(Mis)understanding the Right

We don't really read anymore. We merely consume in an attempt to keep up with the current of the stream. It would be easier to hook the feed into ourselves: It would simplify the whole process—no logging in, no nothing. Nothing barring the direct encounter with the divine data of 𝕏 and its endless feed of autopsies, analyses, and arguments. The Presidential election, and its less than expected results, created yet another moment of synergy between an event and its mediation to the American people. One in which the extravagance of the moment is met by an equal and opposite force trying to understand it played out over various platforms of social media. The cacophony of analyses produced its own explanations for what took place on November 7th: Democrats had lost the working class. This type of epistemic ecosystem is not conducive to understanding, however, but rather to entertaining—the foundational explanation for Trump’s return. The all too expected sequel no one wants to see, but will go see anyways. Because.

This is the environment of what philosopher Axel Honneth calls “the normalized intellectual.” “To the extent that an interrogation of what can be said in public is no longer to be expected from the intellectuals, social criticism no longer finds its home in the field of intellectual exchange,” he argues. “A social reservoir for a form of criticism that inquires behind the premises of publicly accepted problem descriptions and tries to see through their construction is no longer found in the class of intellectuals.” While Honneth’s words echo those of Martin Jay in his own magisterial work on the Frankfurt School, Honneth aptly captures the limitations of intellectual labor in 2024 as the “age of the normalized intellectual.” “If the intellectual of the present depends on moving within a conceptual framework of this kind because he wants to win quick public agreement for his positions,” Honneth explains, “social criticism must conversely devote itself entirely to skillfully drilling holes in these tried and tested frameworks and tentatively suspending them.”

A number of themes have thus far emerged from the onslaught of autopsies composed by writers and scholars far and wide that speak to Honneth’s concerns. X, or Twitter, is nothing if not an echo-chamber of “quick public agreement,” a record of a given populace’s public secrets as philosopher Theodor Adorno once wrote about the proverbial “culture industry”. In this sense, social criticism would point out that while the above explanations for Trump’s victory, especially those having to do with the working class, are not necessarily wrong, they are most certainly a product of the “quick public agreement” setting Honneth describes. Nothing that took place on Tuesday should have been a surprise to anyone paying attention to the ebbs and flows of popular culture in the United States. Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe and company sold out Madison Square Garden for multiple nights this past August. Hard truths did not emerge from the wreckage of the Presidential election. They were there all along. The problem is that as a collective group, intellectuals have become beholden to the ecosystem Honneth outlines. Producing content cannot be the driving force behind understanding conservative subjects in the public square. As Gabriel Winant recently argued, Trump—or Trumpism—has literally “remade Americans” in the image of itself.^[1] This is something to sit with, and to consider seriously. Did the working class vote for Trump? Whatever that actually means? Yes, but so did Archie Bunker,^[2] and those who wanted him to be President in the 1970s.

As I understand it, my task as a historian and social critic is to assume a position vis-à-vis society that gives me “a certain distance from socially rehearsed interpretive models.” In this sense, in surveying how the American intelligentsia has written about Trump, on two separate but interrelated occasions, very little has changed since the analyses of those trying to understand the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. As legal scholars Samuel Moyn and Aziz Rana have recently pointed out,^[3] Cold War liberalism remains the dominant strain within American public life for a variety of political and cultural reasons. What has not been pointed out thus far, however, is how scholars, pundits, and commentators remain beholden to its logics when studying the right.^[4] This is what Honneth means by “socially rehearsed interpretive models,” those that begin and end with Daniel Bell and Richard Hofstadter’s The Radical Right published in 1955. An “anxious, minimalist approach” reflected pluralist assumptions about the public square and its undoing as Bell and others focused their attention on the most radical of conservative subjects. This scholastic interest reflected the Cold War’s attention to existential threats to democratic order. As such, the theories of Hofstader and Bell functioned as both academic intervention, and civic prescription at the same time. Moving forward, we need better, more robust ways of interpellating the right as a subject of critical inquiry, and not only as the source of a popular podcast.

Winant points us in the most productive analytical direction when it comes to moving forward in understanding American conservatism. His attention to the ways in which the American people have been interpellated into an entirely different subject speaks to the urgent need to reapply the work of Stuart Hall to America’s present socio-economic and political predicament. As I hope to illustrate in my forthcoming work,^[5] the categories and methods of Cold War liberalism, still very much alive today, have utterly failed to understand the clear and present danger of American conservatism by focusing only on its most extreme elements. After quoting Hall at length, Winant observes that “Trump has remade the Americans, and to defeat Trumpism requires nothing less than the left doing the same.” What has become abundantly clear, is that “whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism,” as Max Horkheimer once remarked. For Winant, the analogy is more stark. “They are willing to eat the calf, but they dislike the sight of blood.”

Despite Winant’s useful example, however, we still need Hall to lead us the way forward. His work on the rise of Margaret Thatcher in England is arguably the most important work on the subject not to reach the proverbial shores of American intellectual life.^[6] “The purpose of theorizing,” Hall once wrote, “is not to enhance one’s intellectual or academic reputation, but to enable us to grasp, understand, and explain–to produce a more adequate knowledge of–the historical world and its processes…and thereby to inform our practice so that we may transform it.” This means resisting the allure of already agreed upon assumptions of the normalized intellectual age in favor of asking broader questions about how best to understand American conservatism as a historically contingent subject rather than a timeless cataclysmic threat to democratic order.^[7] A resetting is needed, one that draws our collective attention to networks, media, and instantaneous communication instead of regressive depictions of the great unwashed. “Since Labour, down to the present, has not managed to solve it,” Winant remarks, “the case is worth serious consideration.” Hall helps us understand how novel forms of “common sense” emerge and are remade to define a given epoch of time, as well as a given group of people. Especially if they’re all consuming the same content: the latest episode of American public life, the Presidential election.

Understanding how the American people have gravitated towards such forces, or better yet swung towards them, should not come as a surprise, or a source of disappointment. Instead, it should be met with a reinvigorated sense of commitment to getting the analysis right, as it were, for the proverbial future. For someone like Antonio Gramsci, the idea was to “attend violently to things as they are.” To this day, this remains the conceptual task in front of us. The question is, are we ready to do so?