![]() I’ve written quite a bit in recent years about Trumpy intellectualism, and have come across my fair share of hyped-up conspiratorial claims. My aim in this essay is to shine some light on a few clear examples of conservative political theorists peddling conspiracism in the Trump era. I am referring also to folks like Charles Kesler (editor of the Claremont Review of Books and probably the Claremont Institute’s foremost intellectual), Patrick Deneen (a chaired professor at Notre Dame, author of the 2018 bestseller Why Liberalism Failed), Adrian Vermeule (a prominent professor at Harvard Law School), and Yoram Hazony (Israeli-American professor and chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, and a key organizer of the Nationalist Revival movement). And I’m not just speaking about obscure intellects like Anton. Once Trump won the election, other theorists turned up to seize the anti-liberal moment: to fill the intellectual void around the new president and soak up some power. It began with Michael Anton’s infamous “ Flight 93” election essay, which appeared, pseudonymously, in September 2016. What was surprising, at least to me, was how swiftly theoretically-minded people swept in to provide more intellectual - but still highly tenuous, and often ultimately conspiratorial and absurd - sustenance to already-tenuous Trumpy views. Conspiratorial lies and misinformation were mainstays of Trumpism from the beginning - from Birtherism, to “alternative facts,” to “flood-the-zone-with-sh*t,” to QAnon. To buy into this sanguine view is to seriously misunderstand the intellectual ecosystem of the American right today - and, in particular, to underestimate the extent to which sophisticated intellectuals have been sustaining Trumpism since 2016. Capitol to fringe elements of the GOP: Sure, Donald Trump’s irresponsible rhetoric might have contributed to the insurrection, but mostly we’re still just talking about disenfranchised outliers. There is a strong temptation to attribute phenomena like QAnon and the January 6 attack on the U.S. It seems to me that there is something similar at play in our political discourse with respect to the GOP’s descent into conspiracism. There is evidence for some of these assumptions, but on the whole such claims mask the extent to which support for Trump also came from the middle class, the better-educated, and the wealthy. One of the strongest temptations of the Trump era has been to assume that Republican support for Trump was fundamentally limited to fringe groups and the economically disadvantaged - to struggling rural whites and those without much higher education. ![]()
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