it.”
Remarks from Sen. Eric Schmitt on Sept. 2 at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C.
Part 1
After winning the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump returned to office with a twofold political mandate: (1) the re-forging of white America through Project 2025, and (2) the reorganization of “Western civilization” around kulturist ideas of race, eugenics, and national unity. Within his first 100-days, the Trump regime moved at blitzkrieg speed, issuing a flurry of executive orders designed to undermine democracy and homogenize the federal government—through the DOGE-orchestrated ideological purge. His most notable attacks targeted universities, the free press, media and tech companies, federal agencies, the courts, and independent law firms.
In the four months since those opening salvos, Trump has only intensified his efforts to eliminate pluralism, dissent, and opposition in America. In practice, this has looked like—the politicizing of the military, federalizing the nation’s capital, occupying California, crippling the economy (while eroding public trust in government data), undermining national elections, extorting business leaders and trade partners, targeting political opponents and critics, outlawing immigrants, and transforming the Oval Office into a Gilded Age throne room for public rituals of humiliation and gift-bearing.
With the administrative state fully captured after this six-month crime wave, the federal government has been remade in Trump’s image—one that increasingly resembles an ongoing criminal enterprise. Given the considerable damage America’s first “despotic German prince” has inflicted on the home front through Project 2025, far less attention has been paid to the second half of Trump’s mandate.
While many are rightly concerned about another three and a half years (or potentially more) of Trump’s political cruelty and lawlessness, his ambitions stretch far beyond 2028—and far beyond America’s borders. Setting aside his stated desire to annex Canada as the 51st state and claim Greenland as U.S. territory, Trump, through his “pitchfork revolution,” envisions himself as the redeemer of “western civilization”—and the chosen savior to fulfill Cecil Rhodes’s dream of an “Anglo-Saxon Empire.”
The Kulturist Roots of America First
“America First” is not the only idea that Trump shares in common with Pat Buchanan. Both men hold a deeply rooted belief in scientific racism, with Trump regularly accusing Black political opponents of being “low-IQ individuals.” These are not one-off statements, but core beliefs that shape his worldview. From the campaign trail to his sycophantic cabinet meetings, Trump has relentlessly fanned the flames of kulturist thought—accusing immigrants of being “invaders,” “people of crime,” and genetically predisposed to savagery:
Donald Trump, December 16, 2023, Durham, New Hampshire Campaign Rally:
“When they [the Democrats] let… 15, 16 million people into our country… they’re poisoning the blood of our country.”Donald Trump, October 7, 2024, in conversation with conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt:
“How about allowing people to come through an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers. Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”Donald Trump, August 26, 2025, White House Cabinet Meeting:
“These are hardcore professional criminals. They were born to be criminals, in my opinion. But they’re seriously bad people… We’re getting a lot of them out of the country and putting a lot of them in prison.”
Yes—racism and white supremacy are the bedrock of Trump’s “America First” policy agenda. But Trump himself is not the ideological architect of the 21st century eugenics movement he is laying the foundation for.
The ideological framers of this post-liberal, anti-democratic world order have taken their cues from 20th-century kulturist thinkers and repackaged them for modern consumption. Understanding the history of white American kulturist thought is not an academic exercise—it is a matter of democratic survival. Unless We the People reckon with the intellectual roots of this movement, America’s constitutional order will continue to be dismantled, while the Supreme Court willfully presides over the conversion of the federal government into “a well-disciplined mob in the hands of a single madman.”
With the Trump regime’s ongoing Viktor Orbán–style crackdown on American universities, kulturist thinkers have been funded, platformed, and emboldened like never before. On August 19, 2025, William F. Buckley’s Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) launched its new series, Project Cosmos: Conversations on the Future of Civilization. The inaugural panel featured four of the most prominent kulturist thinkers of the 21st century: Patrick Deneen, Curtis Yarvin, Chris Rufo, and Christopher Caldwell.
If we were to trace the origins of the fundamental ideas being advanced by these thinkers, they would lead us back to a 100-year-old debate between two Harvard graduates: Horace M. Kallen, the 20th-century philosopher of cultural pluralism, and T. Lothrop Stoddard, the American historian, journalist, political scientist, and white supremacist.
Kallen, in his 1924 book Culture and Democracy in the United States, posed the central question: should America embrace the “Kultur Klux Klan” or “Cultural Pluralism”? Stoddard, in his 1927 book Re-Forging America: The Story of Our Nationhood, delivered a chilling rebuke of cultural pluralism, arguing instead for a racially homogeneous nation rooted in Anglo-Saxon civilization.
While Kallen’s arguments dominated the second half of the 20th century, the sea change ushered in by Trump’s Make America Great Again movement has sparked a renaissance—or, as Chris Rufo describes it, an “ideological gold rush” for the modern harbingers of white American kultur. “The Great Awakening” (chapter 8 of Re-Forging America) began with Trump’s 2016 victory. And with Trump’s 2024 return, American kulturists now see themselves as turning the page to “The Closing of the Gates” (chapter 9) and “The Will to National Unity” (chapter 10).
Regime Change: The Rising Tide of American Fascism
Energized by Trump’s return to office, the American kulturist movement is now hyper-focused on a single question: having defeated the liberals, what kind of post-liberal order do we want to create? For the past four years, these men have bided their time as a government-in-waiting, preparing themselves to do the heavy lifting of upending the cultural, economic, and political institutions that have been the bedrock of progressive liberalism.
During MAGA’s period of political exile, Vice President J.D. Vance rose through the ranks to become a prominent voice in the white American kulturist movement. Once a staunch “never-Trumper,” Vance had openly criticized Trump as “reprehensible,” an “idiot,” and even likened him to “America’s Hitler.” But a month after the January 6 insurrection, Vance met privately with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and apologized for his earlier attacks, dismissing them as the product of mainstream media influence. From that point forward, he began steadily realigning himself politically.
Starting with regular appearances on right-wing and “red-pill” manosphere podcasts, then-Senator J.D. Vance began to lay out his vision for a new “political religion” and the goals of a second Trump administration. In September 2021, he appeared as a guest on The Jack Murphy Show, where he spoke extensively about a “war-gaming” project he and his “friends” were developing—Project 2025—to prepare for Trump’s return to office. By November 2021, Vance had emerged as a central figure on the nationalist right, closing out the National Conservatism Conference with a keynote address entitled The Universities Are the Enemy. By June 2023, Vance appeared alongside Kevin Roberts and Patrick Deneen on the Russell Kirk–founded Modern Age forum, where he was positioned as part of the new right’s ‘virtuous leadership class’ that would remake America.
While Vance is playing a central role in the authoritarian makeover of the country, the ideological infrastructure that supports the movement is outside of his scope of work. Returning to the Deneen, Yarvin, and Rufo ISI panel discussion, the braintrust surrounding the Trump-Vance executive office is recasting a vision of the American nation—one that once again places whiteness at the center of the equation.
If for no other reason, analyzing these public discussions is of strategic value, because they reveal the “kultur” war plans (almost like a public Hegseth signal-chat) in the battle for the future of America—and any pro-democracy coalition that hopes to prevail must ground its strategy in a clear understanding of the “new right’s” animating ethos—Me Ne Frego!
No Sacred Cows, No Decency, and No Shame
The phrase “Me Ne Frego” is a fascist slogan that was adopted by Mussolini, along with the “Roman salute,” following World War I. Commonly translated as “I don’t care” or “I don’t give a damn,” Me Ne Frego expressed the new authoritarian ethos of 1920s Italy. It dismissed earlier commitments to pacifism and liberalism, casting such values as signs of weakness. In place of restraint, the phrase valorized indifference to personal cost, presenting sacrifice and risk-taking as virtues to be embraced in service of the nation.
While the American nationalist right has been slow to adopt the Roman salute—with the notable exception of Elon Musk—the operating ethos of Me Ne Frego has been fully embraced as the guiding principle of the New Right’s reconstruction project. With Me Ne Frego as its animating spirit, nothing is sacred, and no institution or political party is beyond sacrifice if it stands in the way of their mission.
Patrick Deneen, speaking at the ISI Project Cosmos panel, offered a revealing example of this shift:
Let’s look at what I would regard as Ron DeSantis’s two signature actions and achievements.
The first, as you mentioned, was going after Disney. That would have been unthinkable to previous Republican administrations, for whom the free market and corporations were considered sacrosanct. You didn’t interfere in the free market, and you certainly didn’t interfere with corporations. But after 2015, that restraint was gone—beginning with what we saw happen in Indiana.
The second centers on education. Traditionally, conservatives took the view that you don’t interfere with universities or schools because those are the experts. It was understood to be about free speech and academic freedom—even if the institutions didn’t align with a state’s general worldview. That too has now changed, because in red states these institutions are increasingly viewed as working at cross purposes with basic conservative commitments.
So, I think those two actions reflect not just strategic power plays, but also a fundamental shift in what we might think of as conservative philosophy.
In this new conservative movement, there are no golden calves—only golden trinkets. Tributes, which are regularly placed at the feet of their leader. The contradictions are a small price to pay for the promise of lasting victory. Once the party of states’ rights, local authority, and small government, Republicans now sit submissively as the president invades Democratic states, suspends self-government in Democratic cities, and uses executive orders to bypass Congress and unilaterally raise taxes on the American people. The very party that once prided itself on restraining federal power, now watches silently as its own house is besieged—and power is concentrated in the hands of one man—Donald Trump—white America’s savior.
President Trump, like Mussolini, has been telling his supporters, since his January 6 “Save America” rally: “You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength.”
Republicans are constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back. . . And we want to be so nice. We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. And we’re going to have to fight much harder. . . If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.
Well, the “voice of one crying in the wilderness” has at last aroused the nationalist right “to the peril which threatened the very foundations of national life.” According to Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, the revolution now being carried out by the Trump–Vance coalition is “unparalleled in the history of the conservative movement … in its size and scope” and “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” So while the first American Revolution sought to free the nation from “the descendant of despotic German princes,” the aim of what Roberts calls the “second American Revolution” is to deliver it into the hands of one.
What is clear from the writings and public interviews of the new right’s intellectual wing is that the Trump–Vance regime is conceived as a wartime revolutionary government—one seeking to subdue the citizens and allies of its former Republic (1776–2024). This is made abundantly clear in the remarks of Chris Rufo and Curtis Yarvin during the ISI panel; in the interview exchange between Yoram Hazony and Ezra Klein; and in Christopher Caldwell’s recent address at Hillsdale College—the citadel of the new American right. An analysis of their discourse shows that there is no uniform agreement on what the project of the New Right should be. What unites the right, however, is a common desire to see America reconstituted as a white nation.
Take Chris Rufo for example. In his remarks at the ISI panel, he stripped away any pretense of what he believes the “project of the right” really entails:
“I think that the project of the right should be simultaneously how to capture, destroy, subvert, or rule these national institutions, while providing a kind of trench network for local institutions to regain their function and regain their purpose.”
Rufo’s words reveal the underlying ambition of his vision for the New Right: to weaken, hollow out, or outright destroy the federal government, while simultaneously constructing a fortified network of state and local power. His trench metaphor is not accidental—it signals a war footing, one in which deep-red confederate states are envisioned as the vanguard of a breakaway—or secession—movement, capable of resisting and ultimately escaping what he sees as the tyranny of the federal government.
In Rufo’s adopted state of Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis is actively building the exact kind of trench network Rufo describes. The creation of the Florida State Guard (FSG) has drawn sharp warnings from extremism experts. Jacob Glick of ICAP told Hatewatch that the FSG is essentially a state-backed carbon copy of illegal private militias, creating a structure that could allow groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys to terrorize their perceived enemies under the guise of state-sanctioned legality. Jason Van Tatenhove, a former Oath Keepers official, echoed the concern, describing the FSG as a “professional, private paramilitary organization that is extremely well funded,” one that advertises itself as emergency preparedness but in reality emphasizes paramilitary and combat training.
These aggressive tactics, and the growing intolerance of the New Right, are exactly what led Ezra Klein to voice his concerns during his conversation with Yoram Hazony, founder of the National Conservatism Conference. Klein warned that what he called the “modern, more nationalistic right” is far less tolerant, not genuinely interested in strengthening the bonds between Americans—particularly those who are not considered Anglo-Saxon—and “is moving much more aggressively to use the power of the state to enforce its vision of what America should be.”
In response to Klein’s concerns, Yoram Hazony offered the following:
I understand. I think the question—which is completely reasonable—is this: the NatCons are being pretty aggressive in government, but is it possible that they could actually be tolerant? Let’s say they keep winning—will they, in fact, be tolerant?
If Trump, Vance, Rubio, Pete Hegseth, and their thirty closest allies and advisers were in charge of America for the next twelve years, I think they would eventually succeed in convincing many people—not that all their values are correct, but that they are capable of tolerance, that they aspire to it, and that they want to build an America that is tolerant.
Essentially, Hazony’s belief is that all will be well once America’s racial hierarchy is restored and Anglo-Protestant culture once again becomes the dominant center of American life. As convulsing as I find this to be, there were two aspects of Hazony’s responses to Klein that stood out to me. The first, in relation to the above remarks, is the twelve-year timeline he assigns to the period it would take for liberals to be convinced—or coerced—into reconciling with the fascist makeover of America. I find this interesting, because twelve years was the exact length of the post–Civil War, Reconstruction period. Hazony’s political calculus seems to suggest an eventual “Tilden–Hayes compromise,” where white liberals will once again abandon the oppressed, to bring the current reconstruction project to a close and complete the post-liberal makeover of America.
The second aspect of Hazony’s responses that I find revealing is his reaction to Klein’s criticisms of the New Right. Hazony offered little objection to most of Klein’s criticisms, even acknowledging many of the contradictions—but there was one label he was not willing to accept. Being referred to as the “illiberal right.” This proved intolerable for Hazony, because, in his words, it lumped the NatCons together with what he called the “kooky Nazi right.”
What I find most telling is that, given the New Right’s open affinity for the Confederate cause—a cause kept alive largely by the Ku Klux Klan—the attempt to draw a sharp border between neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates is absurd. The line between the two is, at best, blurred—if it exists at all, especially given that Hitler’s Nazi Germany drew direct inspiration from Jim Crow America.
Moreover, the inclusion of Curtis Yarvin, a self-professed “neo-reactionary,” in the canon of new right thinkers is enough to debunk Hazony’s claim that the nationalist right is the paragon of bourgeois respectability. Yarvin—who, among New Right thinkers, is the most referenced by J.D. Vance—is both a Confederate apologist and an unapologetic racist.
The cult of Yarvin, which includes notable technocrats like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel—and as noted above, Thiel’s lapdog J.D. Vance—is built on the appeal that Yarvin makes no pretense of political correctness. Much like Nick Fuentes and his “groypers,” Yarvin’s following only grows, the more barefaced his racism and white supremacy becomes. And with the aid of the Trump–Vance coalition, he is now being laundered and legitimized for the masses.
Yarvin, who formerly wrote under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, has published extensively on his belief in the necessity of monarchy and domination, as protections against the threat of democracy. In his 2009 essay, Why Carlyle Matters, Yarvin laid out his defense of racial hierarchical structures as follows:
Not all humans are born the same, of course, and Carlyle (following Aristotle) takes the view that the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery. For others, it is more suited to slavery. And others still are badly suited to either. These characteristics can be expected to group differently in human populations of different origins. Thus, Spaniards and Englishmen in the Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries, whose sense of political correctness was negligible, found that Africans tended to make good slaves and Indians did not.
These are the words of a man recently invited to speak at Harvard—an institution that prides itself on enlightenment and liberal values—and is now regularly paraded alongside the so-called “respectable” intellectuals of the New Right, as if open racism were simply another viewpoint in the marketplace of ideas. Yarvin not only challenges the conventional norms of liberal society; he also pushes the boundaries of Modern Age conservatism itself.
Since its founding by Russell Kirk in 1957, the Modern Age forum was intended to serve as a bulwark for conservative scholars, writers, and critics, to defend America’s Anglo-Saxon tradition against both progressive liberalism and totalitarianism. Yarvin, however, fully embraces totalitarianism and does not believe it to be incongruent with the nation’s British cultural heritage.
For Yarvin, totalitarian structures are not a threat to cultural flourishing, but a condition for it. He made this point explicitly during the ISI panel, noting:
One of my favorite facts that I learned, randomly, by reading a Victorian history of Elizabethan England is that, if you were an Elizabethan, you were required to go to church every week. You were actually fined, and your name was written down in a little book. In a way, it was almost a totalitarian system. They certainly did not have a free press at that time, and yet Elizabethan society produced some of the most amazing artistic works in all of history.
The caveat to Yarvin’s vision of totalitarian rule is that it should be imposed only on members of the non–Anglo-Saxon outgroup:
What that means in practice in my world—which is obviously very distant from the world of the Trump administration—is this: you wake up one morning, you’re a gang banger in Baltimore or wherever, and your life is about to change. You are not an aristocrat. You have to be part of a society. And being part of a society means that you’re going to get your welfare check, or however you support yourself, from your minister. You are part of that community. You don’t pay taxes. Your relationship with the state is intermediated through your church. And basically, your minister can drug test you, he can assign you work, he can put an AirTag on you, and he can tell you where to go and where not to go.
While Yarvin offers the Trump administration a layer of plausible deniability, Trump himself has signaled admiration for Yarvin’s neo-slavery model, floating his own version as a solution to supply American farmers with a captive labor force of undocumented farm workers.
More than any other figure in the New Right, Yarvin personifies the “no shame” element of the tripartite maxim: no sacred cows, no decency, and no shame. While others have been reluctant to publicly lean in to the lessons of history, preferring instead to maintain a sanitizing distance,Yarvin’s politics are a bit more muscular—or dare I say, kulturist:
I’m going to say what we’re all thinking, but afraid to speak aloud.
The more traditionally trained intellectuals of the new right movement, such as Deneen and Hazony, prefer to have the unspoken parts (i.e., gaps) of their arguments explained away as contradictions. They readily accept this, since it shields their facade of decency and preserves their access to civil society. Yarvin, on the other hand, requires no such protections. With the direct backing of techno-fascist, Peter Thiel, he is free to be far more daring in his ideological pronouncements, and leaves nothing unsaid:
Let’s take the conversation in a more daring direction. I think that’s something we’ve seen in the conflict of left and right throughout history. It’s a really common pattern, and I would point to, as an example, America’s greatest left-versus-right struggle: our own Civil War. We don’t normally think of the Civil War as left versus right, but of course, it is.
Yarvin’s remarks place at the center of the discussion the big red elephant in the room: the New Right, like the old right, conceives of itself as the Confederate side of the Civil War—an idea that the closest allies and advisers of the Trump–Vance coalition readily embrace and are using to their advantage. I’ve written about this in a recent essay, titled No due process for fugitives. No mercy for their friends.
Can you imagine a world where every action taken by Abraham Lincoln and the Union troops was reversed—executed instead by the Confederate South? If the Civil War were happening today, and Jefferson Davis held command of the federal government instead of Abraham Lincoln, what would that world look like?
I would submit to the reader: that world looks exactly like the America we are living in today. Every strategy that was once deployed by the federal government during the Reconstruction and Civil Rights eras, has now been turned upside down—and weaponized by the Trump–Vance government against the victors of those earlier struggles.
Just as the civil rights movement sought to provoke confrontation with Birmingham’s police in order to force federal intervention, the Trump–Vance government seeks to provoke confrontation with Democratic cities to invoke the Insurrection Act.
Just as federal troops occupied the Confederate south during Reconstruction, Trump now seeks to use the military to place Democratic states under federal control.
Just as Southern Democrats were once branded domestic terrorists by the Union-led federal government, Stephen Miller and the Trump-led Neo-Confederate government have declared the Democratic Party itself a domestic terrorist organization.
Every single one of these tactics, and more, are being used by the Trump–Vance coalition to “Take America Back!” Back to where? Back before civil rights—and the Civil War itself—to the founding of the country.
The continuation of the January 6, Trump-led, revolt—when his supporters stormed the Capitol shouting “1776!”—is now being directed from within the Oval Office. As stated before, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance believe themselves to be revolutionary leaders who have liberated the nation from a tyrannical government, and the “radical leftist” ideas of its founding fathers. From the pardoning of his MAGA insurrectionists, to the military honors and reparations paid to his MAGA martyr, Trump intends to see his counter-revolution through.
The current retelling of America’s story has become the capstone project of the newly minted MAGA-loyalist government. This extends far beyond attacks on museums, curricula, and the Library of Congress; into the very idea of what it means to be an American itself.
J.D. Vance began laying the groundwork for his idea of a less “inclusive” American identity while on the Trump–Vance campaign trail, speaking at the 2024 Republican National Convention:
You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea. And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas, like the rule of law and religious liberty. Things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation. But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.
Vance’s first pass at the homogenization of American identity—along racial and ideological lines—left much to the imagination. But many of those questions were recently answered during his July 5th acceptance speech for the “Statesmanship Award,” presented by the Claremont Institute:
Identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence—that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time.
According to Vance, this definition would exclude many people that “the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.”
By using the occasion of the Claremont Institute to clarify who exactly he believes qualifies as American, J.D. advances a vision of nationality that appears to have far more in common with the “blood and soil” that emerged in the wake of the Weimar Republic, than with the U.S. Constitution, and the oath taken by those sworn to defend it. In fact, his confederate-friendly revised notion of national identity is a direct—and likely intentional—negation to the oath spoken of by Retired General Mark Milley:
We don't take an oath to a country. We don't take an oath to a tribe. We don't take an oath to a religion. We don't take an oath to a king, or queen, or a tyrant or a dictator. And we don't take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We don't take an oath to an individual. . . We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we're willing to die to protect it.
Southern Confederate soldiers—who Vance is clearly aligned with—were not merely labeled “domestic extremists.” They were also considered traitors, and as a condition of reentry into the Union, were required to swear a pledge of allegiance to the U.S. Constitution. Vance’s America is one in which that oath is voided—along with the Constitution—and allegiance is redirected to the state, tribe, or king.
Assault on the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitutional Order
Calling into question the founding ideas of America is not a Trump–Vance innovation. It is a tradition that reaches back to the American Revolutionary period, to the debates between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke. Their arguments represented the two primary strains of American political thought as it relates to the founding generation’s view of the French Revolution. Paine and Burke, like their ideological heirs, Horace Kallen and Lothrop Stoddard, exchanged words over the central issue of their day through polemical treatises that were published in 1790 and 1791, respectively.
Reflections on the Revolution in France, And on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event. (1790) - Edmund Burke
Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution. (1791) - Thomas Paine
The very origins of the left–right political divide, in America, can be traced to the seating arrangements of the French National Assembly after the Revolution—where the “radicals” who supported the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen sat to the left of the speaker, while those opposed to this radical expansion of human dignity sat to the right.
Paine—whose 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense, helped spread the democratic spirit throughout the colonies, tipping the balance in favor of American independence—aligned himself with the French radicals and argued for a republican government rooted in a constitution that prioritized the rights and interests of the public, both individually and collectively. Burke, however, rejected the principles of French radicalism and instead proposed a government that conserved the English constitutional tradition—preserving elements of aristocracy and monarchy, the essence of what would later be called conservatism.
Lothrop Stoddard, in his retelling of the American story, identified the radicalism of Paine and other revolutionary founders as key contributors to what he considered the nation’s fatal birth defects—Enlightenment liberalism and anti-British bias—which, in his view, had negatively altered the “Beginning of National Life” (Chapter 2 of Re-Forging America) as a constitutional republic:
Picture [George] Washington asserting at the beginning of the war that he abhorred the idea of independence, yet within a year transformed into its standard-bearer! To a steadfast, constant soul like Washington’s, the emotional wrench of so sudden a shift of fundamental loyalties must have been prodigious indeed.
We are therefore not surprised to find the Revolution followed by a general revulsion against things British—a revulsion strengthened by the bad relations with England which continued for a generation and culminated in the War of 1812. Manners and customs recalling the colonial past and dependence on Britain were eschewed. Gentlemen discarded British fashions. The silk coat, the satin breeches, the powdered wig went out of style, and republican simplicity became the order of the day. Democratic and equalitarian tendencies steadily gained ground, stimulated by the French Revolution and hastened by the rapid growth of the ultra-democratic pioneering West.
This anti-British bias profoundly influenced the intellectual and idealistic concepts of American nationality. Colonial America was so thoroughly English that, had independence been unaccompanied by the passions of the Revolution, the new nation would almost certainly have desired to develop on a definitely Anglo-Saxon basis. The emotional chasm of the Revolution prevented this. Of course the emancipated colonists had no intention of renouncing their English speech or the fundamentals of their Anglo-Saxon culture and institutions; indeed, they could not have done so, even if they had so desired. Nevertheless, their national aspirations trended away from the old Anglo-Saxon basis toward a new basis founded on theoretical and cosmopolitan ideals.
This novel trend was bound up with the spread of radical thought in America. Even before the Revolution, French ideas had begun to influence a few minds, including such leading men as Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry. The vital aid which France gave the Americans in the Revolutionary War enormously enhanced the popularity of what were then known as “French principles.” Their old ideals shaken, the Americans (as men always do under such circumstances) were longing for something to take their place, and the new ideas were seized upon with avidity.
This notion—that the American founders lost their way because of the hot-headedness of a few rabble-rousers—is a common white supremacist retort, and something I’ve written about recently, in “Silicon Valley’s Red-Pill Guru: Curtis Yarvin and the Push for Monarchy in America.”
By now, it’s common knowledge: President Trump has never been shy about declaring himself the “greatest president” in American history. The question then becomes: how much convincing would it really take to persuade the “Greatest President Ever” (GPE) that a handful of "pig-headed statesmen" from the 18th century got it wrong — and that he alone can correct their mistake by ending the failed experiment of liberal democracy and crowning himself the new King George?
Anyway, even with these so-called considerable birth defects, Stoddard argued, the “Shattering of Old America” (Chapter 5) did not occur until the “Radical Republicans”—Abraham Lincoln and the Abolitionists—attempted to extend these whites-only principles—liberté, égalité, fraternité—to the African population in America.
The Radical Republicans were of course merely another name for the extreme Abolitionist group which had done so much to bring on the Civil War by its unmeasured denunciations of the Southern whites and by its fanatical preaching of race-equality and amalgamation. Doctrinal heirs of the French Radicals of the eighteenth century, the Radical Republicans professed the same boundless faith in abstract principles and the same firm conviction in the power of environment to mould men almost at will, regardless of their origin or antecedents. Such was the Radical wing of the Republican party, led in Congress by Sumner and Stevens, and represented outside Congress by orators and publicists like William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Tilton, and others, who conducted an eloquent and aggressive propaganda. Never really numerous, the strength of the Radicals lay in their fanatical sincerity and in the political trend of the times.
This argument, advanced by Stoddard in 1924, is almost identical to the one advanced by Russell Kirk three decades later, who also believed that the expansion of rights and the move away from Anglo-Saxon culture were destroying the fabric of America. According to American writer and progressive commentator, Thom Hartmann, Russell Kirk regarded the rise of the American middle class as an existential threat to social order. Hartmann recounts that Kirk warned: if ordinary people continued to gain wealth and independence, the foundations of American society would collapse—young people would stop respecting their elders, women would no longer know their place, racial groups would begin demanding equality with white people, and working people would no longer respect their bosses.
According to Hartmann, few took Kirk’s words seriously, at the time. But during the urban rebellions and student protests of the 1960s, his warnings found a receptive audience in figures like Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley, who joined Kirk in laying the groundwork for a half-century conservative-led counter-revolution.
The postwar conservative movement that began in 1953 with the publication of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind and the founding of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute—followed by his launch of Modern Age in 1957—has culminated today in the Edmund Burke Foundation’s National Conservatism movement and the Heritage Foundation’s—ideologically fortified—Make America Great Again movement, which together are re-forging the Burke-Stoddard-Kirk vision of the American nation.
The continuity of thought from Edmund Burke to Russell Kirk is undeniable. Like Kirk, Burke fervently believed in natural social hierarchies that divided people into classes—royalty, aristocracy, gentry, and peasantry. While Burke’s contemporaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau criticized social inequality, Burke regarded it as an essential stabilizing and ordering function in society. For both of these conservative philosophers of the Modern Era, separated by time and distance across generations, inequality was not a flaw to be corrected, but a foundational pillar of the Anglo-Saxon cultural inheritance to be defended—an idea that is still deeply entrenched within the conservative movement today.
Backed by the evangelical Christian community, the New Right is now leading an onslaught against American civil liberties—the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Wilson-backed Ku Klux Klan rose to power in 1915 and secured its definitive legislative victory in 1924: the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. This so-called modern “war on woke” is nothing more than an effort to halt the American Revolution by extinguishing the contagion of freedom—the symbolic gift of French Enlightenment ideas that has fueled the torch of American progress for the past 250 years.
While the civil rights gains of the 1960s were an imperfect fix to a deeply rooted problem, they nevertheless held back the floodwaters of white American racism long enough to stabilize the country and establish the United States as leader of the “rules-based” international order. On day one of his second term, however, Trump blew up the levees of American prosperity and has since watched with great satisfaction as a flood of white supremacist hatred washes over the nation—an effort to roll back the ”radical” expansion of civil and human rights over the past two and a half centuries, restricting them once again to white men only.
Eventually, even this temporary bequeathment of rights will be further repealed to exclude white men without land or property. But in the meantime, the Trump–Vance policy agenda is continuing its sustained assault on civil rights, voting rights, and human rights, while aggressively working to overturn the Fourteenth and Nineteenth Amendments and advancing a new campaign to hollow out the First.
Of course, none of this would be possible without a host of co-conspirators—namely, the Supreme Court, mainstream media, and polite civil society—who, out of fear of being labeled alarmist, emotional, or hysterical, maintain a docile and orderly attitude in the face of mass destruction. To be fair, the latter has not been as harmful to the unprotected American public as the Supreme Court, in its refusal to defend the Fourteenth Amendment, or the mainstream media, which has willingly offered its platforms to Confederate-friendly Christian nationalist preachers to promote their crusade against the Nineteenth Amendment—brought to you by America's favorite advertisers.
Ignoring the slide from “woke” capitalism to “neo-Confederate” capitalism, the zeal with which members of the Trump–Vance war machine preside over the destruction of the U.S. Constitution should be enough to place them squarely on the treasonous side of every past American conflict. The Trump–Vance regime would have been the Loyalists who fought alongside the British monarchy against the patriots in the American Revolution—and today they openly admit that the Confederates who fought against the Union in the Civil War, were on the “right” side of history.
The above screenshot posted by J.D. Vance on his Bluesky account, after yet another one of Trump’s illegal executive orders, is more than just the vengeful taunting of an unstatesmanlike troll with an axe to grind against East Coast liberals who once rejected him. It‘s a political statement that aligns the Trump–Vance regime with a long line of anti-democratic jurisprudence—stretching from Chief Justice Rehnquist, Reagan’s appointee and Roberts’s predecessor, all the way back to Chief Justice Taney, who infamously argued in Dred Scott v. Sandford that African Americans, as “beings of an inferior order,” had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
On its face, Vance’s invocation of Rehnquist is about excluding flag burning from First Amendment protection. But the less generous—and likely more accurate—reading is that it signals agreement with Rehnquist’s notorious defense of Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that enshrined “separate but equal” into law until it was struck down by Brown v. Board of Education. As Rehnquist once wrote: “I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by ‘liberal’ colleagues, but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be re-affirmed.”
The New Right’s infatuation with gold-plating the ugliest elements of America’s racial past does not stop at re-litigating the heroes of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. They have carried this spirit of “rediscovery” across the Atlantic to Europe, where more and more New Right crusaders are taking up the Pat Buchanan mantle—that perhaps America got it wrong by siding with the left against Nazi Germany.
Rather than learning and growing from the nation’s racial past, the Trump administration has tethered itself to 20th-century kulturist thought. This helps explain why so many in the New Right have begun to reimagine America’s role in World War II—flirting with the idea that the country may have chosen the wrong side. Under Trump appointee Marco Rubio, the State Department is reorganizing itself to complete America’s fascist makeover on the international stage—ensuring that the United States chooses the “right” side in current and future conflicts.
When tyranny prevails, resistance shines brighter.
If you enjoy my writing — there is no expectation to become a paid subscriber. The light is for all who seek it. But if you choose to support this work financially, your contribution helps sustain independent writing rooted in “love, duty, humanity, and justice.”
Thank you again for holding the light with me (reading & sharing).
May truth and memory light your path,
— H. E. Bibbs
#HelpMeHoldTheLight