This Thursday and Friday, I’ll be speaking at the Liberalism for the 21st Century conference in Washington, DC. The timing is perfectly ironic given President Donald Trump’s militarized crackdown on the city, but the conference is shaping up great; the organizers tell me there’s now a waiting list for attendees.
Liberalism: a surprisingly hot ticket in Trump’s illiberal America!
My panel will focus on right-wing anti-liberal thought: what far-right intellectuals believe, why they believe it, and where their arguments go wrong. While preparing for it, I’ve started reflecting on a meta-question hanging over the panel: Why does it matter what far-right intellectuals are doing in the first place?
Trump’s authoritarianism is of the gut, not the mind. He’s not shaking down Harvard or ignoring red-letter law based on a deep read of right-wing political theory. I’d bet a lot of money he couldn’t tell you who Carl Schmitt is, let alone explain what “sovereign is he who decides on the exception” is supposed to mean.
Part of the answer is that there are people around him who care about these ideas.
Vice President JD Vance is perhaps the best example: avowedly influenced by anti-liberal writers like Patrick Deneen and Curtis Yarvin, Vance has spent significant effort during his time in office trying to develop intellectual-sounding justifications for Trump’s illiberalism. Other products of this world, like Michael Anton and Darren Beattie, are serving in high-level positions — to say nothing of the radical youth cadres making up the rank-and-file of the Trump White House.
But there’s also a deeper answer — one that a co-panelist, the writer Laura Field, explained to me during an upcoming episode of Vox’s The Gray Area podcast. It’s not about direct vectors of influence, like people in power reading radical books, but the more indirect way that ideas shape the background culture of a society — which, in turn, shapes the very nature of its political identity.
Field is a political theorist who spent a lot of time studying with right-leaning scholars (though she herself is a liberal). One thing she noticed, during her training, is that the right-wing tradition developed a distinctive theory of how change happens in politics — one she called “Ideas First.”
Ideas First is kind of a trickle-down theory of politics: the notion that much of what happens in day-to-day politics is downstream of prior developments in intellectual life. She uses, as an example, the 1948 book Ideas Have Consequences, which argued that many problems of contemporary American society were the product of epistemological skepticism about truth. The book’s author, Richard Weaver, traces this error all the way back to the work of medieval philosopher William of Occam (more widely known for his invention of Occam’s Razor).
The right thinks that big ideas ”have destroyed modern life,” Field tells me, because philosophical skepticism about truth, especially the truth of Christianity, means “we don't have a common set of norms and values and beliefs that anchors us together and allows us to make [good]decisions about politics.”
This sort of thing reads like parody — an absurd over-valuation of the power of ideas in history relative to, say, the influence of technological advances or economic transformations. And Field shares this critique to a degree.
And yet, there’s something importantly true about the “Ideas First” doctrine.
Societies are defined, at least in part, by shared beliefs — both the social stories children learn in school and the high-level worldviews of its elite educated classes. The United States was knit together, at least in part and until recently, by widely shared veneration of founding principles about freedom and equality. Such ideas have their own causal force, in the sense that people take them so seriously that they choose to act on their beliefs.
This isn’t just a right-wing idea. The liberal economist John Maynard Keynes famously quipped that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”
But Keynes was writing in 1936; in the years since, the left has become increasingly disenchanted with such thinking. Instead, a Marx-inflected materialism that denies any meaningful role for ideas in producing social change has gained significant intellectual ground. If the right takes “Ideas First” too far, then the left can fairly be accused of putting “Ideas Last” (in Field’s words).
I think this is at the heart of a divergence between the right and the left’s public intellectuals (the academic world is a different ballgame). American liberalism’s most prominent voices tend to be heavily focused on policy analysis, while the right (and especially the radical right) are drawn to more abstract “Ideas First” discussion of first principles.
In normal democratic politics, defined by disputes over policy implementation, this gave the mainstream liberals a significant advantage: they were the ones who knew the ins and outs of Obamacare and the distributional effects of various tax increases.
But when the very ideological foundations of American politics are up for dispute, people are looking for guidance about how to think about the tectonic changes in our society. These are not technical questions about policy implementation, but big-picture ones about what society is for and how it can be corrected. The radical right’s Ideas First approach has given it an outsized ability to shape this conversation, to redefine the very terms by which our politics is being conducted. That’s why the right feels more intellectually vital to many young people, shaping their emerging worldviews even as Trump’s brazen authoritarianism should be discrediting the prophets of Trumpism.
At least, that’s what Field and I think. Both of us, in different ways, see our job as correcting what she calls the “Ideas Last” impulse among many liberals and leftists. If you’re interested in hearing what that sounds like in practice, please listen to our whole conversation on The Gray Area. Should be out on Monday!
