Conservatives Have a New Master Theory of American Politics – New York Magazine

Earlier this year, I was introduced to a Republican at a small gathering. I asked him what he made of the new theory sweeping the right, which held that radical leftists had conducted a “long march through the institutions,” seizing control of American culture, education, and business, and thus forcing Republicans to use government to dislodge their power.

This theory has largely been associated with the new, Trumpier factions of the right that have risen up as alternatives to traditional conservatism. Since the man I met was exactly the sort of Republican the Trumpists are plotting to displace from power — (Jewish coastal elitist, donor, mortified by Donald Trump, vocally pro–gay marriage yet intrigued by Ron DeSantis, etc.) — I assumed he would express either ignorance of the long-march theory or else outright opposition.

Instead, to my surprise, the only portion of my account he questioned was the word “theory.” To his mind, the long march and its grim implications for the party’s strategy were simply an obvious truism. The idea has spread so rapidly through the conservative elite that, before it has even gotten a name, the segments of the party most predisposed against it have adopted it.

Ron DeSantis has placed this theory at the center of his governing vision (“elected officials who do nothing more than get out of the way are essentially greenlighting these institutions to continue their unimpeded march through society,” he writes in his campaign book.) Donald Trump is personally sub-ideological, but the intellectuals around him have embraced it too.

Two new books expound upon Longmarchism, as you might call it. America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, by Christopher Rufo, attempts a sweeping historical theory tracing the ascent of a brand of left-wing identity politics from the 1960s New Left to its present position (according to Rufo) of dominance of the commanding heights of American society.

Up From Conservatism: Revitalizing the Right After a Generation of Decay, a collection of essays edited by the Claremont Institute’s Arthur Milikh, uses the long march as its premise and proposes an array of retaliatory actions.

Rufo’s version, which is the most developed iteration of the theory, posits that the 1960’s far left hit a wall when the working class failed to support its revolutionary program, and instead decided to gain control of society from above by burrowing into its elite sectors. Rufo initially, erroneously, attributed this strategy to the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, before correctly crediting his disciple Rudi Dutschke, who proposed a “long march through the institutions.”

The notion that ex-hippies have burrowed into the Establishment (especially universities) has been floating around the right for many years. But it was only at the tail end of the Trump administration that a more comprehensive version of the idea suddenly burst forth into the frontal cortex of the conservative mind. Longmarchism served as an all-purpose explanation of everything that angered the right during the Trump era: the belligerence of the news media, increasingly overt hostility from respectable Americans, and the final collapse into failure of the Trump administration. All these vexing developments could be explained by the single phenomenon of the left having successfully taken over America’s institutions.

And accepting this theory, in turn, implied a new focus for Republicans if and when they next gained control of government. The left’s long march had given it control of nongovernmental organs of power, from which position it had waged relentless guerrilla war that had rendered Trump impotent and finally defeated. The right’s new task was to use government power to strike back.

We should begin by acknowledging that the theory contains elements of reality. Conservatives are not fantasizing when they perceive that their beliefs are being anathematized by elites and elite institutions. Over the last couple decades, polarization has injected politics into peoples’ lives to a much greater extent — during the 1990s, it was common, even in Washington, D.C, to attend a party and never discuss politics. Simultaneously, the increasingly liberal cast of college-educated Americans has made all sorts of elite institutions more liberal even as they have grown more political. It is a real sea change in American life for giant corporations to endorse a left-wing group like Black Lives Matter.

This trend exploded during the Trump administration. From a liberal point of view, the mobilization of Blue America looked like a necessary response to the national emergency of a bigoted authoritarian running loose through the West Wing. But it is easy to see how conservatives could perceive the same thing as something like a hostile conspiracy. “Conservatives have come to feel that practically everything that can reasonably be called an ‘institution’ — from sports journalism to the federal bureaucracy — is against them,” writes Richard Hanania in Milikh’s compendium.

Since 2020, Rufo has done a fair amount of legwork digging up documentation of the often-ridiculous Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs spreading through corporate, educational, and government human-resources departments. He fleshes out his theory with a series of historical synopses of left-wing theorists like Herbert Marcuse and Derrick Bell that take their ideas seriously. Rufo is also at least intermittently capable of recognizing deep disagreements within the left, a refreshing counterpoint to the common practice among right-wing polemicists of lumping together everything to the left of the Republican Party.

But Longmarchism suffers three serious defects which, working in conjunction, transform a reasonable set of objections to left-wing social-justice fads run amok into a paranoid, authoritarian ideology.

First, the Longmarchers are prone to catastrophizing. It is not just that left-wing ideas are spreading — those ideas are literally tantamount to Soviet-imposed totalitarianism. “Although the left-wing cultural revolution had self-destructed in the Third World,” writes Rufo, “over time it found a new home in America.” And not only have these ideas gained currency, they formed “a new ideological regime.”

“The Constitution cannot be said to be governing the nation when there is no real presidency (but rather an intelligence apparatus and an administrative state that operates, more or less, on their own); no real Congress (which delegates its powers away to the administrative state); and no real independence of the states (which, with the aid of the Supreme Court, have become mere federal fiefdoms,)” claims Milkh, arguing along similar lines. “In terms of political and moral power, the Left currently rules every consequential sector of society, from the nation’s educational institutions (K–12 and higher education), to large parts of the media, corporate America, Big Tech, and the federal administrative apparatus.”

Rufo’s analysis, despite its depth and specificity, relies upon a sleight-of-hand technique: He assumes that any organization that has adapted left-wing rhetoric in its training or branding has been wholly captured by the ideology of the activists who devised their underlying concepts.

So, for instance, he proclaims, “The final conquest in the long march through the institutions is the extension of the critical theories into America’s largest corporations.” How did critical theorists gain control of corporate America? Well, after George Floyd’s murder, they made supportive statements toward the Black Lives Matter movement, and “The largest fifty companies in America immediately pledged $50 billion toward ‘racial equity.’”

That certainly sounds like an ideological commitment that has redirected the priorities of corporate America. But if you look at the footnotes, 90 percent of those funds are loans or mortgages, and almost all of the sum comes from two banks, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. Of the grants, just $70 million went to groups promoting criminal-justice reform.

Likewise, when reporting on defense contractors employing some loopy DEI training materials in 2020, he asserts, “Even federal defense contractors have submitted to the new ideology.” And when he notes the same thing happening at the Treasury Department the same year, he arrives at the sweeping conclusion,  “After fifty years, the long march had been completed. The radical left had finally won its Gramscian ‘war of position’ and attained ideological power within the American state.”

Of course, the military-industrial complex and the Treasury Department are massive bureaucracies. The fact their human-resources departments circulated some wild left-wing rhetoric hardly means those agencies were enlisted in the cause of left-wing revolution. Their general operations have not appreciably changed. It is safe to assume that, if they were actually under the control of Angela Davis’s disciples, the Pentagon and Treasury would probably be acting very differently than they are now.

The second flaw in the long-march theory is that it fails to understand how social-justice ideology exploded specifically in reaction to events that are now receding.

The most striking thing about both Rufo and Milikh’s books is that the events they cite as evidence of the left’s inexorable rise overwhelmingly took place during the Trump presidency. Primarily, they return again and again to the George Floyd protests and their aftermath. They also point to outrages like public-health guidance in 2020, a source of ongoing anger. Very little of the evidence they muster of a left-wing march through the institutions takes place since Trump left office.

One reason, of course, is that the murder of George Floyd was a high-profile event that happened to occur in 2020. But Floyd was killed after Trump had spent several years engaging in public displays of racist bullying. Trump repeatedly promised to roll back police reforms undertaken by his predecessor and unleash the cops to brutalize suspects. “The Obama administration and the handcuffing and oppression of police was despicable,” Minneapolis Police Union president Bob Kroll announced at a Trump rally in Minneapolis, seven months before a Minneapolis cop killed Floyd. “The first thing President Trump did when he took office was turn that around, got rid of the Holder-Loretta Lynch regime and decided to start … letting the cops do their job, put the handcuffs on the criminals instead of us.” And Trump bullied protesters for police reform, like Colin Kaepernick, boasting that he had blackballed the quarterback from being hired by the league again.

None of the Longmarchers mention this context. In their accounts, the explosion of protests instead spring directly from a 50-year-long left-wing plot.

There is a common psychological phenomenon called the fundamental attribution error. It describes the way in which people habitually assess their own actions within the context of their environment, but assess the actions of other people as if they represent an innate character trait.

The political version of the fundamental attribution error is that ideologues can easily perceive how the other side’s extremists are radicalizing us, but fail to see how our side’s extremists are radicalizing them. It is very obvious to the Longmarchers of the right that the excesses of the George Floyd protest era produced a backlash on the right. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that these protests were spurred in large part not simply by the outrageous torture captured on video, but also the years of goading by the most famous person in the world that preceded it.

The Milikh volume has two essays specifically chastising conservatives for being too anti-racist. Not only can they not grasp that anti-racism protests draw more support when there is public evidence of racism, they argue that the movement has nothing to do with opposing actual racism. Indeed, at points they seem to deny its existence. “No amount of black outreach, Juneteenth celebrations, or expressions of sympathy for George Floyd will ever get them to stop calling us racists,” argues David Azzerad. “Their political movement thus requires the existence of racists. When they do not exist, they must be manufactured.” How would he know what progressives would do in the absence of actual racism, unless he thinks such a condition actually exists?

A more important corollary, which the Longmarchers ignore, is that Trump’s defeat has drained the energy from the left.

Rufo draws an extended scene of racial-justice protesters confronting Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey with a demand to endorse police abolition, then shaming him when he refuses. The narrative structure of the episode, as Rufo constructs it, depicts the protesters as triumphant, and Frey slinking away shamed and defeated. What Rufo does not mention is that Frey went on to win reelection in 2021 and then a city ballot initiative to reduce police funding lost. Indeed, after a brief flirtation, the Democratic Party turned sharply against defunding the police. Joe Biden has promised to “fund the police.”

The fact that so many of the horrors cited by the Longmarchers occurred under Trump confirms a finding by the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi. A critic of the far left on social issues, al-Gharbi has compiled a number of metrics showing the “great awokening” has already begun winding down. University students are less fearful of discussing controversial topics, and professors are facing less retaliation on campus. Corporate DEI bureaucracy, whose growth Rufo portrays as an unstoppable terror, is collapsing; the Wall Street Journal reports that chief-diversity-officer searches are down 75 percent over the previous year amid plummeting demand.

It is difficult to empirically prove something as amorphous as the rise and fall of an ideological tendency, but these findings paint the same picture as the Longmarchers’ reliance on circa-2020 anecdotes: The worst excesses of social-justice activism peaked under Trump, and Uncle Joe has managed to calm things down.

This problem is worth bearing in mind when you consider the third defect of Longmarchism: It implies a radical program that its advocates fail to articulate clearly.

Both tomes brim with militant sloganeering language exhorting their allies to take merciless, decisive action against the enemy. “We like to say that one must govern, but a truer expression is that one must learn to rule,” writes Milikh in one essay.

Rufo displays even more clearly Leninist thought patterns. Politics is a struggle of willpower, and the forces of his side (the counterrevolution) “must ruthlessly identify and exploit the vulnerabilities of the revolution, then construct its own logic for overcoming it … The task is to meet the forces of revolution with an equal and opposite force.” Having convinced himself of the success of the Marxist left, he believes the right must fashion itself as a mirror image.

Rufo’s self-conception as a reverse Leninist, agitating for his anti-revolution, even extends to constructing his own dialectical analysis. “The working class is more anti-revolutionary today than at any time during the upheaval,” he posits. “Their quality of life has plummeted into a revolving nightmare of addiction, violence and incarceration.” The proletariat in Joe Biden’s Amerika, immiserated into radicalization, is ready to take to the barricades.

But exactly what this all means in practice is a little harder to say. Milikh’s volume offers a series of mostly vague proposals to extend (or, the Longmarchers would say, join) political combat to almost every sphere of American life. Many of them point to DeSantis’s campaign to punish Disney for the sin of criticizing his restrictions on gender education as a model.

“Destruction followed by reconquest is necessary and proper,” proposes Milikh in regard to the education system. One contributor suggests starting up a new clothing line to replace “woke Patagonia’s clothing” and creating dating apps that reject hookup culture. Another argues, “This rolling sexual revolution cultivates a new sexual ethic supporting that may be called the Queer Constitution (in contrast to our former Straight Constitution), which has become central to Americanism and its ruling class,” and thus, “the family must be self-consciously repoliticized.”

Of course, all these maneuvers would generate a backlash on the left. This response would obviously freak out conservatives even more, in turn promoting yet more panicked demands for another counteroffensive (or, perhaps, counter-counter-counteroffensive) in the culture war. If the militant language of the Longmarchers expresses anything cogent, it is that the mere existence of opposition is intolerable to them.

One notable characteristic of the Longmarchers, and the post-liberal movement on the right in general, is that every new escalation in tactics they demand serves as justification for the next one. Michael Anton’s famous “Flight 93” essay justified a vote for Trump as a final, desperate gambit (akin to passengers on the doomed hijacked flight charging the cockpit) to save America from the left-wing takeover. Now Anton — who has contributed two essays to Up From Conservatism — needs an explanation for why Trump’s presidency failed to save the country.

The long march supplies that explanation. It turns out, writes Anton, “the people we nominally elect do not hold real power.” So now, they must not only win control of government, but also extend its power into nearly every sphere of American life. They have abandoned completely the notion they can roll back left-wing excess through persuasion — the very thing that appears to be happening now, under a moderate Democratic president — and instead convinced themselves it can and must be accomplished through coercion.

Perhaps they will try this. If so, they will discover they have generated a backlash far more severe than they anticipated. Indeed, they will have brought about the very thing they had set out to destroy.