Trump, Vance And The Right-Wing Counter-Revolutionaries

The Right’s perennial call for “order” doesn’t necessarily mean affirming the existing order.

Just before the Fourth of July, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts — who helms the right-wing group most responsible for the Project 2025 plan to transform U.S. institutions and culture — made a revealing declaration. The United States, he said, is currently in the midst of a “second American Revolution,” which may or may not “remain bloodless,” depending on whether “the Left allows it to be.”

If anyone was still in doubt, Roberts’ rhetoric about revolution and mass upheaval demonstrates how the U.S. Right has always had a much more militant strain than neocons and country club Republicans acknowledge. From the John Birch Society’s conspiratorial insistence that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower was secretly a Communist stooge, to Barry Goldwater’s proclamation that “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice,” to Pat Buchanan’s declarations of “religious” and “culture war” at the 1992 Republican National Convention, plenty of high-profile right-wingers have always been willing to declare for radicalism.

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In many ways the only thing Donald Trump broke was the carefully curated image of conservative moderatism that could no longer be maintained. Now, not only is what many on the Right call “counter-revolution” in the cards, but it has become the guiding philosophy of conservatism’s intellectual vanguard.

The threat of counter-revolution should not be underestimated. Despite Trump rhetorically distancing himself from the radically transformative Project 2025 and calling for unity after last month’s assassination attempt, his vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, shows how radical the modern Right’s ambitions are. Vance’s intellectual influences read like a who’s who of modern counter-revolutionary authors. They include Patrick Deneen, who wrote an entire book calling for “regime change” and the installation of a new aristocratic conservative elite; the neo-reactionary monarchist Curtis Yarvin, who’s urged Republicans to get over their “phobia” of dictatorship; and Silicon Valley billionaire donor Peter Thiel, who’s said that democracy threatens capital and that he “no longer believe[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible.”