This post is an excerpt of an article reviewing American Apocalypse: The Six Far-Right Groups Waging War on Democracy by former Center for Progressive Reform Board President Rena Steinzor. Footnotes associated with this excerpt can be found in the full article, which readers can download here.
T.S. Eliot was wrong. April is not the “cruellest month.” June is. In slightly over two weeks at the end of June 2024, the United States Supreme Court made mass murder easier, criminalized homelessness, partially decriminalized insurrection, ignored air pollution and climate change by curtailing agency actions, made it more difficult to fine securities and investment frauds, and deregulated political corruption while failing to affirmatively protect women with possibly fatal pregnancies.
To this list, add the Court’s July 1, 2024, ruling effectively giving Donald Trump a pathway to an authoritarian presidency by delaying his criminal trials and then, as extralegal protection, effectively immunizing him from the worst of possible crimes. He once bragged that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and lose no voters. Now, with the Court’s blessing, the conservative majority allows a president, in the exercise of his “core constitutional” duties, to dispatch a presidential appointee with severe prejudice and face no criminal trial. I will leave that inexcusable decision for other commentators.
How did we get here? The short answer is that the Supreme Court has been bought and lavishly paid for via Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society. The longer story is that the Right has always been with us historically, politically, and judicially. Rena Steinzor’s new book, American Apocalypse, makes an important contribution to the literature examining the Right by bringing together several movements that have landed us where we are today.
Steinzor focuses on a right-wing agenda that, in part, has enriched its donors and funders, particularly the ultra-wealthy that can buy political influence. More significantly, this agenda delves deeply by promoting a postliberal political and social order unfamiliar to most Americans.
The Right is no longer satisfied with winning elections in the short term. Rather, it has tapped into a dark populist underbelly and now desires to use its platform for radical social and cultural change, using government as its central power tool. The Right is not anti-government, it is anti-liberal democracy. It intends to dismantle the modern state and replace it with a conservative state.
The Right’s postliberal order is authoritarian, not democratic; it diminishes government for the many and concentrates governmental power in the hands of the few as it attempts to rewrite the American liberal tradition. It is the express intent of Right postliberals to redo the purported wrongs of the New Deal and the Great Society, then go further and establish an American nation-state grounded in a narrow set of values that may seem harmless on their face.
On the surface, family, community, and tradition are values that all Americans can appreciate. It is only when we peel back the layers of what is meant by family, community, and tradition do we learn the deep religious roots of the Right’s agenda. In short, white Christian nationalism is part and parcel of an agenda that seeks to deconstruct the administrative state for a multitude of reasons, then rebuild and reshape it for authoritarian ends as Steinzor shows.
The subtitle of the book starkly presents its theme: The Six Far-Right Groups Waging War on Democracy. Those groups are comprised of corporations, the Tea Party, the Federalist Society, Fox News, white evangelicals, and militias. The book profiles these groups and shows how they serve as markers for larger constellations.
Corporations, for example, can act on their own. However, they are more effective when they act in concert through such organizations as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Business Roundtable, and the like.
Similarly, the Tea Party made itself noticed in several ways, including its anti-Obama rants, and yet it too can serve as a stand in for other like-minded organizations funded in part by the likes of the Koch brothers, the Scaife Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. The operatives for these donors include organizations such as Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks (now defunct), the Cato Institute, the Mercatus Center, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the Heritage Foundation, to name only a few participants in the Right’s influential network.
There is commonality among the six groups. They have money; they are hierarchically organized from the top down; and they share a commitment to “break[ing] fundamental economic, political, and social norms.” Their norm-breaking is an extension of the Right’s decades-long push against liberal democracy. Instead of a society of equal opportunity and the American Dream, these Six promote and fund a society of economic and wealth inequality and a society in which money talks over democratic voices. It is also a society that prefers the favored few, the few that conform to the Right’s notions of gender, race, religion, and politics. Further, as American Apocalypse reveals, the Six share another commonality; they each have a connection with the January 6, 2021, insurrection either by their silence, muted criticism, or direct participation.
Steinzor is perfectly suited to write this book. She is a recently retired law professor and one of the founders of the Center for Progressive Reform. In addition, Steinzor has been a BigLaw partner, a Hill staffer, and a Federal Trade Commission lawyer. She has seen big law and big government mix with big business over a nearly 50-year career.
With that wide-ranging background, as an author she might claim a certain breadth of authority over her subject. However, she is a careful lawyer and notes that currently there is no reliable evidence that the six groups “coordinate their attacks on government in any conscious or methodological way.” However, she continues, “their priorities fall within a surprisingly tight bull’s-eye” such as reducing the size and power of the administrative state, with emphasis on those agencies that protect public health, workers, consumers, and the environment, and cultivating a new religious-based nationalist culture.
The remainder of this essay, which you can read by clicking here, first discusses American Apocalypse, followed by sections that address the low-brow politics of Project 2025 and the higher brow intellectual and academic dimensions of Right postliberalism.
