Party that supports views that are both wrong and unpopular decides democracy is the problem
By What is actually in the [Trump] indictment remains unknown, but the language Republicans are using to attack it reveals that what it says doesn’t particularly matter. Their claim that “the Left” is “weaponizing government” against the right echoes “post-liberal” ideology. This worldview explains why the right wing continues to lose ground in society despite Republican victories at the polls. The problem is not that right-wing positions are unpopular, post-liberal thinkers insist, it’s that the “left” has captured the nation’s institutions.
They argue that the ideas that underpin democracy—equality before the law, separation of church and state, academic freedom, a market-driven economy, free speech—have undermined virtue. These values are “liberal” values because they are based on the idea of the importance of individual freedom from an oppressive government, and they are at the heart of American democracy.
But post-liberal thinkers say that liberalism’s defense of individual rights has destroyed the family, communities, and even the fundamental differences between men and women, throwing society into chaos. They propose to restore the values of traditional Christianity, which would, they believe, restore traditional family structures and supportive communities, and promote the virtue of self-sacrifice as people give up their individualism for their children (their worldview utterly rejects abortion).
The position of those embracing a post-liberal order is a far cry from the Reagan Republicans’ claim to want small government and free markets. The new ideologues want a strong government to enforce their religious values on American society, and they reject those of both parties who support democratic norms—for it is those very norms they see as destructive. They urge their leaders to “dare to rule.”
Those who call for a new post-liberal order want to “reconquer public institutions all over the United States,” as Christopher Rufo put it after Florida governor Ron DeSantis appointed him to the board of New College as part of a mission to turn the progressive school into a right-wing bastion. “If we can take this high-risk, high-reward gambit and turn it into a victory,” Rufo told Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times, “we’re going to see conservative state legislators starting to reconquer public institutions all over the United States.”
The idea that some imaginary entity called “the Left” (actual Left politics are incredibly marginal in 21st century America) has taken over America’s key institutions — the schools and universities, the entertainment culture, the board rooms of large corporations — is a typical right wing delusion.
What’s happened in all of these essentially conservative institutions is that right wing ideas have lost out, because those ideas are generally both empirically wrong and normatively disgusting to people who aren’t still in the grip of some reactionary atavism like evangelical Christianity. Since the latter belief system is very rapidly losing ground in contemporary America — again because it’s both false, and repulsive to the large majority of Americans — that means democracy has to go, since democracy is increasingly fatal to the hopes and dreams of the reactionary right.
The big problem of course is that the entire American constitutional system is radically rigged in deeply anti-democratic ways to favor reactionary politics in their current American incarnation, meaning authoritarian ethno-nationalist theocracy. But it’s still not rigged enough for the authoritarian ethno-nationalist theocrats to win national elections fair and square, so that means those kinds of elections have to go, along with all the other trappings of liberal democracy. And that is the real enemy to these people, as Richardson makes clear.