American Conservatism Unmoored: The Dissident Right's Adoption of Leftist Agitational Strategies

Abstract

The last decade witnessed a drastic reconfiguration of American conservatism by way of a newly emergent and energized dissident right. Beyond the question of ideology, this article argues that an essential aspect of this realignment occurs at the level of strategy, specifically with the adoption of agitational tactics pioneered by the progressive left. It attempts to make sense of this sea change, first, by tracing in broad strokes the history of American conservatism's opposition to much of what passes for agitational politics. It then examines the right's seemingly abrupt adoption of three species of agitational practice: Alinsky-styled radicalism, identity politics, and accelerationism. It concludes by discussing the implications of this shift, in terms of what it means both for the future of conservative discourse and for leftist groups who must now take into account the possibility of having to outmaneuver their own set of tactics.

In the midst of the United States’ first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread issuance of restrictions on work and travel, hundreds of protestors, some armed, entered the Michigan state house to protest Governor Gretchen Whitmer's stay-at-home mandate. The event was one of many right-wing protests that occurred across the United States in response to state-backed, “draconian” measures designed to slow the spread of the virus (Wilson 2020). These protests reflected an emergent trend of strident and unruly demonstrations from what many journalists and commentators describe as the far, extreme, or radical right—from violent pro-police events to 2017’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia (Wilder 2020; Stapley 2017).¹ In response, mainstream institutional voices of conservatism joined their left-liberal counterparts in roundly condemning the violence while also tut-tutting such boorishness as unbefitting of the norms of civic discourse and the ideals of the American conservative movement. Some conservative critics, however, attempted to dissociate conservatism from right-wing extremism by articulating the practice of violent protest with the so-called radical left. Writing in the opinion column of the New York Times, conservative analyst Ross Douthat (2021a; 2021b) went so far as to chastise the COVID protestors for parroting Michel Foucault's critique of biopolitics. Douthat's comments are at once strange (since when do mainstream media sources characterize any element of the right as Foucauldian?) and highly prescient. From the perspective of American conservatism, chaotic, antiestablishment protests were the prerogative of the left—that is, until they weren't.

That conservatives and progressives differ with respect to policy platforms and political envisioning goes without saying, but for over half a century one could convincingly argue that such disagreement encompassed not only political ends but also the rhetorical or discursive means of achieving those ends—both the substantive “what” and the agential “how.” In attempting to map the latter, instrumental terrain John W. Bowers et al. (2010) coined the terms “agitation” and “control,” each of which names a specific, contrasting rhetorical strategy for pursuing political ends. According to that division, the strategy of agitation comprises such familiar social-movement tactics as petitioning, protesting, nonviolent resistance, and civil disobedience (22–49). Control, by contrast, tends to include typical institutional responses to social movements, such as evasion, banishment, and incorporation (55–72). As species of tactics agitation and control are not necessarily tied to any particular set of ideological positions; nevertheless, as Bowers et al. suggest, outgroups tend to favor the strategy of agitation while ingroups often rely on tactics designed to control those groups considered to lie somewhere outside or on the margins of the mainstream. What distinguishes American political culture in this regard is that, for many decades and irrespective of the questionable plausibility of claims to institutional power, conservatives gravitated toward the strategy of control, and progressives or left-liberals tended to privilege the strategy of agitation. Surveys of the various marches on Washington, DC, for example, reveal that progressive or left-liberal causes (e.g., women's suffrage, civil rights, environmental protection, gay and lesbian rights, etc.) vastly outnumber conservative ones (e.g., taxation, abortion, gun rights, etc.) (Barber 2002). What's more, conservative social movements on the whole are comparatively rare, and when they do emerge they tend to form as countermovements (Warnick 1977, 1982).²

For much of the twentieth century, conservative publications and talking heads seemed to relish in directing invectives toward the left's embrace of agitation. In an article about the student-led March for Our Lives, which in 2018 demonstrated in Washington, DC, and other cities in support of legislation to prevent gun violence in the United States, The Federalist attempted to dissociate civic responsibility from critical democratic praxis. David Harsanyi (2018) writes, “For starters, chanting crowds of emotionally charged protestors aren't exhibiting any great American virtue. Mass protests aren't only often antithetical to the aesthetics of republicanism, but sometimes they undermine its purpose, as well.” Conservatives were no kinder in 2011 when they derided the Occupy Wall Street protesters as a mass of dirty hippies (Apple 2011).³ Even criticism of specific political figures tends to center on their alleged ties to agitational groups and activities. Former President Barack Obama was widely criticized on the right for his role as a “community organizer.” Indeed, the conservative Fox News talk-show host Sean Hannity cemented his national reputation by attacking Barack Obama for the latter's alleged connections to 1960s radical protest elements like the Weather Underground's Bill Ayers and the Black Panther Party (Massing 2009). These and countless other examples demonstrate clearly, if anecdotally, that while conservatives may very well respond to the content of their progressive opponents’ positions, they are also keen on formulating their counterstatements as reactions to the typical form of the left's rhetoricopolitical strategies. At the risk of oversimplifying, conservatives maintain that the politics of agitation is for hippies and Jacobins but not the work of genuine, good faith participatory democracy. This is not to deny, however, their use of what Kenneth Burke ([1937] 1984: 260–62) describes as the “Heads I Win, Tails You Lose” tactic when seeking to defend the rare instance of conservative agitation, as in the case of the Tea Party movement in 2009.⁴ But conservatives are much more inclined than progressives to make arguments that center on strategic and tactical form. Progressives who oppose conservative movements like the Tea Party are much less likely to attack them at the level of praxis but rather encourage a mirroring of strategies when doing so would potentially prove to their advantage (see, for instance, Shahid 2016). By contrast, conservatives who may be sympathetic to the particular ideas propagated by right-wing agitation have often been hostile to the form.⁵

The last decade has witnessed a drastic shift in the conservative plan of action: the rapid adoption of rhetoricopolitical strategies that, in their eschewal of traditional institutional mechanisms for pursuing change, were heretofore heterodox to the American conservative movement. Rather than invent novel forms of conservative antiestablishment politics, however, American conservatives have largely drawn from the theory and practice of agitational politics as developed and deployed by the progressive left, including tactics that, in the not-too-distant past, were vociferously rejected by the ensemble of prominent conservative figures and organizations. In particular, American conservatism is being reconfigured by newly emergent and energized right-wing tendencies (or flows) whose modus operandi primarily consists in the appropriation of certain agitational strategies: namely, radicalism as ethos or self-understanding, identity politics, and accelerationism. While lacking in infrastructure, both organizational and financial, these groups have been more or less successful in resignifying for mainstream conservatism the ethicopolitical valence of agitational rhetorical strategies. In the case of the above strategies, specifically, where the sign on the door had previously read “verboten” it now reads “authorized” or nearly so. How else to explain the appearance in the Claremont Institute's The American Mind of a “salvo” calling on conservatives to “[mine] the Maoist Playbook” for “strategy and tactics” (Roa 2021)? This article seeks to make analytical sense of this sea change, first, by tracing in broad strokes the history of American conservatism's antagonism to much of what passes for agitational politics. It then examines the right's seemingly abrupt adoption of three species of agitational tactics (radicalism, identity politics, and accelerationism), which until recently would have warranted excommunication from the conservative movement. It concludes by discussing the implications of this shift, in terms of what it means both for the future of conservative discourse and for leftist groups who must now take into account the possibility of having to outmaneuver their own strategies on the rhetoricopolitical battlefield.

The Rhetorical Gatekeepers of Conservatism

In 1950 the famed essayist and cultural critic Lionel Trilling ([1950] 2008: 14) provided a novel reinterpretation of the liberal triumphalism of early utilitarians: “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation”—at the time a somewhat surprisingly widespread sentiment.⁶ Such liberal triumphalism, it should be noted, preceded by more than a decade the disastrous 1964 presidential campaign of Republican conservative hopeful Barry Goldwater, whose loss to Lyndon B. Johnson marked a humiliating defeat, both for Goldwater and the conservative platform.⁷ By that time liberalism's dominance of the Western ideological terrain was so sweeping that it was able to exercise power over the shape and direction of the then-fledgling conservative movement. According to a number of popular scholarly accounts (e.g., Nash 1998; Schoenwald 2001; Gottfried 2007; and Hawley 2016), both the Republican Party and conservative intelligentsia seized on Goldwater's electoral massacre as an opportunity to consolidate their power vis-à-vis the emerging conservative identity. They accomplished this, in large part, by playing on the popular perception that right-wing extremists had effectively commandeered the party, attributing Goldwater's potentially historic loss to the activity of such elements. Although Goldwater—who famously remarked that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”—bore some of the blame for these perceptions, another, perhaps more significant, contributing factor was the growing influence of the John Birch Society (JBS), an “extremist anticommunist organization” (Schulz 2006) of between 20,000 and 100,000 members and “the premier example of right-wing activism in the early 1960s” (Schoenwald 2001: 62).⁸ With an “inherent distrust of the political system” and a propensity for “publicity stunts” the John Birch Society was firmly grounded in an agitational style (91). After the election, William F. Buckley Jr., founder of the influential conservative magazine National Review, stepped up his criticism of the organization, writing an article asking how JBS members could accept “such paranoid and unpatriotic drivel” (quoted in Felzenberg 2017: 180). Buckley's censuring of agitational elements of the right was not limited to the JBS, and in subsequent years he and National Review would go on to play an important role in policing and defining the boundaries of conservative orthodoxy, excluding or purging from the conservative ranks radical groups such as the Birchers, paleoconservatives, Objectivists, and the like but also individuals like Mel Bradford, Revilo P. Oliver, and Murray Rothbard, to name but a few (Gottfried 2007: 115–24; Gottfried and Spencer 2015; Hawley 2016: 37–73; and Linker 2017).

The coalescence of the conservative movement around the rejection of aversive politics would gain significant ground and an institutional foothold in the 1968 presidential election. Just four years after Goldwater's defeat, Richard Nixon revitalized the Republican Party, narrowly beating out former Vice President Hubert Humphrey on a campaign strategy designed explicitly as a repudiation of radical agitation (King and Anderson 1971). In the wake of social protests such as the national antiwar movement, the 1965 Los Angeles Watts Rebellion (or riots), and the massive demonstration at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the Nixon campaign successfully blamed the upheaval on the Democratic Party and its activist base while articulating Nixon as both the “law and order” alternative and the representative of conservatism as such (Mayer 2001). Indeed, Nixon's reactive electoral strategy of “law and order” functioned as a not-so-subtle dual reference: while it negatively evoked what conservatives perceived as the socially disruptive effects of liberal social policy, in particular those stemming from the civil rights movement and Johnson's Great Society, positively the slogan served to shore up the conservative identity as a politics grounded in state-backed coercion and control.⁹ As Elizabeth Hinton (2016: 7) maintains, this rhetorically coded strategy would remain politically potent for the right for subsequent decades, especially during the Reagan administration, contributing in no small part to the federal government's commitment to anticrime legislation, embodied in particular in the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. Equally important, however, is what this strategy of articulation reveals about the evolution of conservatism's identity as a rhetoricopolitical strategy: that the rejection of agitation and the cementing of the conservative/control pairing are not necessary functions either of psychology or argumentative synergy but the result both of historical contingency and the responsiveness of conservative actors to discredit and demonize aversive strategies within and outside their ideological sphere. For many decades it proved to be a more or less effective strategy, both electorally and financially. In coordination with progressivism's alternative method, it shaped the future of American national politics.

The success of the conservative establishment in policing agitational elements began to show signs of wear during George W. Bush's second term, primarily as a consequence of protracted military operations in the Middle East, and accelerated, reaching something of a fever pitch, in 2015–16 with the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump and the rise of the “alternative right” or “alt-right.” In various ways both of these elements embraced an aversive style of politics, essentially breaking with conservatism's preferred strategy of control and thereby challenging the unspoken rules of engagement that had come to define liberal triumphalism in the latter half of the twentieth century. Conservatism was keenly aware of this heterodox affront, as well as of the existential threat it posed to the established rhetoricopolitical terrain if left unchecked. Buckley's National Review, in semicoordination with the now-defunct Weekly Standard (a “redoubt of neoconservatism”), super PACs, and a number of prominent Republican politicians like Lindsey Graham and former presidential nominee Mitt Romney, led the counteroffensive.¹⁰ Although leveled at Trump and his base, critical remarks such as those made by National Review's then-editor Jonah Goldberg (2015) could just have easily applied to the cultural left—or, for that matter, the Old Right of Goldwater and George Wallace. On that view, so-called Trumpism was nothing more than “catharsis masquerading as principle, venting and resentment pretending to be some kind of higher argument.” Goldberg, in fact, compares Trump supporters to “Jews, blacks, college kids, Lena Dunham fans, and countless other partisan slices of the electorate who reflexively vote on strict party lines for emotional or irrational reasons”—precisely the types or personae that conservatives suggest make up the bulk of cultural radicalism.

Many Republican voters, however, were drawn to Trump's presidential campaign precisely because of its agitational brand of political rhetoric and expressed open resentment toward the efforts of conservative celebrities and organizations to police and control the rank and file. #NRORevolt, for instance, became a trending Twitter hashtag during both the primary and general elections, as many right-wing users lambasted the magazine—and “Conservative Inc.” more generally—for its triangulation with the radical left, observed most conspicuously in the attempt to purge the Republican Party of Trumpism. Representative of this position was the Twitter user who posted under the handle Hateful Heretic (a right-wing evangelical who, at the time, was associated with the avowed white nationalist media website The Right Stuff):

While the weakening of conservatism that had characterized and followed Bush's second term created a space for the reemergence of an illiberal or dissident right, the aversive style embraced by that right-wing constituency further eroded the institutional bulwark that had, for decades, more or less ensured the rhetorical effectivity of conservatism's strategy of control. This oppositional element was and remains a potentially existential threat to conservatism for the simple fact that since its founding conservatism has primarily identified itself in strategic (rather than ideological) terms as consisting in the maintenance of the status quo and the inhibition or postponement of radical change. Buckley's 1955 mission statement for National Review is illustrative in this regard, defining conservatism as “stand[ing] athwart history, yelling Stop.” In adopting a rhetoricopolitical strategy of agitation, the emergent right-wing opposition to conservatism pursues an ill-defined, big-tent ideology of change—if not with respect to the organization of society as a whole, then, at least in connection with the arrangement of right-of-center politics.

Rules for Alt-Right Radicals

The first and most encompassing agitational strategy employed by the illiberal right consists of the various tactics of confrontation and compromise associated with community organizing. Famously elaborated in Saul Alinsky's 1971,Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer, these tactics are summed up in explicit action-oriented statements such as “Ridicule is man's most potent weapon” or “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” A community activist and political theorist, Alinsky was a prominent figure in the world of grassroots activism. His Rules for Radicals elaborated on lessons learned from his work in community organizing (from 1939 to 1965) and adapted them for a new generation of radicals (Trolander 1982). Indeed, two major Democratic presidential candidates could be linked to that radical milieu: Hillary Clinton, who wrote her senior Wellesley College thesis about Alinsky's mobilizing model, and Barack Obama, whose own work as a community organizer in Chicago put him in contact with activist circles trained in the use of Alinsky's methods (Matthews 2016).

For decades, Alinsky and his work were roundly and widely demonized by conservatives. Prominent politicians like Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, and Ben Carson, along with conservative celebrities such as Andrew Breitbart, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and countless others, attacked both Obama and Clinton for their association with Alinsky's tactics. Alinsky became such a bête noire among conservatives that they would invoke his name as an epithet with which to browbeat one another vis-à-vis alleged abdications of “conservative values.” Giuliani, for instance, accused Newt Gingrich of acting “like Alinsky” when Newt criticized Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney (Mak 2012), while David Brooks (2010) lamented that “the Tea Partiers have adopted the tactics of the New Left,” specifically identifying a Tea Party founder's respect for Alinsky. The communications strategist John Feehery (2010) attacked the Tea Party and conservative provocateurs like James O'Keefe in the conservative publication the Daily Caller, writing, “When so-called conservatives adopt tactics of the left—like Alinsky's ‘Rule [sic] for Radicals’—they help further the cause of the left, which is social instability.” Feehery's remarks crystalize the establishment conservative opinion that agitation and conservative ideology are fundamentally incompatible. But they also reveal that the disagreement between conservatism and right-wing populism turns on the issue of tactics and overall strategy as much as on ideological matters.

Right-wing critics of mainstream conservatism, however, have generally balked at National Review et al.’s attempt to police the boundaries of the right. Although that unwillingness appears in piecemeal fashion throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, it was only with the emergence of the Tea Party in the 2000s and the alt-right in the 2010s that Alinsky's rules were seized upon as an explicit plan of action. The Tea Party–associated nonprofit organization FreedomWorks self-published a brief adaptation of Alinsky's work, Rules for Patriots, which it distributed throughout its entire network. Similarly, an early Tea Party leader, Michael Patrick Leahy (2009), made available sixteen rules for conservative radicals based on lessons from Saul Alinsky, the Tea Party movement, and the Apostle Paul. Even the infamous Andrew Anglin (2016), publisher of the white-nationalist website Daily Stormer, implored his readers to look into Alinsky's works, adding, “A lot of the strategy of this site is based on it.” The blog Northern Reaction (2016) refitted rules for radicals as “Rules For Alt-Right Radicals,” examining each tactic and pointing to famous members of the alt-right who were particularly good at implementing them. Kurt Schlichter, a commentator at Town Hall, wrote an article simply titled “Shoving Alinsky's Rules for Radicals Right Back in the Left's Ugly Face.” This about-face has not been entirely lost on the progressive left. As Josh Harkinson (2017) wrote in Mother Jones, “Begrudging respect for Alinsky and the leftist protest tactics he inspired is nothing new on the right. . . . But the alt-right appears to have really taken Alinsky's strategic thinking to heart.” And an opinion piece in Politico identifies Alinsky's influence behind the Canadian trucker protests of vaccine mandates (Shafer 2022).¹¹ The right's embrace of Alinsky's rules, in other words, goes well beyond the long-standing American tradition of partisan hypocrisy, which alternately embraces and criticizes tactics according to what is expedient in any given situation. Conservatism's long-standing opposition to an ethos of Alinsky radicalism seemed a genuine article of political faith and identity. Its recent acceptance as a kind of strategic creed, one that comprises an operative ethos or rhetoricopolitical self-understanding, seems to transcend the charge that it is nothing more than a politically convenient heel turn. Rather, it would appear as though it signals a thoroughgoing shift in its modus operandi, one that has exposed deep fault lines among conservatives.

White Identity Politics and Straight Pride Parades

“Identity politics” names another tactical arena that while traditionally anathema to conservative thought and practice is increasingly affirmed by its right-wing critics. Self-described conservative feminist Wendy McElroy (2004) provides a rather standard conservative critique of identity politics:

Grounded in the classical liberal ideology of Lockean natural rights theory, conservative opposition to identity politics has enjoyed such acceptance among conservative personalities that, much like “Alinsky,” it functions as what Richard Weaver ([1953] 1985: 222–23) calls a devil term—a vague term of revulsion that nevertheless possesses inherent potency. Ever the bastion of establishment conservatism, National Review almost routinely invokes the specter of “identity politics” in a bid to bolster any number of domestic policy preferences. It has used the term as an incipient proposition in support of the law enforcement practice of stop-and-frisk (National Review2013), as well as in defense of the Western literary canon (NR Symposium 2009). But it has also deployed it as a means of repudiating climate change activism (Kurtz 2013) and undocumented immigration (Hanson 2011). Despite mainstream conservatism's explicit rejection of “identity politics,” many on the left have long accused conservatives of tacitly engaging in de facto white identity politics or “dog whistling.” Nevertheless, conservatives have generally maintained an implicit policy discouraging explicit appeals to white identity. National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru (1999), for instance, excoriated Pat Buchanan for his heterodox views on identity:

The article effectively “excommunicated Buchanan from the conservative movement” (Mann 2019). But this was in no way an exception to the norm but rather an instantiation of the implicit policy among conservatives not to make race-based arguments—at least not publicly.

For some time, then, the notion of a conservative variant of identity politics served as a reductio ad absurdum. That is, conservatives would occasionally use it as a stratagem by which to highlight the supposed ridiculousness of minority identity politics. But that use of “identity politics” never amounted to a serious agenda. A classic example of such bad-faith usage of “identity politics” is the widespread practice among conservative groups of hosting “affirmative action” bake sales, which charge customers differently on the basis of race (Associated Press 2003). Another example of this is the suggestion of a “straight pride” parade, presented as an argument against gay pride parades (Alfia and Lipton 2007). Summing up a standard conservative position in 1999, Howard Kainz (1999: 40) writes, “If, for example, heterosexuals were to band together and have a ‘heterosexual pride’ (or ‘straight’ pride’) parade, it would be recognized immediately as dumb and ridiculous.” Conservative commentator Stacey Dash called for the end of Black History Month in 2016, saying, “If it were the other way around, we would be up in arms. It's a double standard. . . . There shouldn't be a Black History Month. We're Americans, period” (Chasmar 2016). The common left-liberal or progressive retort that, given the cultural status accorded to white historical figures, “every month is white history month,” does not register in a conservative frame. For conservatives, venerated white historical figures are never explicitly celebrated for their whiteness. Across the ideological spectrum, the very idea of an overtly white, heterosexual, male version of identity politics was regarded as toxic. For conservatives, the notion was sufficiently toxic to be mockingly deployed for derisive effect.

The dissident right, however, has actively and explicitly embraced identity politics, often making reference to its leftist origins. Invoking European nationalist movements, Richard Spencer, for instance, characterizes his beliefs as “identitarian” and frequently references Israel's “ethnostate” to justify white nationalism (Rosenberg 2017). In the Breitbart article “An Establishment Conservative's Guide to the Alt-Right,” Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos (2016) compare the alt-right to various forms of leftist identity politics: “The alt-right do not hold a utopian view of the human condition: just as they are inclined to prioritise the interests of their tribe, they recognise that other groups—Mexicans, African-Americans or Muslims—are likely to do the same.” They contrast “white identitarians” with the “real hatred” of neo-Nazis.

In 2019, alt-right connected groups hosted a straight pride parade in Boston, embracing what was once conservative's reductio ad absurdum. The website of the parade's organizers is virtually indistinguishable from what one would imagine reading on a website devoted to LGBTQ issues:

The resemblance is so uncanny that it would be easy to read the whole parade as a parody or form of overidentification, but it is more accurate to read the event as having what Woods and Hahner (2019: 214) call “ironic distanciation.” Despite a sometimes-mocking tone, the parade's speeches suggest an earnest element—as seen, for example, in references to particular alt-right political projects such as banning drag queens from speaking at public schools.¹² Conservative pundit Tomi Lahren highlights the dual nature of the parade, as both joke and something that should demand respect:

It is unclear why “leftists” should respect a parade that is essentially a parody of their values—even if an ambiguously inflected one. But regardless of any rhetorical deficit vis-à-vis the left, the dissident right's ironic distanciation of left-wing discourse about identity seems to have gained traction among large segments of the population, especially when it comes to race. In 2018, a poll showed that a plurality of Trump voters supported the creation of a white history month (Public Policy Polling 2018). And from late 2017 to 2018 the catchphrase “It's ok to be white” became the basis of flier campaigns across American college campuses (Sonnad 2017).¹³

Accelerationism: From the Christchurch Mosque Shootings to the January 2021 United States Capitol Attack

It seems almost self-evident that Marxism is anathema to American conservatism. After all, the conservative coalition comprised three major voting blocs—free marketers, Christians, and foreign policy hawks. Opposition to the Soviet Union, and Marxism more generally, united this diverse coalition. Many prominent conservative figures were intimately dedicated to opposing Marxism. Nixon served on the House Un-American Activities Committee and became a household name for his high-profile prosecution of accused communist Alger Hiss. Ronald Reagan famously referred to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire” and introduced the Reagan doctrine, a policy of supporting anticommunist insurgents wherever they might be (but particularly in Latin America and the Middle East) (see Scott 1996). One might think the ability of Marxism to function as a unifying tool would fade following the end of the cold war, but it did not. Conservatives treated “Marxism” as an empty signifier, linking it to any policy or ideology that they opposed.

Right about the time that Francis Fukuyama (1992) was proclaiming the ascendency of market-based democracy, conservatives began raising the specter of “cultural Marxism.” Popularized by Bill Lind of the Free Congress Foundation, cultural Marxism is the idea that political correctness and leftist interest in identity stems from the philosophy of the Frankfurt school. Lind cites a variety of individuals little known outside the academy, like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse as responsible for 1960s-era radicalism and its modern academic form of critical theory, which Lind (2000) describes as follows: “What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down.” Lind and others connect Marxism and the identity politics of “radical feminism, the women's studies departments, the gay studies departments, the black studies departments” and warns that they threaten to “destroy ‘everything that we have ever defined as our freedom and our culture.’” Anyone familiar with radical Marxist feminists and gay Black studies departments would know that they were frequently waging internecine battles, rather than uniting over a set of shared principles. The thing that united them was conservatives’ opposition to them and their opposition to conservatism. The specter of resurgent Marxism was frequently raised by conservatives. As one liberal pundit put it, “Labeling any program seeking to use public resources to help poor people or provide opportunity to more Americans as socialist has been a tactic employed by many Republicans and no small number of conservative Democrats over the years. It has at times been quite effective” (Mitchell [2009] 2011). Conservatives labeled Obama's Affordable Care Act as Marxist, despite it bearing striking resemblance to plans proposed by Nixon, Mitt Romney, and the conservative Heritage Foundation (Reich 2013). As reported by NPR, the “Film Your Marxist Professor” Facebook page has served as a platform to attack academics with leftist political views, part of a long-standing conservative push (and anxiety) to weaken Marxism's influence on academia (Kamenetz 2018). One idea, however, has moved from Marx's original texts through academia and directly into the language of the alt-right: accelerationism.

Although Marx did not explicitly use the German equivalent of “accelerationism” or even “accelerate” in his own revolutionary writings (or Marx writing with Engels), Marx is commonly regarded as the originator of the idea of accelerationism (see, for instance, Fisher 2014; Pasquinelli 2014; Land 2017b).¹⁴ Accelerationism holds that capitalism, or some processes associated with it such as technological change, should or can only be surpassed through its acceleration. Rather than attempting to resist capitalist logic—a futile undertaking on this view—accelerationists argue that anticapitalist activists should pursue radical social change through drastically intensifying the contradictory tendencies inherent in the capitalist mode of production. It is an idea that resembles that of the “fatal strategy” of “ecstasy” in Jean Baudrillard's ([1978] 2007: 65) middle work, whereby “a system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, by forcing it into an excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal amortization.” Once capitalism controls every aspect of the planet, it will create conditions for its own downfall and the rise of a new socioeconomic and political order. Coined as a neologism by the critical theorist Benjamin Noys (2010: 5), the term “accelerationism” names a certain trend of unorthodox Marxist thought that begins to take shape in certain French poststructuralist critiques of capital in the 1970s, in Baudrillard, to be sure, but also in Jean-François Lyotard and the collaborative work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek's “#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics” (2013) traces a similar trajectory but asserts, “It is Marx, along with [Nick] Land, who remains the paradigmatic accelerationist thinker.” A complicated figure, Land's (1992, 2011; Ansell-Pearson et al. 1996) early work on the French philosopher George Bataille and technological postmodernity was relatively uncategorizable in the context of the left-right spectrum. As cofounder of the interdisciplinary research group the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), much of Land's work during the 1990s contributed to what philosophers Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (2011: 6) describe as “a diverse group of thinkers who experimented in conceptual production by welding together a wide variety of sources: futurism, technoscience, philosophy, mysticism, numerology, complexity theory, and science fiction, among others.” It was while in this intellectual milieu that Land would begin to develop the basic ideas and concepts of what Noys and company would later refer to as accelerationism. By 1998, however, Land had left professional academia, resigning from his lecturer position at the University of Warwick, and in the 2010s he began self-publishing online a sequence of essays that elaborated and expanded upon the principles of what Land would term the Dark Enlightenment (Mackay 2012; Haider 2017).¹⁵ Also referred to as the neo-reactionary movement (NRx), the Dark Enlightenment can perhaps best be described as an antiegalitarian, technologically deterministic futurism that opposes authoritarian forms of government to democracy (see Burrows 2018). During this time, Land (2013, 2017a) effectively associated himself and his NRx-brand philosophy with the then newly emergent alt-right, tweeting the white nationalist catchphrase “It's ok to be white” and writing online pieces in support of the concept of human biodiversity (the belief in racial IQ differences). Significantly, it was also at this time that Land authored an essay “A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism,” where he outlined a number of philosophers who, on his view, express anticipatory accelerationist attitudes.

Irrespective of Land's intentions or political views, his connection to the Dark Enlightenment and the alt-right seems to have functioned as a pass-through point in mediating the migration of accelerationism to the illiberal right ecosystem. Writing for the Atlantic, Rosie Gray (2017) argues that Land's ideas “provided a structure of political theory for parts of the white-nationalist movement calling itself the alt-right.” Representing at once the most extreme case of this influence and Exhibit A is almost certainly Brenton Harrison Tarrant, the man who conducted New Zealand's Christchurch mosque shootings in 2019. In a manifesto titled “The Great Replacement,” which was published online and prior to the attacks, Tarrant (2019) wrote, “A vote for a radical candidate that opposes your values and incites agitation or anxiety in your own people works far more in your favour than a vote for a milquetoast political candidate that has no ability or wish to enact radical change.” This is classic accelerationism, subordinating all concerns, even one's own short-term political interests, to the goal of “gaming the game,” of creating chaos within a sociopolitical order in order to bring about its ruin. But Tarrant is not alone among right-wing extremists in appealing to accelerationist arguments and justifications. The American neo-Nazi James Mason, whose newsletter Siege proposed sabotage, mass killings, and assassinations of high-profile targets so as to destabilize and to collapse the system, likewise drinks deeply of the accelerationist waters (see Poulter 2020). Neither of these figures, however, is all that exceptional in his views. Organizations ranging from the Anti-Defamation League (2019), Vox (Beauchamp 2019), and the Brookings Institute (Byman 2020) consistently note a growing trend among right-wing, if not outright neo-Nazi, groups of explicitly endorsing terrorist accelerationism. What is more, the adoption of this ideology has coincided with a sharp increase in politically motivated violence, to such an extent, in fact, that far-right groups now commit the majority of terrorist acts in the United States (Jones et al. 2020). Accelerationist thinking has gained such a stronghold among right-wing dissidents that Greg Johnson (2019), the editor of the white-nationalist publication Counter-Currents, wrote an article denouncing terrorism in an effort to persuade fellow travelers to abandon it.

Although former President Donald Trump was in all likelihood not a classic accelerationist—and probably did not read much if any Nick Land or Karl Marx—during his presidency he did adhere to a strategy of pursuing victory through chaos. A quick Google search reveals article titles such as “Chaos and Confusion Is Trump's Strategy” (Pace 2020), “What If the Chaos Is Strategic?” (Nazaryan 2019), “Donald Trump's Survival Strategy: Chaos, Diversions, and Lily-Livered Republicans” (Cassidy 2018), and “Donald Trump's Re-Election Strategy Couldn't Be Clearer: Chaos Covering Up Cruelty” (Kroll 2019). To be clear, the chaos discussed in these and other related articles primarily appertains to erratic decision-making and the spreading of misinformation. However, Trump's role in fomenting the 2021 attack against the US Capitol does hew closely to the logic of accelerationism. After losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, Trump put pressure both on his attorney general, William Barr, and the top election official in Georgia to overturn the election (Sullivan and Martina 2021; Brown 2021). When these efforts failed, Trump spoke at an event, in Washington, DC, seemingly designed to create maximum chaos. Shortly after Trump's remarks, attendees assaulted the Capitol Building. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, the director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, makes a connection between the accelerationism of the January 6 insurrection and Hitler's beer-hall putsch (Taub and Bennhold 2021).

The Stolen Playbook of Insurgent Conservatism

Radicalism, identity politics, accelerationism—all were strategically and tactically anathema to the coherent postwar ideology called American conservatism and for that reason energetically policed by the organized conservative movement in an effort to determine the boundaries of acceptable right-wing thought and discourse in the United States. Although there is a strong tradition of antiprogressive thought in American history that stands outside the mainstream conservative movement, until recently American conservativism had proven resilient and particularly effective in marginalizing dissident right-wing ideologies and movements, “bestowing pariah status on those that [threatened] to move the conservative movement in a dangerous direction” (Hawley 2016: 40). For a number of seismic sociohistorical and technological reasons (e.g., the end of the Cold War, changing demographics, the widescale adoption of the internet) that ability to set and maintain the parameters of right-wing acceptability has begun to break down, whence the twenty-first-century rise or reemergence of illiberal or antiprogressive right-wing voices. These irruptive voices have in turn opened the gates not only to ideas hostile to organized conservatism but also, and perhaps more importantly, a range of agitational strategies that by their very nature threaten to undermine key civic and political institutions, including but not limited to American conservatism. Unmoored by the rhetorical and organizational strictures of conservatism—which in the main calls for a kind of stasis or tide stemming—dissident right-wing currents have increasingly and in the main looked to the assertoric left for strategic and tactical inspiration.

For much of the twentieth century, the progressive left's embrace of agitational politics resulted in considerable strategic flexibility. The ability to operate rhetorically within and outside (and in between) civic and political institutions allowed the heterogeneous left to engage in politics as dissensus one day while appealing to the rational norms of communicative action the next, that is, to have its Rancièrian ([1995] 1999) cake and eat it with Habermasian ([1976] 1979) universal pragmatics, too. That dual-track approach has not been without its risks. One could argue, for example, that a significant amount of the infighting on the left is traceable to differences as to which track is superior or should win out in any given situation on any given issue. As detailed above, the American conservative movement was not above exploiting the tendency among certain voices on the left to pursue agitational strategies as a rhetorical opportunity to paint the Democratic Party itself as the party of Jacobins and hippies. Beyond rhetorical sleights of hand, which are of a piece with partisan politics, the rise of the dissident right raises a more pressing concern for progressive politics—namely, the appropriation of agitational pathways and strategic maps once theorized, forged, and actualized by the left. Once upon a time, in the mid- to late twentieth century, the left could engage in strategies that poked holes in the institutional foundations of civility, intersubjective agreement, and rational deliberation, confident that the right would be too busy mending the fences and policing its own ranks to follow it through the cracks. What the twenty-first century has revealed is that what once appeared as a probability bordering on certainty—namely, the right's nonmimicry of the left's aversive, agitational tactics—now appears as an ever-weakening contingency, the result of a provisional articulation of Cold War geopolitics, technological development, a particular social milieu, various organizational alignments, and much else besides. In a post-Trump, post-Brexit, post-Orbán world, this ecosystem looks much more fragile than neoconservative saber-rattling of the Bush-era aughts led casual observers and committed activists to believe.

This is not to say that the path forward for the left should involve abandoning its historical agitational strategies. Nevertheless, as leftist social ideas on gender, sexuality, drug use, pornography, and identity continue to achieve cultural ascendency, conservatives will grow more and more alienated from the institutions that maintain the acceptability of these ideas and treat the rhetorical modes tied to these institutions as suspect at best. History suggests that feelings of dislocation from the social mainstream will give rise to increasingly agitational strategies from the right. The left may find itself increasingly in the position of advocating for civility in the face of chaotic behavior from the right, as it did during 2021 US Capitol attack.

Acknowledgments

Both authors contributed equally to this article. Author order was determined according to the initiatory rites of the Ordo Templi Orientis. They wish to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors for their feedback during its developments, as well as Andrew Kuiper and Kathleen Stoneman for their useful comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

References