Thomas Zimmer
@tzimmer_history
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Historian - Democracy and Its Discontents - Podcast: Is This Democracy https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/is-this-democracy - Newsletter: Democracy Americana https://democracyamericana.com
I am grateful to Die Zeit for regularly giving me the space for such deep dives.
I’m hoping to make an extended English version available soon via Democracy Americana - which is also my main source of income as an independent writer.
If you’re interested in such long-form explorations, please subscribe:
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And this story from Buckley to Rufo should also be an urgent warning to the political mainstream: These conservative intellectuals have never kept their promise of taming/purging the extremists. We should treat them as what they have been: Dangerous enablers of extremism.
Those self-proclaimed intellectual leaders who have been fueling this politics of friend-vs-foe / good-vs-evil, this hysterical siege mentality on the Right, do not deserve our sympathy when they are getting swept away by the very forces they have been summoning.
And such a movement is most certainly not going to be contained or restrained by people like Rufo who have been preaching that evil leftist, “globalist” forces are out to destroy the nation and only a comprehensive, ruthless “counter-revolution” may suffice to save America.
But the self-anointed intellectual vanguard was never in charge. Because the movement they are “leading” is not fueled by ideas. It is animated by grievance towards a changing society, by a desire to restore dominance in a world they believe owes them admiration and deference.
In that sense, there is a fairly direct path from William F. Buckley, the godfather of Modern Conservatism, to Rufo. Not the mythological Buckley who purged the extremists – but the real historical figure who deemed the demagogues useful and the extremist energies indispensable.
And so, we are at this point again where today’s intellectual vanguard of the Conservative Movement finds itself unable to steer the extremist forces whose rise to power they have fueled by laundering and legitimizing them, by refusing to draw a line against the extremist fringe.
Rufo is also clever enough to understand that Trumpism as a political project is failing because it is drowning in a swamp of conspiratorial rage, with a leader too delusional to change course, a hardcore base addicted to a spectacle of violence that is alienating the larger public.
Rufo wants all the MAGA factions to focus their conspiratorial rage on the targets he has chosen and deemed safe - rather than targets that are controversial within the movement and could therefore contribute to MAGA’s disintegration.
Now Rufo is concerned about the conspiratorial fever swamp getting out of (his) control. He believes he, as the intellectual vanguard of Trumpism, should be in charge of the radical “counter-revolution” and feels his status threatened by the more unruly extremist forces bubbling up.