Trumpism isn’t conservative, and saying this is still important
Description
Episode Summary
Even though they don’t intend to, many people who oppose Donald Trump are unintentionally helping him by saying that his authoritarian policies are actually conservative.
It’s obviously true that both reactionary authoritarianism and conservatism are right-of-center political philosophies, but they are definitely not the same thing: Conservatives want to keep things how they are; authoritarians want to centralize power and destroy dissent. That means then that when you label them as the same, you’re engaging in the exact same kind of error that Joe McCarthy did when he equated communism and liberalism.
But it’s not just promoting inaccuracy to say that conservatism and authoritarianism are the same. It’s making the job of the authoritarians much easier. That’s because extremist movements throughout history, including Islamists, have frequently used a propaganda technique called “entryism” to disguise their radical agenda in the rhetoric of more mainstream political ideologies.
Robert O. Paxton is one of many historians who have noted that 20th century fascist regimes relied upon conservative voters and parties to open the gates to power to them because they didn’t have enough votes on their own.
In this episode, I’m joined by former conservative radio host Charlie Sykes to talk about all of this in the current moment. We also discuss the right wing’s free speech ruse, how authoritarianism has always been present within the modern American right, and how Republican consultants promoted extremism within their party until it became a monster that they could no longer control.
There’s no doubt whatsoever that the pre-Trump Republican elites bear responsibility for encouraging the growth of authoritarianism within their party, but it’s still important that we avoid telling conservative Americans that Trump’s dictatorial policies are the same as theirs. Joe Manchin is a conservative. Donald Trump is an authoritarian.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
08:23 — Two political strands within the Republican party
13:26 — How extremist groups hide themselves within mainstream ones using ‘entryism’
18:28 — Private actors versus government censorship
23:05 — Did liberals give up on persuasion after same-sex marriage rightfully won?
26:10 — Charlie’s and Matt’s encounters with right-wing extremism during their Republican years
31:44 — How Republican campaign operatives encouraged racism and conspiracism
37:34 — The criminalization of Christianity narrative
41:24 — Final thoughts
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So, today’s topic that we are going to be discussing is, what I’m calling the rate Republican free speech hoax.
And it is something that has been going on for many decades now. And both you and I came out of the world of right wing media. and so we’re going to get a little bit inside baseball today in a way that you don’t typically get to do on MSNBC or other places, I think, right? But I want to go behind the curtain a bit because one of the, key points about Trumpism and the far right tradition of reaction that he comes out of is that.
They also lied to people like you and me, like, oh, just as much as the [00:04:00 ] voters who will vote for Trump and have no idea what he stands for. They also lied to the talk show hosts like you and the conservative bloggers, former conservative bloggers like me.
CHARLIE SYKES: Well, you know what, I’ve been thinking a lot about, the, argument that you will sometimes hear that, that Trump, that Trumpism is somehow a logical extension of American conservatism. which of course is not. It is a radical break. We, it is not conservative in any sense. It is in fact a radical right wing ideology.
But to your point, for years, and it really peaked, I think in the last couple of years, Republicans and the MAGA world dawned the cloak of being free speech absolutist, that they were the champions of it. Now, this was a reaction I think to some of the excesses that we saw in recent years, on academic university campuses. And one of the through lines, even though I described myself as a conservative, one of the through lines of a lot of [00:05:00 ] what I did and what you did as well, was to try to revivify classical liberalism that classical liberalism that was deeply invested in academic freedom and free speech.
And you had people know the absolutist like Elon Musk, who decided that this was going to be the banner that they were going to, go into the 2024 election with. That I think has been exposed as a complete and total hoax. It is one of the biggest bait and switches ever. Doesn’t mean they’re not still principal conservatives who are part of that classical liberal tradition, but people like Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, JD Vance have completely abandoned that.
And I know we’re getting ahead of ourselves, but they have embraced. A, rather ranked illiberalism, and I think you and I have ta
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