Nick Fuentes and How the Republican Party Lost Me
If you run in Republican circles as I do, you’ve probably heard about online streamer turned political activist Nicholas “Nick” Fuentes over the past week and a half. Fuentes, the leader of the so-called “groyper” right, was invited onto Tucker Carlson’s podcast, where he proceeded to rattle off a laundry list of Anti-Zionist, Antisemitic, Hitler and Stalin praising tirades.
What makes this significant is that Carlson is far closer to the GOP’s center than Fuentes. While Fuentes had mostly been relegated to the dark shadows of the Internet, Carlson’s platforming of him was akin to lifting that darkness.
Of course, this set off a firestorm on the right. All sorts of political commentators like Ben Shapiro and politicians like Ted Cruz condemned Fuentes as a “Nazi lunatic,” while chastising Tucker Carlson for giving him a platform to spread his drivel.
But yet others defended him. Brett Cooper, an influential leader of the emerging online trad movement, defended Fuentes, comparing accusations that he was a Nazi to similar “Nazi” accusations leveled at conservatives by ANTIFA and others. Matt Walsh, a colleague of Shapiro’s, lamented the “Right Wing Civil War” as allowing an opening for Democrats to strike back.
Perhaps most shocking of all, the Heritage Foundation, the intellectual backbone of the modern conservative movement, aired a video from its CEO, Kevin Roberts, defending Carlson and Fuentes as Republican allies.
When I speak to Republicans similar to me, Reaganities, pre-MAGA conservatives, and indeed more-moderate MAGAites, there is a general bewilderment at how any of this happened. There is a general sense that Fuentes is an outlier, a deviant from the larger conservative movement.
I would think otherwise. Anyone paying close attention to the Post-Trump conservative movement should not be all that surprised at what has come to pass.
How did we get here?
Right after Trump won in 2016, there was a conventional logic you would hear in conservative circles. It went something like this: “Sure, this guy’s a kook, but he’s going to get judges on the court.”
There was an idea among the conservative intellectual class that Trump would just spend his presidency playing golf, while leaving the actual governing to people like Mitt Romney and Mitch McConnell.
Well, evidently, Trump did play a lot of golf. But he also governed in a distinctly different way than the conservative norm.
Trump is distinctly post-ideological. He has a couple of loose tenets, but nothing more fleshed out, like Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. Both of those Presidents pioneered budding new strands of conservatism that would lead the Republican Party to huge victories.
Trump has led the Republican Party to victory twice now by cultivating a movement not based on ideology, but based on noxious hate. The ideology came later.
This ideology attempted to reconcile the obvious and blatant immorality of Donald Trump with Conservative orthodoxy. A so-called “National Conservatism” is what came out of it.
National Conservatism, loosely defined, is a strand of conservatism that holds up cultural nationalism as being the main organ of the state.
An ideology that emphasizes a strong Judeo-Christian, lily-white, fervently patriotic, and nationalist form of governance squares well with the overt “us vs. them” dynamics that drive a lot of Trump’s decisions.
Many Conservatives have been fine with this. Not all Conservatives are National Conservatives; many are far from it, but so long as Trump’s bombast was a vehicle to deliver on long-held conservative goals, many were fine to hum along with the odious machine.
And indeed, Trump did deliver on long-held conservative goals. He got a supermajority on the Supreme Court that would overturn Roe, he delivered the most substantial across-the-board tax cuts in a generation, and he cut administrative bloat.
Conservatives cheered him on the whole way. What they failed to see, however, was what was happening below the surface.
Within Capitol Hill interns and think tank employees, something was happening. These young people entered politics, like me, during the Trump era. In other words, they were brought into the conservative movement by the Republican president at the time. They were distinctly Trump Republicans.
These people were not brought into the conservative movement because they read William F. Buckley; they were brought in because they saw a safe harbor for hate. They saw a Republican President go on TV and spout hate, and they took note. People who previously would have been on the margins, holding tiki torches with David Duke now signed up to intern with Republican congressmen.
Perhaps that explains a lot of what we’ve been seeing recently. A Republican congressman was recently caught with a Nazi flag in his office, while on intern-controlled social media accounts, Republican congressmen have been openly calling out “Muslim sympathizers.”
Or the Politico exposé on a group chat where Republican interns admitted to “liking Hitler” a lot.
What came before?
This transformation of the GOP is particularly stark given what came before Trumpism: Neoconservatism. Neoconservatism, as its core, was an intellectual body of thought that tried to answer one question: How do you be moral and political?
The neoconservatives were intensely moral, having been disillusioned by leftism through Stalin’s purges, they allied themselves with the Republican Party largely due to the moral failings of 60s era LBJ governance.
They saw how the war on poverty failed to actually reduce poverty, instead giving people an outlet to express their immoral and individualistic tendencies.
The conclusion they drew was that policy and politics have to be moral. And indeed that belief held through even to Trump winning the nomination, with countless Republican congressmen, governors, senators, and more, calling for Trump to be dropped from the ticket after Access Hollywood.
But something changed. Trump won. And Republican leaders abandoned their morality. Only a scant few continued to attack Trump, with them swiftly leaving politics after. An epidemic of cowardice took hold: fearing for their jobs, Republicans in leadership continued to cultivate Trump.
That held right up to Jan 6th, when Republicans, knowing that Trump had incited the riot, refused to impeach the President, fearing that it would hurt the “Republican brand”, and in turn, their re-election hopes.
As Mitt Romney said during his speech following the attacks, “Do we weigh our own political fortunes over our conscience?” Republican leadership did.
This is what happened to the conservative movement: An older, institutional conservative elite class cultivated Donald Trump on the assumption they could use his bigotry to further their own ends. Now, as they enter their old age, they watch, jaws agape, at a younger insurgent wing that they unwittingly created stands with guns pointed at their eyes.
Perhaps they could have done well to heed the lesson of the first, greatest Republican President, Abraham Lincoln:
“As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
The Overton window will continue to move further and further, until it consumes you.