CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Right vs. the Right: Conservative “Liberals” in the Age of Trump

Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore – CC BY-SA 2.0

Before the last presidential election, Adolph Reed Jr. argued that “electoral politics has captured too much of the political imagination of the American left—or, at least, of those occupying the cultural space that a left would if there were one in this country.” Reed lamented the culturally dominant “sensibility that approaches politics as largely performative, a theater for the expression of righteousness, or bearing witness for justice and against injustice.” As many radicals long predicted, this approach to politics has handed the whole of the national political conversation to the right, and this development will plague American society long after Trump is a memory.

We’ve reached a point where Bill Kristol can be a featured speaker at a “liberal” conference. It’s hard, in this context, to know which way is up, yet we can see clearly that all ways now point rightward. Kristol is far from alone; this cottage industry includes a who’s who of bloody-handed, Bush-era conservatives who now pretend to care about the rule of law, when their whole careers were spent writing thin apologies for the many constitutional violations of the post-9/11 years. We would not be in this moment with MAGA lawlessness and authoritarianism were it not for the people behind The Bulwark, the Lincoln Project, and the various other groups and outlets that have emerged on the right since Trump.

In the Trump era, these self-congratulatory spaces have made a cottage industry of rewarding demonstrably right-wing commentators for their empty gestures in the direction of “democratic norms,” even as their old commitments have gone unquestioned and largely remained intact. The predictable result is that the political spectrum recognized by the mainstream of our culture and politics has been dragged even further to the authoritarian, death-worshipping and -dealing right. In this era, under these dynamics, the American right has divided itself into a MAGA wing and an embarrassingly self-satisfied group of supposedly noble, Never Trump conservatives, embraced by a cohort of lifeless laptop liberals who largely share their still very conservative views. The effect of this reconfiguration of the political right is to bring forth a mainstream political spectrum that sits almost completely on the far right.

Media Matters for America’s Craig Harrington remarked on this baneful phenomenon back in 2022: “Even the supposedly liberal outlets like MSNBC lurched to the right, soaking up castaway Republicans guilty of Trump apostasy. After Biden won? The same outlets rushed to hire more conservatives who jumped ship after January 6th.” It is possible to imagine a liberalism that opposes war and empire, fights mass imprisonment and the wholesale destruction of the criminal trial and the rights of the defendant, fights on behalf of working people, and meaningfully resists the police statism and rampant warrantless surveillance of both the red and blue........

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