The Intellectual Edgelords of the GOP

Calling the Trump administration fascist has become a cliché, but some federal departments seem keen on the comparison. Consider the administration’s messaging on social media.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Facebook account recently posted a recruiting notice for ICE under the banner “WE’LL HAVE OUR HOME AGAIN”—the title of a white-nationalist anthem by the Pine Tree Riots (“By blood or sweat, we’ll get there yet”). The Department of Labor recently posted a video montage referencing American battle scenes under the tagline “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American”—a slogan close to the Nazi-era Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.  

Many of these posts borrow overtly from Christianity. In December, the DHS and White House accounts shared Christmas-themed posts celebrating mass deportations and encouraging self-deportation. One featured videos of armed agents performing night raids, with a caption quoting Matthew 5:9 in blackletter type: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”

[Read: The Trump administration is publishing a stream of Nazi propaganda]

Macho displays and transgressive memes mark a significant shift in how the federal government sees and promotes its mission—and sanctions state violence. It may be tempting to see this change as an organic or bottom-up phenomenon, as if federal agencies are appealing to Proud Boys to lure more ICE recruits. But the reality is that this transformation is the culmination of years of work by niche groups of conservative intellectuals who have long rejected America’s liberal traditions—and now dominate the halls of power.

There were signs from the start that a Trump-led GOP would reward transgression against liberal-democratic norms. In “The Flight 93 Election,” a September 2016 essay for the Claremont Institute, the former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Anton called on fellow conservatives to “charge the cockpit” and vote for Trump in order to prevent a more dire outcome: the election of Hillary Clinton as president. Anton, who went on to serve on the National Security Council in Trump’s first term and the State Department in his second, used his polemic to decry Davos-style globalist pieties as “managerial Davoisie liberalism” and hail Trump’s plans to stop “importing poverty, crime, and alien cultures.” Trump, he allowed, “is worse than imperfect,” but this didn’t matter. Trump, Anton argued, offered a lifeline for an irrelevant conservative movement and a dying republic.

This call to arms scandalized many establishment conservatives, some of whom provided a check on Trump in his first term. Members of Trump’s first cabinet prevented him from ratcheting up his trade war, fully alienating allies, deploying U.S. troops to American cities, and withdrawing them suddenly from overseas.

After the “Unite the Right” rally turned deadly in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, the alt-right appeared to lose steam. The White House chief strategist Steve Bannon fell from grace, the white nationalist Richard Spencer mostly vanished from the public eye, and controversial figures including Sebastian Gorka and Darren Beattie were ultimately ousted from the administration. Even Stephen Miller looked vulnerable for a time. Many conservatives assumed that the events of January 6, 2021, would rightfully prevent Trump from holding public office ever again.

Instead, January 6 came to signify the staying power of Trumpism, and offered a new rallying cry and loyalty test for a more radicalized GOP.

In October 2021, the Heritage Foundation tapped Kevin Roberts, the former CEO of the Trump-friendly Texas Public Policy Foundation, to be its next president—marking a change in orientation for one of Washington’s most influential conservative think tanks. At the National Conservatism Conference in 2022, Roberts declared his “fellowship with the principles” MAGA’s main intellectual movement had advanced “to rescue America from the barbarians inside the gates of our very own institutions.” At the same gathering, the natcon leader Yoram Hazony argued that Christian domination is the only safeguard against “the religion of woke neo-Marxism.”

Today, elite MAGA-world figures including Anton and Peter Thiel flirt openly with the idea of Caesarism, or a “Red Caesar,” whereby a lone authoritarian ruler might restore the country’s strength. “Postliberals” such as Patrick Deneen write about how “regime change” is possible only with a new elite—one that understands the value of “Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends.” The influential philosopher-blogger Curtis Yarvin has called for a total dismantling of “the cathedral,” by which he means the all-powerful liberal institutions at the center of modern life (universities, media outlets), which operate like a Church in that they dictate how people should think.

[George Packer: An Anatomy of the MAGA Mind]

What unifies these thinkers is a totalizing and conspiratorial conception of modern liberal politics. In this view, very little in the existing order is worth redeeming. Some even argue that the most patriotic way forward is simply to burn it all down.

All of this intellectual boundary-breaking can be intoxicating, especially against the backdrop of a wider culture that has at times tipped into stultifying speech codes and groupthink. But the rebellion has also spurred a race to the bottom. This is how a group chat among young Republicans devolves into talk of loving Hitler.

Richard Hanania, a political scientist who knows a good deal about such dynamics owing to the years he spent writing pseudonymously for alt-right and white-supremacist publications, calls this phenomenon the “based ritual.” Young ideologues compete to prove their fealty to MAGA by engaging in a kind of transgressive one-upsmanship. In this performance, the risk of appearing racist or sexist is well outweighed by the risk of seeming disloyal to Trump.

Prominent conservatives have publicly discussed the value of shifting the Overton window. In 2023, Christopher Rufo hosted a debate about whether to broaden the tent to include racists and other extremists—a “no enemies to the right” strategy.

This is very much a live question. In October, after Tucker Carlson hosted the young white-nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes in a long and indulgent interview on his podcast, quite a few conservatives struggled to distance themselves from Fuentes without alienating other political allies. Roberts, at the Heritage Foundation, raised hackles when he initially defended Carlson. He then tried to split the difference by criticizing Fuentes but not Carlson, but still faced an exodus of staff and several resignations from the board of trustees for legitimizing extremism. Clearly some conservatives are still willing to hold the more radical factions of the party to account.

[Jonathan Chait: The conservative movement’s intellectual collapse]

Unfortunately, these traditional, more principled conservatives are not ascendant. In the early days of the Heritage fiasco, Harvard’s Adrian Vermeule, perhaps the most sophisticated thinker of the MAGA new right, warned against factional infighting when the enemy is “at the very gates.” What is notable here is that for Vermeule, the “enemies” are liberals. Such language handily buttresses Trump’s constant talk of the “enemy from within.” It’s a philosophy that allows the administration to portray liberal activists as domestic terrorists, and mass peaceful protests as “engineered chaos.”

That kind of edgelordism has become the currency du jour in the GOP, from the Ivy League through the streets of Minnesota. The MAGA new right seems to be betting that the American polity has a deep reserve of untapped nativist rage—which can be harnessed in the service of their culture war against the liberal status quo, or of ICE’s more tangible goals. But if current polls are to be believed, the administration seems to be underestimating the everyday decency and patriotism of the American public.

Boundary-pushing ideas can be invigorating, and opportunities to question and resist received wisdom are essential to any free and democratic society. But the pursuit of transgression for its own sake can easily derail sound judgment. The risk is in presuming that anything subversive or sensational is also true and meaningful, and that anything conventional is a lie that must be smashed down. That is a brutal way to inhabit the world—and, I hope, a losing one.

*Illustration Sources: Galerie Bilderwelt / Getty; Corbis / Getty; Ivy Close Images / Universal Images Group / Getty; Bettmann / Getty.