"Conservative Revolution" and asymmetric partisan polarization in the US

I wrote in the immediately preceding post about how the radicalization of the Republicans party is part of a long-standing asymmetric partisan polarization in US politics. One of the features of that phenomenon is the fondness of Republicans for the rhetoric of "revolution", even though their perspective in distinctively conservative-to-reactionary by any normal historical standard. That has included a increasing willingness to use "revolutionary" measures - in the sense of illegal and extra-legal actions from voter suppression to political neutralization of the independence of the justice system - in pursuit of the comfort and increasing enrichment of the already wealthy.

While the Democrats have to be dragged kicking and screaming into even mild reformist measures that their voting base demands. The latest manifestation was the Party establishment's insistent rejection of "Medicare For All, aka, national health insurance, aka, the standard approach to health insurance in most wealthy nations from Canada to Europe to South Korea and China, as "socialist" and un-American. While Bernie Sanders call for a "revolution" in the sense of more active voter participation and national health insurance is treated with mock (and maybe real) horror by Democratic leaders dependent on corporate donors. National health insurance was a part of the Democratic Party's official program from 1948 to 1992 and is extremely popular among the Democratic base.

This is asymmetric political polarization, American style.

But what sense does "conservative revolution" actually have? For as long as I can remember, I've been hearing what I believe is known as the circle theory of radicalization, i.e., that radicals on the far right and the far left often switch to the other extreme. I generally react to the claim with at least a mental eye-roll and often a physical one. While we can certainly find examples of that happening, it's not a common political path. We see it in opportunistic cases, because opportunism is part of politics. We see it with people of an authoritarian mindset, although such people are generally more drawn to rightwing politics. We see it in some famous cases like Benito Mussolini, who went from being a militant Italian socialist to a militant Italian fascist, for whom both the opportunism and the authoritarianism were important.

And we see it in rightwing populism as in Steve Bannon's brand, which picks up on the Tea Party schtick. He has even described himself as a Leninist. (Victor Sebestyen, Bannon says he’s a Leninist: that could explain the White House’s new tactics Guardian 02/06/2017) But Bannon, like other rightwing populists, is interested in protecting oligarchs, not overthrowing them or even spreading their wealth to "the people" to whom they make demagogic appeals.

There was an intellectual movement in interwar Germany that was known as the Conservative Revolution - or at least group of thinkers who became identified . The best-known figure associated was Carl Schmitt, who became Hitler's favorite jurist and Nazi Party member, who is still taken seriously as a political theorist. Oswald Spengler, author of The Decline of the West, provided them with an image of a decent, doomed liberal order. The writer Ernst Jünger is also often associated with this trend. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck is little remembered now, but the name of his 1923 book Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich) is well known from its real-world incarnation. As the Britannica Online article on him notes, "Though the Nazis denied him as an intellectual precursor, his thought helped create an atmosphere that was receptive to the National Socialist ideology."

Arnulf Scriba and Daniel Wosnitzka (Konservative Revolution Deutsches Historisches Museum 12.09.2014) define the trend this way:

Der Begriff Konservative Revolution bezeichnet eine geistig-politische Sammelbewegung jungkonservativer Kräfte in der Weimarer Republik, die sich für einen autoritären Staat einsetzten und den liberalen Werten der Weimarer Demokratie deutlichen Widerstand entgegenbrachten. Sie grenzten sich sowohl von den Ideen der Französischen Revolution und der Aufklärung wie von bloßer Restauration ab und forderten nach den Erfahrungen des Ersten Weltkriegs eine "neue abendländische Einheit unter deutscher Führung". Die Konservative Revolution verstand sich als Gegenrevolution, die nach dem Umsturz der bestehenden Ordnung konservative Maßstäbe setzen und die Auflösung der abendländischen Kultur verhindern wollte.

[The term Conservative Revolution refers to a spiritual-political collective movement of young conservative forces in the Weimar Republic, which advocated an authoritarian state and wanted to resist the liberal values of Weimar democracy. They distanced themselves from the ideas of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment as well as from mere restoration and demanded, after the experiences of the First World War, a "new Western unity under German leadership". The Conservative Revolution understood itself as a counter-revolution that, after the overthrow of the existing order, wanted to set conservative standards and prevent the dissolution of Western culture.] (my translation and emphasis)

This was an intellectual trend, not a defined group with a common, formal program. But the notion of a "Conservative Revolution [that] understood itself as a counter-revolution" is a pretty good definition of what Bannonism, Trumpism, and the Tea Party/pro-COVID-19-protesters actually represent.

I closed the previous post with a 1972 quote from the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse making a grand generalization, "

The Western world has reached a new stage of development: now, the defense of the capitalist system requires the organization of counterrevolution at home and abroad. ... The counterrevolution is largely preventive and, in the Western world, altogether preventive. Here, there is no recent revolution to be undone, and there is none in the offing. And yet, fear of revolution which creates the common interest links the various stages and forms of the counterrevolution.

Marcuse had been around in the 1920's and 1930s to engage with the idea of the so-called Conservative Revolution. His 1972 pronouncement is general enough that a lot of developments could be defined as having fit it. One could also make an argument that the "Western world" had been in counterrevolution mode since 1917 (the Bolshevik Revolution), or since the beginning of the Cold War (1947), or since the beginning of the decolonization movement became a major force in the 20th century.

But I also think that the view Marcuse expressed there actually defines how today's version of the Conservative Revolution thinks about their role and how they view contemporary history. In some ways, the dramatic reform movements known by the shorthand of "1968" probably plays a bigger role in their minds than it does in the minds of the mainstream or those who considered themselves distinctively left. It's often been said that Trump's Make America Great Again slogan is understood by his followers in the sense of Make America White Again. That is, a return to a conservatively imagined 1950s. Those were the days:

It's also worth remembering that most histories of the market-fundamentalist economic and political outlook known as neoliberalism had its first major real-world implementation in Chile after the coup against Allende in 1973, and in Argentina after the 1976 coup against Isabel Perón's government. (The latter was actually more the government of José López Rega, the Dick Cheney of Argentine contemporary history, and was already practicing its own form of authoritarian neoliberalism and explicit counterrevolution against actual armed revolutionary groups.)

The subsequent military governments in both countries actually did practice extra-legal and extra-constitutional methods of government, i.e., methods that good Burkean conservative would consider "revolutionary". But those were real, violent, consciously counterrevolutionary regimes that understood themselves as part of an international reaction against the revolutionary impulses they identified with "1968" and the anticolonial revolutionary and independence movements of the time.

In American politics, the asymmetrical partisan polarization currently features one side that is composed of a continually radicalizing Republican Party and the associated far-right movements and that imagines itself as facing offing the imminent storming of the Winter Palace by an unruly mob of scientists, professors, angry feminists, black radicals, and dope-smoking hippies.

On the other side, we have a Democratic Party that thinks talking about national health insurance is way too radical to even talk about, because it might alienate some elderly white voters who would never in a hundred years consider voting for Democrats.(And who, by the way, already get their health insurance from Medicare socialism.)

This is very asymmetric!