When President Donald Trump and Elon Musk had their dramatic falling-out last week, it appeared the right was on the brink of civil war — with Musk’s allies in the “tech right” poised to battle Steve Bannon and his faction of populist tribunes. The battle lines reflected deep disagreements between the right’s factions about the nature and purpose of government, divides made increasingly salient by Trump’s policies in areas like trade.
But now, after several days of protests and unrest in Los Angeles, everyone is once again reading from the same hymnal — condemning disorder and calling for a harsh crackdown. Even Musk is back to retweeting Trump like nothing happened.
Why this intra-right ceasefire? Because what’s happening in LA reminds every component of the modern right why they’re in coalition together: They believe that progressives in general, and the “woke” left activists in particular, represent an existential threat to everything good about the United States.
This vision has deep philosophical roots on the right, which has always positioned itself around defending elements of the status quo from its enemies on the left. But the 2025 American right tells itself a very particular version of that general story, one that focuses on the events of summer 2020.
In their minds, the combination of Covid restrictions, mainstream calls for wide-ranging social change, and mass street upheaval was the terrible terminus of modern progressive politics. Whatever their internal disagreements on issues like trade or spending or even immigration, the modern right agrees that the left must never be permitted another year like 2020 — and that Trump is the best vehicle for stopping it.
The Trump coalition has appeared fractious for much of 2025 because the big policy moves, like tariffs, have made areas of disagreement in the coalition more salient. It appears united for now because the news cycle has shifted to a topic — the specter of radical left street disorder — on which nearly everyone inside of it agrees.
The right’s long 2020
Philosophically speaking, the right has long been defined by its emphasis on the value of stability — as odd as it may seem in the era of Trump’s radically destabilizing administration.
Conservative theorists, most notably Edmund Burke, have long maintained that political flourishing depends on the existence of stable social rules developed gradually and from the bottom up over the course of generations. Those who seek to overturn this order, either through sweeping legislation or revolutionary violence, will inevitably do more harm than good. For this reason, the right’s intellectuals have long positioned themselves against what they saw as instances of leftist street violence.
Yet Trump has spent the past 10 years setting the American political order on fire — demolishing its norms, enacting radical changes to its longstanding policies, and flagrantly violating its laws. He even incited an honest-to-God insurrection aimed at overturning an election. How could any of this fit with a tradition premised on the values of stability and order?
The answer, in part, is that it doesn’t. The intellectual right has adopted a self-consciously revolutionary mode of politics, seeing the current political order as a fundamentally corrupt system that deserves to be torn down. This is a reactionary rejection of Burkean conservatism, which is why so many erstwhile Burkeans became the Never Trumpers who publish at places like the Dispatch and the Bulwark.
And yet, there’s a crucial element of the Burkean emphasis on order that the Trump right has retained: a belief that some specific elements of American life remain uncorrupted, and that the “woke left” must be defeated for those elements to again become the country’s defining traits. Traditional religion, conservative cultural values, a market economy, the notion of national pride, and even nationhood itself — these are the elements of the United States that the modern right sees as being under attack from the left and the institutions (like universities) where it is in control.
This sense of siege, of a need for counterrevolution, crystalized in the summer of 2020.
It wasn’t only that there was rioting in America’s cities, or that major American cultural institutions were aligning themselves with once-radical views on race and gender. It’s that both were happening at the same time, suggesting that radicals in the streets were seizing the commanding heights of American public life.
“The individual acts of violence — the sacking of urban police stations, the Molotov cocktails thrown at police cruisers, the toppling of historical statues, the wholesale looting of big-box stores — were, in fact, the representations of a long-running cultural revolution,” leading right-wing activist Chris Rufo wrote in his 2023 book America's Cultural Revolution. “In city after city, [Black Lives Matter] activists, including its paramilitaries in the black nationalist and anarcho-socialist factions, shut down urban neighborhoods, intimidated residents, and established their ideology as a social requisite.”
This is, to my mind, a wildly exaggerated narrative of that summer’s events (a consistent problem in Rufo’s work). It vastly overstates the pervasiveness of the violence and paints with an ideologically overbroad brush, ignoring that most people were in the streets because they were deeply and sincerely concerned about racism in policing.
Yet there’s some truth as well. The summer’s events, including riots in Minneapolis and Seattle’s disastrous “autonomous zone”, did real harm to real people — in ways that many mainstream liberals and leftists were unwilling to admit at the time.
That liberal elites endorsed street protest amid the Covid pandemic, when the public health establishment was recommending people stay away from mass gatherings, fueled the right’s outrage. It was, to them, a sign that the so-called establishment was not only flawed but fully corrupt; so shot through with political bias that it would tell people to go protest for George Floyd, but stop attending church.
From this was born the mythic underpinnings of the modern Trump right: a deep fear of chaotic, violent left-wing radicals, paired with a sense that mainstream liberals and nonpartisan experts are in thrall to said extremists. This is the narrative that knits together the various factions of MAGA 2.0: the tech right, the national populists, the atheist anti-wokes, the Christian nationalists, and on down the line. There are reasonable grounds to doubt that everyone believes it sincerely, but it defines much of the conceptual vocabulary right-wingers use to communicate across factional lines. We may not agree on everything, they say, but we are all against that.
What’s happening in LA right now brings this set of uniting concerns to the fore.
Once again, progressives and radicals have taken to the streets to demonstrate against what they see as social injustices. Once again, there are clear instances of looting and violence (though I’d add that these are once again being widely exaggerated). And once again, it appears to many on the right as if the liberal establishment were siding with the people in the streets — with LA Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (correctly) downplaying the scale of the violence and rejecting Trump’s efforts to send in the troops, in large part because they believe it to be at once unnecessary and counterproductive.
It is thus no surprise that in the face of recent events, the right’s infighting would give way to a display of unity. When the right sees the specter of 2020 looming over America, its cadres feel an urgent need to form ranks.
