Gore Vidal took a British television interviewer by surprise in 2012 when he remarked, “When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative,’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not. They’re fascists.”
That might have seemed like hyperbole during the year Mitt Romney became the Republican presidential nominee. But it rings truer as we pass the six-month mark of Donald Trump’s second term in office. Now, the American media is running into the limits of its vocabulary. Despite the inadequacies of the term, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and all the many outlets that follow their lead continue to describe the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans as “conservative,” a word that seems wholly inadequate to a moment when the president in a single week demands a private business, the Washington Commanders football team, change its name back to the Redskins or face some unnamed punishment, when the president’s FCC uses its regulatory power to coerce conformity from a publicly traded corporation, and when Trump uses unilateral tariff powers to promote his planned resort in communist Vietnam.
The failures of “conservative” to accurately convey the ideology and actions of today’s Republican Party are many. First, there is the lexical use, that is, by default, complimentary when it means restraint. One might praise a neighbor for his “conservative lifestyle” or advise a couple that they would benefit from a “conservative household budget.” Given that most Americans are largely apolitical, “conservative” hits the average ear in such a way that bolsters false Republican bromides about “getting our fiscal house in order” and “encouraging personal responsibility.”
Second, it is painfully apparent that Republicans have become anything but conservative in the traditional sense of the word. In his tome, The Conservative Sensibility, George F. Will, who left the Republican Party, struggles to define “conservative,” but he identifies two strains of the political philosophy: American and European. He argues that the latter “emphasizes the traditional and dutiful, with duties defined by obligations to a settled collectivity, the community.” American conservatism, by contrast, “seeks […] to conserve or establish institutions and practices conducive to a social dynamism that dissolves impediments to social mobility and fluidity.”
Setting aside that Will’s description of American conservatism might be elastic enough to imply support for universal health care, childcare programs, and tuition-free (or, at least, low tuition) universities, it is a valuable tool for measuring the Grand Canyon-sized gap between the Trump personality cult and what has, traditionally, passed for “conservative.” Republicans and their so-called “thought leaders” aim to overturn and subvert institutions and norms, rather than “conserve” them in the European sense. They are also consolidating executive power rather than maintaining distrust of too much power vested in any branch of government, let alone one man. The view of human nature as deeply fallible and immune to romantic Jacobin or Marxist visions of a new man is at the heart of conservatism. But MAGA is built on a different premise, that one ruler should be given broad authority and not held back by the Lilliputians of the Deep State. No wonder we find ourselves living in an increasingly autocratic form of government that commits vandalism against the concept that Will most closely associates with conservatism—“individual autonomy.” To his credit, Will recently denounced Trump as the “most statist president in US history” whose repressive policies and erratic actions constitute a “Putinesque” form of governance.
Will, like MSNBC host and former communications director for George W. Bush, Nicole Wallace, the editorial crew at the Bulwark, and Liz Cheney, would insist that the Republican Party is violating “true conservatism.” They often conceal their roles in pulling American politics to the far right with assessments that sound suspiciously like self-pity. “I didn’t leave the party; the party left me,” they will say.
Stuart Stevens, a former political campaign manager in the Republican Party, adopts a more honest approach in his aptly titled memoir, It Was All a Lie. The virtuous and philosophical precepts of Republican politics, from “personal responsibility” to “limited government,” were nothing more than a cover for a power grab that would eventually lead to the ongoing violation of democracy, the rule of law, and the social compact.
A more charitable view would consider that, perhaps, there were always two versions of “conservatism” duking it out within the GOP and its attendant media culture. There was the moderate, pro-business wing, represented by Stevens’s former client, Mitt Romney, and the anti-democratic militancy of Joseph McCarthy, Jesse Helms, and now, Donald Trump. To quote an old rock and roll song, for the sane side, “it’s all over but the crying.”
Mike Lofgren, a former Republican staffer and budget analyst in the US Senate, who often writes for the Washington Monthly, argues that the “dark turn of American conservatism” isn’t much of a turn. When I spoke to Lofgren over the phone about the political history and applicability of the term “conservative,” he said, “Ever since the French Revolution, there’s always been a revolutionary, reactionary countermovement aspect to conservatism that’s very radical.”
Lofgren, the author of The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, the Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted, then proposed that “there needs to be some label that can encompass” that element of conservatism to communicate the threat to societal stability that, ironically enough, something most people call “conservative” now presents. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former “chief counselor,” calls himself a “Leninist.” Curtis Yarvin, a software developer turned political philosopher who is a prominent influence on JD Vance, identifies as a “neo-monarchist.” These appellations are self-damaging, but unlikely to resonate with most Americans. Gore Vidal wasn’t the only person to see the contemporary American right as “fascist.” Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, has applied that term to the current president. The problem with “fascist” as a descriptor is that it is too loaded. Personally, I think the term is accurate in describing much of what the Trump administration is doing. Still, when many people hear the word, they immediately think of Hitler, or something vaguely nefarious that has no precise political meaning.
During our conversation, Lofgren and I agreed that “radical” is accurate and politically potent. Typically associated with the left, “radical” is synonymous with “extreme.” It signals an agenda threatening societal stability, sabotaging American life, and invading people’s lives. Trump and the Republican Party that he controls are radical–undermining the democratic process, undercutting democratic institutions, and undergirding an autocracy. They’ve attempted to overturn an election, established a Supreme Court that has wildly expanded executive power, while granting the president legal immunity for any action he takes in or even after office, and stretched their repressive influence into commerce, academia, and media.
“Radical is never seen by the public as good,” Lofgren said before adding, “It’s familiar and has a pejorative context.” The word also has the added benefit of tacitly noting who is subverting what generations of Americans have taken for granted, relating to personal freedom, separation of powers, and the rule of law. Here’s a hint: It isn’t Black Lives Matter activists who haven’t held a rally in years, librarians stocking novels with gay protagonists, or college professors with grey ponytails. It is the political party that celebrates the president deporting immigrants without due process, detaining people without criminal records in facilities guarded by alligators, and usurping congressional authority to allocate taxpayer dollars.
The mainstream media should adopt radical because it communicates an extreme break from sociopolitical norms, and the Democrats should not shy away from the pejorative context that Lofgren describes. “Extreme” is not a good substitute because it seems to imply that Trump is a stronger variant of traditional conservatism, 150 proof versus 80, when in fact he’s an entirely different breed. True, Newt Gingrich advised congressional Republicans in the 1990s to use words like “anti-American” and “traitor” to ridicule Democrats. President Trump has referred to his political opposition as “perverts,” “the enemy within,” and the Nazi-borrowed, “vermin.” By those standards, “radical” is pretty tame.
The bizarre, unforced error that Democrats must stop making is to refrain from using the word “Republican.” In recent years, they tend to adopt too-clever-by-half nicknames for Republicans, like “MAGA extremists,” zero in, with laser-like precision, on an individual, like Donald Trump or Elon Musk, allowing the word “Republican” to remain untarnished.
The alliterative, “Radical Republican Party,” should become a stain that its leaders cannot scrub clean. Middle Americans who pay closer attention to the manufactured drama of reality television than to the endangerment of their society should come to understand that the Republican governor or senator smiling down at them from a billboard next election season is not a “conservative” church usher or VFW captain, but a radical planning to disrupt their quiet lives.
