The Right Wing’s Institutional Problem
Last month, in an opinion piece at The New York Times, Adrian Vermeule decried the lack of accountability and corruption in a judicial system that allows activist judges to openly defy the Supreme Court. It is both an acute problem and a symptom of a much larger and deeper problem.
If you go through the landmark political triumphs of the liberal left, it quickly becomes apparent that very few of them were accomplished through electoral victories or the ordinary operations of the legislative process. Instead, the left moved the goal posts through judicial fiat and by legislating from the bench, as far back as the Warren Court.
As Vermeule points out, the progressives preemptively attacked Trump for the alleged crime of not respecting the sanctity of the impartial institutions of society.
Since President Trump returned to the presidency for a second term, legal scholars and political writers have wrestled with a particular preoccupation: What if he defies court orders? […]
The issue of defying court orders is still with us—but it has taken a twist. Now the defiance is coming from inside the judicial branch itself, in the form of a lower-court mutiny against the Supreme Court. District Court judges, and in some cases even appellate courts, have either defied orders of the court outright or engaged in malicious compliance and evasion of those orders, in transparent bad faith.
This behavior from the judges is brazen chutzpah on several levels. It’s their own activist judges defying the system and the Constitution, not Trump. But defying the system for power has always been their modus operandi. The notion of upholding impartial institutions and adhering to a standard of objective truth has only ever been advanced by one group: conservative-minded Western European men. But because that group has been the dominant force of the dominant civilization until very recently, they could afford to indulge in the belief that embracing and implementing these values was something universally admired. That turns out not to be the case.
The faith in so-called impartial institutions, be they courts or academia, ended up sending us a steep bill, as those values weren’t even universally held within our own society, and all the enemy had to do was “march through the institutions” to conquer society’s strategic heights.
Another thing the progressives realized early on is that once you control the traditional “impartial” institutions, the ones charged with enforcing the norms and ground rules, it’s quite easy to reshape society from the top down, from kindergarten to the grave. Women, and plenty of men, to be fair, are social amplifiers. They want to fit in and will enforce whatever social paradigm is prevalent. If, as in most periods of history is the case, generally sane and sound customs are accepted, they will enforce them. But when destructive ideas win social acceptance, it is those ideas that will prevail.
Because “conservatives” had an innate respect for established institutions, and the left didn’t, the right ended up in a situation where they had to win every time, while the left only needed to win once. Once the left secured a victory, they changed the rules and transformed the institutions. And this vulnerability goes even deeper.
On the face of it, it would seem self-evident that the resurgent national-populist movement could find common cause with the religious right. Not only is there broad overlap in their vision of a good society, but they share a common foe. And it is worth noting how many of the supposed “hysterical” warnings of the religious right turned out to be prophetic. Given these facts, many saw an alliance between the two groups as natural, if not entirely unproblematic. Gradually, however, it has become clear that there may be insurmountable barriers to such an alliance , not only as concerns the basis for a shared program in the aftermath of any victory, but even as a vehicle to attain the desired victory.
This is not to say that individual people of Christian conviction can’t contribute mightily towards a shared goal with the national-populist movements, but we need to be aware of the problems within the formal organizations, denominations, and among the thought leaders within organized churches. These institutions have been marched through, after all. Some might say this is an inevitable result of a fundamental philosophical clash between particularist and universalist creeds. But I don’t actually believe that’s the issue. It’s more practical and systemic than that. It’s true that the lion’s share of nationalists and modern religious conservatives share a broad vision of what is wrong with and what might fix society. But, in the end churches today, even Protestant splinter ones, are established institutions and have to work within a larger institutional order. And the question of organizations, and who controls them, gets us coming and going in the present circumstances.
One of the primary reasons the old religious right had such an outsized political impact through the 1980s and into the 1990s was that even though it sprang from the pews in Evangelical churches, it exercised power and influence through newly created and overtly right-wing political organizations, not churches. While Christian socialists, hippies, or liberal parishioners might have left their mark on the churches themselves, in line with Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics (that any organization not explicity right-wing in its character, over time becomes left wing), Moral Majority, Focus on the Family, and the Family Research Council stood as proof against infiltration.
One has to remember that the religious side of the debate today is not dominated by the same groups that controlled the old religious right. The Protestant old guard is still keeping the lights on in most of the old organizations, but they lack cultural firepower. On the other hand, the online discourse is dominated by a younger vanguard of traditionalist Catholics pining for the doctrines and aesthetics that governed the Church prior to the Second Vatican Council, with many even leaning Orthodox. But these, too, are too disorganized to function as a classical cadre. New organizations with younger, more energetic, and explicitly right-wing leadership are needed to advance the politics of Christian conservatives.
It is important to remember, also, that corporations such as InBev (of Bud Light infamy), toe the intersectional progressive line not because they’re true believers in the woke doctrines, but because navigating government regulations and the requirement of an acceptable ESG (environmental, social, governance) score for access to credit forces them to make these choices. Churches, because they are institutions, are also forced to operate in this new environment. In an era of institutionalized progressivism, natural conservatives become unwitting Red Guards, and the congenital revolutionary ends up under the banner of the “alt-right.” And it was always naïve to think the churches would have any particular immunity.
It’s a sad reality with which many people who see themselves as true Christians increasingly have to wrestle: the vast majority of their co-believers, and the overwhelming majority of the hierarchy and churches are hostile to all they hold dear. Christianity, because it is one of the roots of today’s form of progressivism, had no real immunity to it. Churches had even less resistance to being infiltrated than many other institutions. They have largely succumbed to capture for the same reasons, and largely by the same mechanisms, as almost every other established institution.
Any serious-minded right-wing movement, thinker, or leader has to grapple with the institutional problem in every facet, unlearn the bromides of the past, and even re-learn from the left wing the true blood sport of politics and power.
The left has always intuitively understood there is no “debate,” no “marketplace of ideas.” You take power and use it to make your values the norm. You defund your enemies and hire your friends. This is all so basic and simple, yet it still eludes people on the modern right.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/the-right-wings-institutional-problem