By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, October 25, 2020
The nationalist–populist tendency that buoyed Donald
Trump in 2016 has many precedents in American politics: the Tea Party, Ross
Perot, Pat Buchanan, George Wallace, a political bloodline that runs back
through William Jennings Bryan to Andrew Jackson and Patrick Henry. But one
aspect of the Trump movement has received insufficient attention: its roots in
the trauma of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
The 9/11 Republican was a curious creature,
characteristically found not in the traditional conservative habitat but in
progressive, Democrat-aligned cities and suburbs from New York to the Bay Area.
The 9/11 era was marked by fear of several kinds, ranging from prudent
watchfulness to clabbered paranoia. Cinnamon Stillwell spoke for the 9/11
Republicans in a 2005 San Francisco Chronicle column in which she
described being a Marin County liberal pushed toward the right by her
progressive friends’ “irrational hatred for their own country”:
As I spent months grieving the losses,
others around me wrapped themselves in the comfortable shell of cynicism and
acted as if nothing had changed. I soon began to recognize in them an inability
to view America or its people as victims, born of years of indoctrination in
which we were always presented as the bad guys. . . . America was singled out
as the sole guilty party on the globe. I, on the other hand, for the first time
in my life, had come to truly appreciate my country and all that it
encompassed, as well as the bravery and sacrifices of those who fight to
protect it.
Stillwell in 2005 prefigured the major themes of
Trumpism: America as victim, unpatriotic elites, liberal hypocrisy, sentimental
militarism, the union of conservative religious and political orthodoxies (“In
my search for like-minded individuals, I also gravitated toward the religiously
observant”), rightist social alienation and martyrdom (“I was spat on, called
names, intimidated, threatened, attacked, cursed”), self-dramatization in
martial rhetoric (“I put myself on the front lines of this ideological
battle”), and Manicheanism.
Another part of her story will be familiar: “Suddenly, I
was listening to conservative talk-show hosts on the radio.”
The 9/11 attacks and their aftermath had an enormous
influence on the right-wing media ecosystem and contributed mightily to the
rise of the entertainment wing of the conservative movement. Sean Hannity’s
radio program went into national syndication on September 10, 2001, and, while
Hannity already was by that time a familiar media figure, 9/11 made him a
national force. Before 9/11, there really was no conservative talk-radio industry
as we know it today: There was Rush Limbaugh and . . . everybody else, and
everybody else amounted to not very much at the time in real cultural and
political terms. Fox News, launched in 1996, lost money for years, but it
thrived in the 9/11 era, surpassing CNN in total viewership for the first time
in January of 2002 and then achieving the dominant position it has largely
maintained during the Iraq War, during which time its
profits doubled. Rupert Murdoch is a shrewd businessman, as Roger Ailes was,
and Sean Hannity is near the forefront of a generation of gifted demagogues. It
is likely that Fox News and talk radio would have been successful without 9/11
— Fox News already had been on an upward trajectory from its coverage of the
2000 Florida recount. But what happened, happened, and that matters because the
shock of 9/11 and the peculiar voice of FNC/AM conservatism combined to shape
the intellectual habits and style of a new current on the right.
Like Trump and his acolytes, the 9/11 Republicans were
media-saturated and desirous of cathartic social confrontation. Like Trump, the
9/11 Republicans were heavily invested in symbolic illiberal displays: Their cause
célèbre was blocking the construction of a mosque in Manhattan.
They cheered the PATRIOT Act and NSA surveillance but
became skeptics of such measures when Barack Obama was elected president. (That
is a familiar pattern for both political parties: libertarian in opposition, étatist
in power.) Trump himself is something of a 9/11 Republican, too, enraptured by
9/11 conspiracy theories, insisting that thousands of Muslims in Jersey City,
N.J., were seen cheering the collapse of the World Trade Center, a deathless
urban legend. Trump also lied about going to the scene and helping to “clear
the rubble,” part of his habit of making every story — especially that
story — about him. You’ll remember: “I would like to extend my best wishes to
all, even the haters and losers, on this special date, September 11th.”
There is always a strain of authoritarianism, paranoia,
and xenophobia in American politics, and there is always a strain of
nationalist populism. The events of 9/11, as communicated through the demagogic
media environment that was emerging at that time, facilitated the combination
of those events and the centralizing of them politically, for the time being,
in the Republican Party. But Americans have short attention spans, and that may
be especially true of the paranoid and the conspiracy-minded. They soured on
the Iraq War, demanding to know why we weren’t using those billions spent
overseas to fill potholes in Poughkeepsie. They turned on George W. Bush and
the brand of Republican politics associated with his administration. Bushism
has been, to some extent, a victim of its own success: The threat of an existential
confrontation with the Islamic world is not quite as politically piquant as it
was 15 years ago, thanks in part to the policies and tactics of the Bush
administration, which continued to be implemented, to a great extent, by the
Obama administration — and which have been implemented to some extent by the
Trump administration, too. President Trump is desperate, though apparently not
quite able, to conclude our entanglement in Afghanistan, and the U.S. continues
to station thousands of troops in Iraq.
The locus of Oriental terror has moved from Mecca to
Beijing, in keeping with the Western myth of the Asian Economic Superman who is
always about to eat our Yankee lunch. For years, the dreaded Asian Economic
Superman was Japan — Trump first discovered his enduring love of tariffs when
Japan experienced an economic boom in the 1980s. Before Japan’s ascendency, “Made in Taiwan” was a mark of terror for
nationalist populists in the 1960s. This terror was not an exclusively American
phenomenon or an exclusively right-wing one: The English punk singer Joe
Strummer of the Clash — on an album titled Sandinista! — sneered: “Gimme
Honda, gimme Sony — so cheap, and real phony.” Hong Kong and South Korea have
vied for the role of Asian Economic Superman, and India has been a candidate
from time to time. It has not been very hard to adapt 9/11-era rhetoric about
our “addiction to foreign oil” to Trump-era rhetoric about other imported
goods. Behind the sham economics of Peter Navarro and the Liberace-as-Mussolini
posturing of Trump himself, one can almost hear the whispered internal
monologue: “Every minute
Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger.”
One of the paradoxes of American conservatism is that one
of the things American conservatives seek to conserve is American liberalism,
which is rooted in the Anglo–Protestant liberalism of Locke, Smith, et al.
American conservatism is the political home both of American liberalism (which
is distinct from progressivism and socialism) and the organic,
pre-ideological conservative temperament that is rooted in prejudice, a word
that here should be understood to carry no pejorative connotation.
Temperamental conservatism is a prejudice in favor of the status quo and, in particular,
the local status quo: one’s own people and community, their manners and
habits, their traditions, their mode of family life, their economic means and
economic interests, etc. This is a conservatism that is prior to political
ideology as such and found on both sides of the American political divide,
including at the extremes.
This temperamental conservatism often finds itself at
odds with the classical liberalism at the heart of American conservatism. For
example, it is often anti-capitalist in its orientation, seeking to use
economic controls to prevent or minimize the social change associated with
trade and commercial integration; it is at the moment industrialist in its
orientation, seeking to preserve a partly mythical model of 20th-century factory
work, but before it was industrialist it was anti-industrialist, seeking to
protect agriculture and craft from the modernizing ravages of factory
capitalism. (T. S. Eliot and J. R. R. Tolkien are two exemplars of this school
of thought.) That temperament is not naturally or reflexively aligned with
freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and other liberal
projects, though it may seek to defend them from secularist or progressive
interference.
Because temperamental conservatism is strongly local and
communal in character, it produces different results — and a different
political agenda — in different times and different places. And it acts well
beyond the scope of right-leaning politics: The same Puritan spirit that sustained
the temperance movement also animated, in part, such progressive programs as
the eugenics championed by Margaret Sanger and others of her ilk — both were
very strongly influenced by uneasiness with the social changes that accompanied
high levels of immigration in the 19th century. (Prohibition and eugenics were closely
associated with each other. One of the categories of human being commonly
targeted for eugenic elimination was drunkards.) It is worth keeping in
mind that as late as the 1960s and 1970s, conservatives and Republicans — many
of them citing the need for population control — were prominent in the
pro-abortion camp: Ronald Reagan as governor of California, Richard Nixon,
Barry Goldwater. Dwight Eisenhower served as honorary chairman of Planned Parenthood’s
population-control effort. Like the eugenicists of the progressive era, they
worried about “growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of,”
as Ruth Bader Ginsburg put it. The Democratic Party, sensitive to its Catholic
bloc, came by its current mania for abortion relatively late in the game.
Trump obviously is not a philosophical conservative in
the vein of William F. Buckley Jr., or even in the vein of a traditionalist
such as Russell Kirk. But his particular blend of celebrity, prejudice, and
paranoia speaks directly to that older aboriginal conservatism, an orientation
that crops up in ways that cannot always be anticipated and that sometimes can
be understood only in retrospect. The fall of the Soviet Union and the booming economy
of the 1990s brought the Buckley–Reagan brand of conservatism — an engaged,
outward-looking conservatism of free markets and free people — to the forefront
of American political life, while the trauma of 9/11 revivified the
inward-looking conservatism of fear and resentment. That was intensified by the
2008–09 financial crisis and recession, the failure of the nation-building
projects in Iraq and Afghanistan, the long, humiliating presidency of Barack
Obama, and the Left’s vicious efforts to drive nonconformists out of American
public life and into pariah-dom and, if possible, into penury. What’s been
cooked up under those conditions is an admixture of genuine grievances and
imagined ones, truth and fiction, responsible criticism and cynical exaggeration,
patriotism and chauvinism.
For the moment, this witches’ brew is mostly contained in
the fragile vessel of Donald Trump’s political career. If that vessel is broken
in November, as seems likely, what’s inside will flow into something else, and
it will fester and mutate, as it always has. At some point, without the common
enemy of the Soviet empire or an Islamic caliphate to keep things together, the
Republican Party and the conservative movement are going to have to reckon with
the fact that both of them are houses divided — between classical liberalism
and postmodern illiberalism. The natural inclination will be to try to find a
new mutual threat to keep these tendencies in union if not in harmony. That
effort already is under way, of course, which is why conservatives always are
being warned that the republic is one election away from annihilation. (“If Trump loses, it’s over for America. The end!
Finished! They’ll put us in camps! Now, let me tell you about Balance of
Nature Fruit and Vegetable.”) And that may work, if imperfectly, for a while.
This being the United States, there will always be another war to rally behind,
but national crises do not bring the country — or the Right — together the way
they once did. The COVID-19 pandemic has aggravated the recriminatory character
of our politics rather than mitigating it.
The more sensible thing would be to prepare for the
divorce that is coming and to try to make it as amicable as possible.
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