King Donald and the New Right

It was an event that looked like a thought. Rishi Sunak called this summer’s British election the Fourth of July: America’s Independence Day, the date when the thirteen American colonies broke away from Britain itself. What Americans celebrate is that the Second Continental Congress, on the Fourth of July, 1776, approved the Declaration of Independence. Its basic doctrine was revolutionary – and still is. For the first time, a new state is formed on the basis of an idea of ​​inviolable individual rights. Moreover, the state is given only one main task: to defend these rights.

In Great Britain, like other countries that have developed a constitutional culture of rights, the state mainly came before the rights, chronologically as well as essentially. The rights were not a foundation but an adaptation to new times and ideas. They were, in the words of historian Lewis Namier, “neither planned nor invented but have grown up, just like living things”. When rights were later established, they were just a historical coincidence: a necessary adjustment, then and there, often forced by specific social and political circumstances.

Ever since 1776, the American experiment has been about this: can a country really survive on the basis of a philosophy? In a way, the question also involves the great methodological battle within the humanities – the reason and universality of philosophy versus the tradition and coincidence of history. And if the United States represented the philosophical method of politics, the great representative of the other side – the epitome of the historical method – is the Tory party.

This method is also necessary to understand the turbulent American politics today – especially on the right. After all, the left is easier to understand. Ever since Woodrow Wilson, American progressives, with notable exceptions, have waged a low-intensity war against the philosophical method of the American Declaration of Independence. Their political method has features of positivism but is mainly based in historicism – best expressed in the credo of being “on the right side of history”.

The right’s development is less linear. Moreover, it is the right which today is in rebellion with itself. To continue in the spirit of generalisation, Republicans have long been the guardians of the constitutional philosophy. In a speech on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1926, Calvin Coolidge extended the classic idea of ​​the Constitution and made it relevant well into the 20th century. Silent Cal was a pale East Coast lawyer who was ridiculed by American intellectuals (a somewhat unfair slur against a person who translated Dante’s Inferno as a wedding present for his wife) but he breathed new life into the method of philosophy. He linked the constitution with natural law, idealism, and a good dose of spirituality, contrasting this philosophy with historicism and the blood-and-soil politics of Europe. The humanism of Coolidge’s independence doctrine later became the political opposite of the totalitarian states of the 20th century. It guided all the Republican presidential candidates until 2016. And then came Donald J. Trump.

For ten years, many have wondered: what is the Trump phenomenon really about? The question will be prompted with greater force now, after this convicted felon’s remarkable return to the White House in this year’s election. We know what Trump is not: a classic Republican or a centrist politician of the traditional school. But many still struggle to capture the phenomenon and get to its core. The answer, it seems to me, needs to come in two parts. The first, and simple, explanation of the Trump phenomenon is about his own personality. It is quite obvious and he has not been hiding it. Trump is a narcissistic blowhard who cheats on most things and who for decades has been reflected in American celebrity culture and the country’s hysterical media climate. The politician Trump is none other than the real estate magnate Trump, the golfer Trump or the reality TV personality Trump. He is Trump – the big baby.

The second explanation is more complex and concerns the emerging MAGA movement – ​​or the New Right – as much as the man. It links, of course, to an American political tradition of bread and circuses—populism—and its disdain for rules, laws, and courts that constrain a modern-day Caesar. But the association with Ceasarism, or the kind of political form that Plato described as tyranny, is at the same time weak. Nor is the new right about fascism and archetypical nationalism. They are both system projects and just as George Orwell observed in his Notes on Nationalism, the typical nationalist “wants to secure more power and prestige, not for himself but for the nation”. And although Trump, the narcissist, likes prestige – and sometimes power – for himself, MAGA is rather characterized by a passive approach to system and power. Its cultural instinct seems to be that Washington, DC should “leave us alone.”

Is there “a method in the madness”? The answer is perhaps simpler than we think. Neither Trump nor the new right are ideological projects. In policy, they are a blank projection screen on which anything and nothing can stick: neoliberal economic policies a la the Club for Growth can be as much MAGA as Oren Cass’s American Compact and its support for protectionism and a large welfare state. There are security policy isolationists in the movement – ​​as well as hard-boiled realists and friends of military alliances. Federalists with an original interpretation of the Constitution can be as much MAGA as supporters of Southern confederacy. The new right brings together staunch opponents of abortion but also sex-liberal swingers. At the Republican convention in Milwaukee this summer, you could buy both the Trump Bible and Trump dildos.

What unites the new right is about regime – not policy. Its point of departure is, in a broad sense, postliberal: it seeks a different combination of political forms of governance than today’s and believes a new kind of political sociology will emerge with a new regime. The New Right is not anti-democratic and not necessarily authoritarian. Key thinkers like Patrick Deenen and Yoram Hazony, both of whom are close to J.D. Vance, draws inspiration from ancient philosophers and the Judeo-Christian tradition. And if there is a historical model for the kind of regime they aspire to, it seems to be less about the country’s constitutional philosophy and more about the classic form of Tory.

It is a monarchical-democratic regime, and to understand its component parts we should familiarise ourselves again with Viscount Bolingbroke – Tory humanist, Jacobite, and a leading English politician and writer of the 18th century. He has been called an anti-Machiavellian Machiavelli and the description is useful because, like the Florentine thinker, Bolingbroke deals with a classic and recurring political question: how to change a regime that has collapsed into corruption? The question is often based on the politics of the historical method and defines a state where laws and forms of governance need to be changed for a country’s survival. In his book from 1738, The Idea of ​​a Patriot King, Bolingbroke seeks the answer in monarchical rule, but unlike Machiavelli, he links back to ancient and medieval philosophy. He develops a moral order based on divine right and public virtue rather than Machiavellian brutality and manipulation.

Bolingbroke does not stand for the method of rationality and straightforward lines of arguments – just like today’s New Right. They share the desire for a regime built on patriotism and monarchy rather than nationalism and absolutism, or tyranny. The starting point is corruption, a concept that neither Bolingbroke nor MAGA considers to be about bribery and brown envelopes. It is the result of political delusions and the power of the financial elite, marked by a kind of oligarchy in which different interests control parties and other institutions of public power – the media and the universities, for example. The threat to the nation and freedom comes not from too much power in the hands of a political leader but in the multitude of competing oligarchs and elites. The situation is so bad that a new leader is necessary to chart a new course – and, to coin a phrase, Make America Great Again.

The regime therefore needs to be changed to save the country. However, it is not directly a particular policy or executive agenda that will recreate order and reduce the chaos: a new leader, a patriot king, who is clipping the wings of the old oligarchs is all that is needed. To be sure, the patriotic king needs to have classical public virtues such as courage and cunning, and at best also private virtues such as passion for truth and justice. But the job description of the leader is not an angel but someone with the intention to change regimes and who carry the voice of a country’s tradition, especially inherited beliefs and old concepts derived from natural law.

For the New Right—the thinkers as well as the voters—Trump is a modern version of this patriotic king. King Donald is, more than anything else, a provocation to what they see as the oligarchs of our time: mainstream media like the CNN and the New York Times, ESG ideologues at Wall Street banks and woke puritans at Ivy League universities. But like Bolingbroke, the new right also concedes that the monarchy cannot be unfettered: the patriotic king is an ideal and King Donald is not exemplary. Since the king is unlikely to hae all the necessary qualities to control the oligarchs and proclaim the natural law, the monarchy, Bolingbroke noted, needs to be checked and balanced – but not by constitutions but the people. Like the modern MAGA thinkers, he was skeptical of political parties and believed that the will of the people should be channeled to parliament directly in the new regime.

Bolingbroke faced opposition – both in England and the new America that was emerging. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were intimately familiar with his Toryism (and his influence on George III) and took it as inspiration to do the opposite in the Declaration of Independence. The philosophy they and other founding fathers enshrined in the United States Constitution—the American Experiment—rebuked both monarchy and the idea of ​​the will of the people. Monarchy, they pointed out, could degenerate into Caesar’s tyranny. And the wisdom of the crowds: wasn’t that what led to Socrates’ death sentence and the collapse of democracy in ancient Athens? James Madison directly took issue with Bolingbroke’s form of anti-oligarchy government: it was in pluralism—in the struggle of one faction with another—that he believed liberty was preserved. That philosophy can survive a second term for big baby Trump. Hopefully, it can also stand up to King Donald and the new right when they now return to the White House.