Trump’s intellectuals will betray his base Conservative luminaries have real influence

Trump is back, as garish and triumphant as ever. But this time, and far more than his victory in 2016, he comes with friends. I don’t just mean the Hegseths and Lutnicks of the world — I mean intellectual backers, some with real heft, and who in different ways shape and reflect Trump’s worldview in economics, education and law. Appropriately for someone as idiosyncratic as the President-elect, they come from many sources. Some, like Patrick Deneen, are genuinely serious intellectuals. Others, like Raw Egg Nationalist, are little more than internet trolls.

Whatever their differences, though, and arguably more even than Trump himself, these varied figures offer a vivid glimpse of how the President-elect will rule over the next four years. Given the man they admire, their ideas unsurprisingly spear at vaunted liberal ideals, whether in their understanding of race or how the courts can promote social justice. Yet beyond the ideology, the question remains: to what extent do Trump’s court philosophers, and the ideas they promote, actually chime with what Americans thought they voted for on 5 November? I’d argue “not very much” — and from economic populism to social policy, the millions of voters who plumped for Trump may yet rue their choice.

Like any political movement, Trumpism has antecedents. The clearest example here is Pat Buchanan, famous in the Nineties for mixing culture war pathos with strict anti-immigrationism. After several quixotic presidential runs, he eventually retired to write long books about how European and “white” Americans were being replaced in their own homeland. During the long neocon ascendency, it goes without saying, such ideas were happily ignored. Over more recent times, however, many on the Trumpish wing of American politics have refocused their attention on race.

That’s clear enough in the person of Christopher Rufo. A Florida native, he’s lately emerged as a major force in Republican politics. To be sure, his own intellectual output is relatively meagre. In 2023, he published America’s Cultural Revolution, which argued that Left-wing activists and philosophers had revolutionised American culture. As I wrote at the time, such claims are tediously familiar: as far back as 1951, William F. Buckley was making similar arguments about how liberal academics undermined the republic. Besides, focusing exclusively on individuals, even ones as provocative as Angela Davis, handily ignores the socioeconomic causes behind discontent.

Rufo is a talented organiser. His skills lie less in the development of new ideas — America’s Cultural Revolution was long on polemic and short on argument — and more in his ability to frame a narrative about wider intellectual currents. In a telling interview with a hard-Right outlet, he declared that the “currency in our postmodern knowledge regime is language, fact, image and emotion. Learning how to wield these is the whole game.” And learn he has. Rufo, after all, was largely responsible for the conservative media’s histrionics around “critical race theory” some years back. He’s also been heavily involved in Ron DeSantis’s restructuring of the Florida university system, attempting to push out Leftist scholars and replace them with conservative loyalists. Rufo has also set his sights wider, successfully lobbying for the dismissal of academics for a range of (real and perceived) faults.

Given these antics, at any rate, it’s far easier for Leftists to sympathise with someone like Patrick Deneen. Without doubt the most rigorous and interesting of the Trump-adjacent intellectuals, he enjoys a pronounced and growing following that includes people like J.D. Vance, alongside other self-consciously bookish conservatives. Published in 2005, Deneen’s book Democratic Faith was a genuinely deep and thoughtful critique of egalitarian perfectionism, worth reading whatever your politics. Why Liberalism Failed, from 2018, made Deneen’s name in the public square, even securing praise from progressive luminaries like Barack Obama.

Arguing that liberalism had created societies of alienated individuals, crushed by callous technocratic elites, Why Liberalism Failed is another interesting read. Apart from its incisive critique of capitalist materialism, its support of so-called “postliberalism” implies that much of the liberal tradition is worth saving. Deneen’s 2023 effort, by contrast, was far more trenchant. In Regime Change, he advocates replacing the existing neoliberal elite with a conservative aristocracy backed by popular support. This, he claims, is far more likely to work for the common good. Deneen’s enthusiasm for creaking and corrupt governments like Viktor Orbán’s certainly makes me wonder.

But, like Rufo, the real problem with Deneen’s philosophy is his relative uninterest in economics. As I noted in my review of Regime Change, Deneen talks a big game about challenging neoliberal power. But Deneen’s proposed set of economic reforms are extremely modest, especially when compared to his enthusiasm for cultural revolution. Taken together, they barely amount to a revival of Eisenhower’s economic policies, and certainly don’t fundamentally threaten the neoliberal plutocracy Deneen claims to despise.

It’s also unclear if there’s an appetite for the sweeping cultural changes Deneen wants his new populist conservative “aristocracy” to enact. Notwithstanding the cliches, on both Left and Right, many Trump supporters are somewhat socially moderate. To the chagrin of many on the GOP’s more conservative members, gay marriage is now backed by over 50% of party members, and so probably isn’t going anywhere. Trump himself has also wavered on his commitment to militant pro-life positions, probably spooked by the largely hostile response to the Dobbs decision even in some red states.

If his leading intellectual lights are anything to go by, however, Trump 2.0 may yet prove rather more radical. Consider someone like Adrian Vermeule. A professor of jurisprudence at Harvard, he’s one of the more influential jurists around. For decades, practically the only game in town on the Right was originalism, the idea that judges must hue precisely to the wording of the US Constitution. Quite aside from the practical challenges here — how to interpret what the Founders meant 250 years later? — Vermeule departs drastically from these ideas.

Rejecting the supposed neutrality of originalism, he instead advocates for so-called “common good” constitutionalism. In practice, this means advancing very socially conservative positions, notably around LGBT and women’s rights. Plausibly inspired by Carl Schmitt, a Nazi jurist and a core influence, Vermeule seems to think that moral and political convictions are a matter of theological and mythological choice. Given that, arguing for or against political convictions is less important than defeating one’s enemies in the name of one’s friends. Beyond these philosophical underpinnings, at any rate, a Vermeule judiciary would be far more willing to issue conservative rulings on issues like gay, trans, and abortion rights. It would take a dim view of democracy and democratic procedures, which Vermeule thinks have “no special privilege” next to the goal of implementing the common good. And it would undoubtedly attempt to blur, if not erase, divisions between Church and State in line with what one critic calls Vermeule’s “integralist vision” of a Christian social order.

Of course, we should be careful here not to draw a straight line between theorists like Vermeule and Deneen on the one hand — and the actual policies of a Trump presidency on the other. As we all know by now, the man himself is too chaotic and capricious to necessarily be swayed.

All the same, there are signs that these conservative luminaries may have real influence. Vermeule, for his part, has gained a loyal following among young conservative jurists. The academic himself often expresses admiration for Victor Orbán’s autocracy, where the judiciary has been thoroughly politicised in line with the regime’s competitive authoritarian model. This should be worrying given the GOP’s long flirtation with the Hungarian model — and the proven willingness of figures like Mitch McConnell to do anything to get their guys on the bench. With conservatives looking to remake the judicial branch in the foreseeable future, it’s therefore quite possible that common good constitutionalism could be coming our way, whether socially moderate voters like it or not.

You can plausibly say something similar of Trump’s economic policies too. For just as Deneen and Rufo seem uninterested in genuine change here, that also feels like the direction of travel for the future administration. Just consider Trump’s plutocratic backers, men like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy who don’t remotely seem to think that their wealth and power will be challenged. Musk, for his part, has even warned that his “Department of Government Efficiency” will cause “temporary hardship” for ordinary Americans, while also stressing that such hardship is necessary for the state to live within its means. And if that should raise alarm bells for anyone — not least those millions of voters who backed Trump as a bulwark against neoliberal tinkering — who thinks the President-elect genuinely tends to spearhead an economically populist attack on billionaires like himself, it hardly helps that, like Vermeule, Deneen has the ear of an increasing number of Republican insiders.

Altogether, then, Trump’s intellectuals presage disappointment for the electorate both in theory and in practice. And it’s a similar story when you leave the university campuses and head online. During both his successful election campaigns, the President-elect ran on a platform of draining the swamp, of smashing the complacent liberal elite that ran Washington, finally restoring power to the American people. Anti-elitism was a prevalent theme, with Trump reaching out to self-described “ordinary” Americans who were struggling economically and who felt that woke liberal elites sneered at their lack of education and refinement.

Go online, though, and Trump’s cohort of internet intellectuals routinely proclaim their disdain for democratic norms in particular and the electorate in general. Consider Curtis Yarvin. Originally writing under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, he blends Right-libertarian and old-school reactionary thought into a geeky blend of anti-democratic animus. Among other things, that means support for a kind of corporate monarchy, with Yarvin claiming that successful and innovative companies like Apple and Tesla are little fiefdoms, whose model should be emulated politically. Yarvin found a willing audience in the tech world, where sympathetic anti-democrats like Peter Thiel helped him out financially before going on to fund the political rise of Trumpy politicians like Vance. That’s of a piece with other reactionary influencers, notably Bronze Age Pervert and Raw Egg Nationalist, who blend libertine provocation with a reverence for hierarchy.

Taken together, then, Trump’s intellectuals are often a different breed from his populist supporters. Quite aside from their ideas, or indeed their varied links with the White House, that’s also true in another way. Compared to 2016, Trumpworld is just more organised this time around. Enjoying almost a decade to reconfigure, people like Yarvin have been thoroughly mainstreamed. Not only that, they also have the funding — courtesy of Thiel and other billionaires — to keep thinking and writing and pushing the Right-wing conversation forward. But whether it’s the conversation the electorate wants to hear remains unclear.