Even as the right screams and tears its hair about cancel culture, conservatives are doubling and tripling down on cancelling democracy. Christopher Rufo (of critical trace theory fame) has a quote outstanding to absolve himself of any fallout from his incendiary rhetoric on that (Zack Beauchamp at Vox):
On Tuesday, Rufo elaborated a bit more on the project he has in mind: “It’s time to clean house in America: remove the attorney general, lay siege to the universities, abolish the teachers’ unions, and overturn the school boards,” he tweeted.
Confronted with unsavory parallels to militant fascist rhetoric against intellectuals, Rufo clarified that he was not calling for violence. “For the Godwin’s Law aficionados: remove the attorney general through resignation or impeachment, lay siege to the universities through cutting federal subsidies, abolish the teachers’ unions through legislation, and overturn school boards through winning elections,” he tweeted on Tuesday night.
Whew. Thank goodness that, post-Rittenhouse acquittal, the guys who’ve been buying and selling the stickers above at gun shows for decades won’t take Rufo the wrong way.
Patrick J. Deneen published an essay this week explaining the need for real conservatives not only to supplant a Conservatism Inc. co-opted by the left, but to crush “liberal totalitarianism.” Deneen’s “happy warrior” stance recalls Grover Norquist’s invitation to a post-election party at his Capitol Hill home. Norquist quoted Conan the Barbarian: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.”
Deneen explained Republicans have so far failed in that:
What is the reason for this failure? Deneen cites mainstream conservative adherence to seven liberal principles — religious liberty, limited government, “the inviolability of private institutions (e.g., corporations),” academic freedom, constitutional originalism, free markets, and free speech — as the root of its defects.
“Liberalism has become consistently more aggressive in extending each of these features to their logical conclusion — their own contradiction in the form of liberal totalitarianism,” Deneen argues. Liberalism inevitably produces “the evisceration of all institutions that were originally responsible for fostering human virtue: family, ennobling friendship, community, university, polity, church.”
“Rufo and Deneen are part of a bigger intellectual trend on the right — one in which America’s core institutions are described as hopelessly corrupted by liberal forces,” Beauchamp explains. The view is promoted now by conservative think tanks such as California’s Claremont Institute:
In a March article in the American Mind, Claremont’s blog, writer Glenn Elmers declares that “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” If Trump voters and conservatives do not band together and wage “a sort of counter-revolution” against these “citizen-aliens,” then “the victory of progressive tyranny will be assured.”
And an August essay in the Claremont Review of Books by scholar Angelo Codevilla describes a country whose government is clinging to “an illusion of legitimacy” after “a half-century of Progressive rule’s abuse” has demolished American society.
Rufo and Deneen’s stances are dressed-up versions of white backlash to a diversifying country. With demographic shifts and growing demands by traditionally marginalized groups including, most prominently, Black Americans for actual equal treatment, conservatism as a whole now reflects evangelical Christianity’s reflexive sense of persecution. When you’re accustomed to privilege equality feels like oppression.
Compare Deneen’s list of institutions fostering human virtue with the list of institutions Seven Mountains dominionists hope to seize by “overt” and “covert” means to bring about the return of Jesus. I wrote about Christian reconstructionism described in Rachel Tabachnick’s recent webinar for the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice:
“The goal of reconstructionism is to tear down the existing order and reconstruct a new society based on biblical law,” Tabachnick said. “Even if we assume that this vision of a theocratic America will never come to fruition, it’s important to recognize the movement’s impact on the ideas, strategies and tactics of the larger religious right and its role in sacralizing the actions of other anti-statist fellow travelers.
Consider the parallels between Deneen’s rhetoric and that from figures Tabachnick cites. Do yourselves a favor and have a listen to Tabachnick’s take on what’s happening just below the surface of our broken politics:
Tabachnick told Paul Rosenberg of Salon:
“This movement believes that rights come from God and not from any government,” Tabachnick told Salon. “Therefore, any ‘rights’ that conflict with their interpretation of God’s law are not actually rights. They are ‘humanist’ or a product of man’s laws and not God’s laws. This theme of ‘human rights’ versus inalienable rights from God has been at the center of the Christian Reconstructionist movement since its beginnings.”
She pointed to “What’s Wrong With Human Rights,” an excerpt from a book of the same name by the Rev. T. Robert Ingram published in “The Theology of Christian Resistance,” a collection edited by North. Ingram sweeps aside the Bill of Rights as “a statement of sovereign powers of states withheld from the federal authority of the Union,” and turns instead to the Virginia Declaration of Rights, authored by George Mason in 1776.
The first section of the Virginia Declaration, beginning “That all Men are by Nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent Rights,” is dismissed by Ingram for omitting any mention of God, as an “error of unbelief which falsifies all the rest that is said about human life.” The second, beginning “That all power is vested in, and consequently derived from the People; that Magistrates are their Trustees and Servants, and at all Times amenable to them,” he dismisses as well: “The meaning could not be more clear, nor more opposite Biblical thought. The ruling proposition of Scripture and Christian doctrine is that ‘power belongeth unto God.'” In short, there are no human rights.
I wrote this month that “well-meaning” Americans’ aversion to seeing what’s in front of them has allowed Christian Reconstructionists to move into positions of power unnoticed.
“The goal of reconstructionism is to tear down the existing order and reconstruct a new society based on biblical law,” Tabachnick said. “Even if we assume that this vision of a theocratic America will never come to fruition, it’s important to recognize the movement’s impact on the ideas, strategies and tactics of the larger religious right and its role in sacralizing the actions of other anti-statist fellow travelers.”
When clips of a speech by North Carolina Republican lieutenant governor went viral this week, many will not have recognized the dominionism behind his promise that “Christian patriots will own and rule this nation.” But when he declared non-Republicans “our enemies” and the most populous state in the U.S. “Commie-fornia” [timestamp 8:10], what he put on public display was Christofascism.
This movement does not get a lot of press. The players seem too fringe for most of the media to cover. Until they storm the Capitol. While they scream the loudest about being cancelled, they will cancel democracy if that’s what it takes to retain their accustomed privilege.