Can You Fight Catastrophism Without Catastrophism?

A question prompted by Damon Linker's excellent taxonomy of the American radical right

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My friend and fellow Substacker Damon Linker had an excellent piece in The New York Times this past weekend on the varieties of extremism that have taken firmer and firmer hold of certain key citadels of the intellectual right. He divides them broadly according to a threefold taxonomy:

• First are the “Claremont Catastrophists” associated with the west-coast Straussian stronghold of the Claremont Institute, who have gone from decrying the progressive assault on the constitution from the early 20th century down to the present, to concluding that the constitution is effectively a dead letter and that therefore a Caesar is needed to restore order and unity by force since self-government has become impossible.

• Second are the “Christian Reverse Revolutionaries,” members of the old Christian New Right who have gone from mobilizing a presumptively moral majority to win elections and enact policies reflective of Christian moral commitments, to embracing the view that America is already a totalitarian progressive regime that needs to be overthrown entirely, by force if necessary, so that an integral Christian state can be erected in its stead.

• Finally there is the “Nietzschean Fringe,” many of them influenced by the writings of self-described fascist Costin Alamariu who, like the original fascists, want to save civilization by throwing off its shackles, embracing outlawry, violence and cruelty on the grounds that only by such means are “great” men made, such greatness being the point of civilization in the first place.

I could quibble about possible omissions from this list—the promulgators of right-wing post-humanism of the tech world, for example. Authoritarian moguls like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, powerful intellectual influences in their own right who have helped promote some key thinkers in the intellectual far right, also present an important question of who’s influencing whom. But it’s overall an excellent summary of the intellectual state of things, and I think Linker is right about the function of these intellectuals in the world where actual decisions are made, that they are “giving Republican elites permission and encouragement to do things that just a few years ago would have been considered unthinkable,” like overturning elections, ignoring court orders, and more generally undermining the very idea of law in favor of an explicitly lawless conception of “order.”

So I encourage everyone to read Linker’s excellent piece. And then, after you’ve read it, come back here, because I found something paradoxical and, ultimately, inadequate about Linker’s final paragraph, where he gestures toward—or, rather, away from—the question of what is to be done about everything he’s warning us about:

There may be little the rest of us can do about [the intellectual right’s increasing refusal to accept the possibility of losing] besides resisting the temptation to respond in kind. In that refusal, we give the lie to claims that the liberal center has tyrannical aims of its own — and demonstrate that the right’s intellectual catastrophists are really just anticipatory sore losers.

To be fair: I suspect Linker is right. Centrist liberals faced this dilemma in 2016 during the Trump campaign and after Trump’s victory, and in retrospect I think most would agree that they did not respond optimally. At the time, the feeling was that Trump really was not merely a potentially very bad president or a despicable individual but a fundamental threat to the constitutional order itself. In response, many argued that this was exactly what he was, and thereby entered a hall of mirrors where they were the catastrophists, they were the one alleging bizarre and outlandish conspiracy theories, they were the ones calling for extra-constitutional actions to save the country from an existential threat. And the only argument to make in response is that the difference is that they were right while Trump and his supporters were wrong—which is not just a pretty uncompelling response but, more importantly, is an admission that we’ve left the realm of normal politics and entered a Schmittian situation. That just made the radicals’ arguments for them, not to mention that it opened space up for left-wing radicals to claim far more intellectual space than they otherwise would have been able to do, both reasons why Linker says those who oppose the right-wing radicals should not mimic them.

It’s worth further delineating what this stance implies, though. It implies that Democrats should deal with the new House Speaker Mike Johnson like a normal politician, trying to make positive-sum deals with him while also trying to score political points against him over ways that his leadership is incompetent and his policy priorities bad. It means that if the 2024 election brings Trump back to the presidency, the Democrats should limit themselves to legal means of opposition and, if these are denied them (if, for example, the administration ignores adverse decisions by the courts, or especially if it steals an election), should resort only to non-violent extra-legal modes of opposition. And that implies further that before the radical right comes to power, it should be opposed not on the basis of an appeal to catastrophism—these right-wing radicals are trying to overthrow democracy!—but on the basis of a more “normal” appeal to the citizenry’s interests, because an appeal to catastrophism sets up a rational expectation that if the catastrophe happens, the normal rules will be suspended, which is precisely the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy you’d want to avoid making.

That, I think, is a very hard lesson for ordinary citizens or political players alike to internalize. The primary fault lines of our politics are arrayed around fundamental issues of the system itself, and pressure on those fault lines inevitably makes the system itself less stable. Indeed, even pointing to the problem arguably makes you part of the problem. Consider, in that regard, Linker’s own essay. It’s going to be shared—as it should! it’s a good essay! I’m sharing it myself!—primarily by people who are already concerned about the potential danger of right-wing radicalism, so as to substantiate their concern and convince others to share it. People who want to minimize or deny that concern will engage in whataboutism, or simply mock it for—you guessed it—it’s catastrophism! Linker’s piece, in other words, inevitably becomes a part of precisely the phenomenon it is decrying, his final warning to avoid that stance notwithstanding.

So is there anything else that one could do, on an intellectual level, in response to the catastrophists? I wonder if there might be. Perhaps you can’t beat them by joining them in the sense of joining in their catastrophism, not without increasing the likelihood of catastrophe anyway. Could you, though, beat them by joining them in some of their actual views?

That’s a question that gets discussed as a matter of practical politics all the time. President Biden is building the border wall that Trump proposed but failed to build, has embraced greater fossil fuel production, etc., and it’s become a familiar talking point from centrist friends of the administration like Matt Yglesias that Biden should be doing more to take credit for these shifts in policy rather than downplaying them in deference to the opinion of the Democratic base. Linker made similar suggestions himself recently, arguing that the Biden Administration should distinguish itself from the angry left and hunt for new votes among the minority of Republicans who abhor Trump. All of this is classic triangulation, trying to take an issue that is good for the opposition off the table by adopting their positions, and positioning yourself in the moderate center by criticizing the extremists on both sides.

But what about on a deeper emotional or philosophical level? Is there any way to blunt some of the appeal of the right-wing catastrophists by adopting some of their world view albeit in more moderate form?

It sounds crazy, I know, given how crazy some of these guys sound. It sounds, in fact, like it would bolster their appeal—even Democrats think they have a point! I can already hear people saying “are you suggesting the way to defeat the Nazis was to promote ‘moderate’ antisemites?!?” But I wonder that response doesn’t have things turned around. Most people aren’t constitutionally radical (and if they are, then there’s genuinely nothing to be done about increasing radicalism). The country has indeed changed in fundamental ways that are uncongenial to the radical right, and that is an important reason for their radicalization—but in and of itself, that should impose hard limits on their ability to succeed, because those same changes should mean they don’t have the numbers. Hence Linker’s prediction that they are preemptive sore losers. But Trump is currently polling in the lead nationally and in key swing states. The country has heard plenty about how dangerous Trump is, plus they saw him in action as president and on January 6th. Yet the right-wing radicals are punching far above their weight. Why? Probably in part because the country hasn’t changed nearly as much as liberals think it has, or behave as if it has, which can lend right-wing catastrophism an air of plausibility—or at least suggest that both sides have their crazies who cancel out. Right-wing radicals’ primary selling point to most people surely isn’t their own extremism, but the sense that they may have a point about the world despite their extremism, and the sense that the other party doesn’t see that they have a point—which is what makes them the real extremists. So maybe that’s what needs to be punctured.

An anti-catastrophist response to right-wing catastrophism, then, might not just mean refusing the take the bait. It might mean taking a “yeah, sure, everyone knows that” approach to some of what the right-wing catastrophists say. To take a specific example, it has long struck me that a core common thread between the varieties of right-wing radicalism that Linker identifies is masculinist reaction. There are lots of explanations for where this reaction is coming from, what material changes are driving it, but on an emotional level the important thing is that to far more people than have actually been radicalized, there’s a level of plausibility to the view that the world has gotten more “feminized,” or that masculinity itself has come to be treated as a kind of malady. One option for liberals is to fulminate against the awfulness of the manosphere—and it is genuinely awful, no argument from me there—then tie these right-wing radicals to that awfulness, then tie the GOP as a whole to the radicals. That’s all entirely fair, but isn’t that kind of fulmination just another variety of catastrophism? Inasmuch as there’s a penumbra of people who are not fully red-pilled but who think Jordan Peterson has some useful stuff to say, is there some value in being able to casually agree with them, rather than point out all the—completely valid!—ways in which Jordan Peterson is an obvious charlatan?

I’m not saying this approach would be some kind of panacea. It might be completely ineffective, in fact; I don’t know. But emotional triangulation of this sort would surely be cheaper than the policy triangulation of the Clinton years. If the stakes are as high as Linker thinks they are (and I agree with him there), and pointing out those stakes potentially exacerbates the problem, then the anti-radicals need to find every way they can to seem reasonable—particularly to Republicans who the folks Linker highlights are trying to radicalize with their talk of impending catastrophe. To that end, why not find a bunch of places where normies are likely to emotionally feel that the right-wing radicals are onto something, even if they go too far, and . . . agree with the normies?

It seems to me to be worth trying. And if liberals can’t do that, doesn’t that also implicitly suggest that the radicals kind of have a point?