Donald Trump’s victory in last week’s election reinforced the impression that he and his followers have “taken over” the Republican party. The campaign saw Republicans like Liz and Dick Cheney switch sides and back the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris. Now—after Trump won a second term—the right is locked in an impassioned struggle to pressure the president-elect to appoint some Republicans to important executive roles and to freeze others out of the administration entirely.
While it is often framed in the media as a battle between principled conservatives on the one hand and an angry, non-ideological movement focused solely on personal loyalty to Trump on the other, the current civil war on the American right is only the latest chapter in a much older story.
To truly understand what’s happening today, we have to go back.
Origins of the Contemporary American Left and Right
The political parties of the 1800s would be mostly unrecognizable to most people living today. Not only did parties come and go—like the Federalist and Whig parties—the ideological makeup of early political parties would change dramatically. For instance, after the Civil War, the Democrats were the party of free trade, hard money, personal liberty, and minimal government. That changed in the 1890s when inflationist, big-government forces took over, bringing about a Democratic party that’s much closer to what we have today.
The opposition to the Democrats remained relatively fractured, however, with a shrinking group of writers like Oswald Garrison Villard and Albert Jay Nock carrying the laissez-faire individualist tradition of the American Revolution and radical abolitionists on into the twentieth century. These thinkers joined with socialists and left-wing anti-imperialists to oppose American involvement in World War I—seeing it as an unacceptable expansion of government that set a dangerous precedent for federal infringements on the American people’s liberty.
Then, as the country moved on from the war and into the Great Depression, the leftists and socialists dropped their opposition to the Washington establishment and rallied around Franklin Delano Roosevelt as he worked to implement the New Deal. At the same time, Herbert Hoover—who had, in actuality, started the government programs that FDR built on with the New Deal—left office, rebranded himself as an opponent of big government, and allied with the laissez-faire individualists to oppose FDR. And with that, what we know today as the American left and right were born.
The Original Right
The original right can best be understood as the opposite of FDR and New Deal Democrats. They opposed the quickly-expanding level of government intervention in the economy and the aggressive internationalism of the Washington establishment. Some were focused on stopping the implementation of the New Deal, while others also wanted to roll back the size of government well beyond where it had been at the start of FDR’s term. But together—as more and more of FDR’s destructive New Deal programs came to fruition—the right was unified in its rejection of the new interventionist status quo. That means the original American right-wingers were fundamentally not conservatives.
World War II upended politics, as it did with all other facets of American life. Much of the American establishment got on board with FDR’s war effort. Those on the right who instead argued that getting involved in the war would have lasting bad consequences for the American people were villainized and deplatformed—which was brutally effective in that day’s limited media environment. In his history of the topic, Murray Rothbard called the war the nadir, or low point, of the original right.
After the war, things improved for a time. Opposing foreign interventionism in the public sphere again became possible, but that began to change as the Cold War with the Soviet Union ramped up. But this time, the pressure to fall in line with Washington’s aggressive foreign policy came from other right-wingers. Some were surely tempted to give leftists a taste of their own medicine after enduring years of being slandered as fascists and Hitler apologists for daring to question the wisdom of going to war.
But at the same time, the ideological makeup of the right was on the precipice of another change.
The Newcomers
At the same time the original right was fighting FDR’s New Deal and entrance into WWII, a small group of communists were going through an intellectual transition of their own. This group were fervent followers, political allies, and, in some cases, even close personal friends of the Russian communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky.
In what was both an ideological dispute and political struggle, Trotsky split with Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin—leading to his banishment from Russia in the late 1920s. Through the 1930s, Trotsky in exile and his followers around the world argued against Stalin’s theory of “socialism in one country.” The Trotskyists advocated for so-called “proletarian internationalism,” working to bring countries under the communist banner until it remained the sole global power.
But throughout Trotsky’s exile—and especially after his death at the hands of a Soviet agent in 1940—the Trotskyist movement began to fracture. Out of this fracture, some Trotskyists like James Burnham, Max Shachtman, and others began to drift right. These thinkers came to accept some aspects of the nominally liberal capitalist countries of the West. But, importantly, they held onto their belief in the feasibility of central planning and their hatred of the Stalinist Soviet Union.
As these former Trotskyists embedded themselves in the American right, they began to swing the balance away from the original opposition to the New Deal and foreign interventionism. The group—which is now known as the neoconservatives—instead saw the interventionist programs built up by Hoover and FDR as institutions worth conserving and the USSR as a foreign menace that required a significant expansion of Washington’s war-making apparatus to oppose.
The neoconservatives and other right-wingers who aligned with their goals and priorities formed a coalition that successfully transitioned the American right into a “conservative” movement that—while a bit skeptical of some future government interventions—was in favor of keeping the many that had already been implemented in place.
This small-government in rhetoric but big-government in practice conservative movement came to dominate the American right in the decades after WWII thanks largely to conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr. and his magazine National Review.
National Review
The conservatives at National Review framed opposition to the Soviet Union as the single most important issue facing the country and anyone who disagreed with either their hawkish, anti-Soviet foreign policy or conservative acceptance of the status quo as an unhinged maniac or a devotee of the USSR. Buckley conducted an enormously successful campaign to deplatform the various factions of the right who were not on board with his program.
As members of the original right lost access to their newspaper columns and positions at magazines, they outright disappeared from public discourse. The neoconservative-Buckleyite coalition dominated American right through the sixties, seventies, and eighties.
Then, in 1991, the USSR collapsed—exactly as many of the original right-wing opponents of central planning predicted. Suddenly, the chief villain, justifying the massive military-industrial complex that had been built up in Washington, was gone. The right was again plunged into a crisis of identity.
The Return
Some conservatives, like Pat Buchanan, viewed the dissolution of the Soviet Union as the dreamed-of opportunity to return to a non-militaristic, internally-focused country. Even as the Washington establishment quickly pivoted to its next bad guy in Saddam Hussain, Pat Buchanan and his followers joined with the intellectual heirs of the original right and ushered in a resurgence of older, non-conservative ideas back to the American right.
But the progress made in the nineties was significantly set back by the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Using the historic level of national unity that appropriately swept the country after the attacks, the neoconservative George W. Bush administration launched the global war on terror. The Trotskyist roots of neoconservativism could be seen in the movement’s insistence on bringing the entire globe under their fold and their certainty that brand-new Middle Eastern countries could be built and centrally planned from the top down.
But later on in George W. Bush’s presidency, the disastrous results of the war on terror and the impossibility of the neoconservative’s global project were becoming hard to ignore. That led, again, to a revival of original right thought—seen most clearly in the early days of the Tea Party protests and the popular presidential campaign of Ron Paul.
After Barack Obama rode the public’s anti-war sentiments to the White House, only to flip and govern as a war hawk while implementing many destructive economic interventions at home, much of the Republican base was ready to move on from neoconservativism.
That is the sentiment that Trump—a marketer, not an ideologue—picked up on as he ran for president in 2016. His victory over Jeb Bush and later Hillary Clinton was not only a sign that the ideas of the original right could once again triumph over conservativism, but that they were popular enough to win the White House.
But that in no way means the age of neoconservatism is in the past. In his first term, Trump appointed many neoconservatives, Buckleyites, and big-government Republicans to important posts across the Executive branch. They successfully prevented Trump from carrying out many of the anti-establishment policies voters had sent him to the White House to implement.
The factional struggle we’re seeing today, as Trump makes his first appointments for his second term, is not some shallow, vindictive scrap based solely on personal slights from the past few years. It’s a pivotal moment in the long, convoluted history of the American right. A battle between the populist, original right-wingers who understand the damage Trump’s appointments did to his agenda last time and the establishment, big-government conservatives who again want to quietly co-opt the Trump presidency and turn it back into the same old kind of Republican administration we’ve seen for decades.
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