It’s not conservatism. What we call the conservative movement today is not what the conservative movement historically has been in the United States. It’s a species of reactionary politics. The distinction rests in the party’s fundamental attitude towards democracy and democratic institutions.
The old Republican Party, for all of its faults, played by the political rules. It had faith in the idea that elections determine the winner, and that when elections happen, you accept the verdict of the people and you adjust based on that regardless of whether or not you like the policy preferences.
Reactionary parties are different from conservatism. They both share an orientation towards believing that certain ways in which society is arranged — certain setups, institutions, even hierarchies — are good and necessary. There’s value in the way that things are. What differs between the two of them is that conservative parties don’t see potential social change as an indictment of democracy. That is to say, even if a democracy or an election produces an outcome that they don’t like, that threatens to transform wholesale certain elements of the social order, a conservative would not throw out the political order as a consequence of that. Reactionaries are willing to do that.
My view is, at the core of the Trump movement, which I want to distinguish from every Trump supporter because they’re not the same, but the people who have given Donald Trump an iron grip on the Republican Party, that base of hardcore support, are animated primarily by reactionary politics, by a sense that things have gone too far in a socially liberal and culturally liberal, and even in some cases economically liberal direction, and they want things to go back to partially a past that never existed, but also a past that did exist where there was a little bit more order and structure in terms of who was in charge and what the rules were.”
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“Coming into office last time, Trump didn’t have a vendetta against large chunks of the government. He didn’t believe an election had been stolen from him and that needed to be rectified. At the very least, he thinks it is a public blemish that needs to be shown to be false to many people, because if many people believe that he won, then that’s good enough. It doesn’t matter if he actually did. What matters, to put it differently, is Donald Trump’s honor, and the honor of Donald Trump must be avenged at all costs, and the insult of 2020 must be erased from the history books. That’s the kind of thing that he cares about.
The degree and scope of the planning that has gone into this and the willingness to take a hammer to different institutions and the specificity of the plans for doing so is not normal. To name just one example from Project 2025, they want to prosecute the former Pennsylvania secretary of state who presided over the 2020 elections using the [Ku Klux] Klan Act, which was passed to fight the first Klan. It’s basically alleging that by trying to help people fix improperly filed mail-in ballots in 2020, this Pennsylvania secretary of state was rigging the election, trying to undermine everyone else’s fair exercise of their votes in a way akin to the Klan intimidating Black voters in the 1860s by threatening to lynch them.
When I speak to legal experts about this, they’re like, “No credible prosecutor I know would bring such a charge.” It’s a real abuse of power and anti-democratic in many ways because it’s trying to wield federal power to prevent local authorities from administering elections properly and helping people vote. So in order to try to even begin an investigation on this front, let alone actually prosecute, what you need to do is fire the people who would do that kind of job, which would typically be in the Justice Department Civil Rights Division role, so the Election Crimes Unit and the Criminal Division, fire those people who work on these cases, bring in attorneys who are willing to do what you say, even though it’s ludicrous on the basis of a traditional read of the law, and then initiate an investigation, try to get charges spun up, and then get them to a judge like Aileen Cannon, who’s presiding over Trump’s documents case and has clearly shown herself to not really care about what’s going on, but rather just to interpret the law in whatever way is most favorable to Trump.
All of that stuff, and this is just one specific example, illustrates the ways in which doing what Trump and his allies have outlined as part of their revenge campaign requires attacking very fundamental components of American democracy: the building blocks, like the rule of law, like a nonpartisan civil service that treats all citizens equally, like a judiciary that’s designed with interpreting the law as best as it can, rather than delivering policy outlines, you need all of those things in order to act on already offered promises in what is widely understood to be the planning document for the Trump administration.”
“According to exit polls, 55 percent of men voted for Trump in 2024, compared to 45 percent of women, for a 10-point gender gap — 1 point less than the 11-point gap in support for Trump in both 2020 and 2016.*
Compared to other exit polling results that point to how Trump’s victory may have boiled down to a referendum on President Joe Biden and the economy, this relatively static gender gap may not point to gender as a major factor in the election. But differences in the gender gap across groups of voters — such as growing gaps among Black and Latino voters — can tell us more about the country’s changing partisan landscape. And there’s a reason gender has also been widely discussed in the aftermath of Election Day: The role that gender played in each party’s 2024 presidential campaigns highlights a potential shift in the parties’ approaches to male and female voters, and how voters think about gender and politics.”
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“Trump’s 11-point gap in support between men and women in 2016 and 2020 was a record, but men have been consistently more likely than women to back Republicans since 1980. From then until 2016, the gender gap in support for Republicans ranged from 0 points (in 1992) to 10 points (in 2000), according to exit polls. (The phenomenon of men consistently showing stronger support for the more ideologically conservative party than women is not limited to the U.S., either.)”
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“the gender gap isn’t uniform across all groups. For example, white men and women voted more similarly to each other in 2024 than Black or Latino men and women.”
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“Nonwhite and younger voters had the largest gender gaps”
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“in 2020 Trump won 61 percent of white men and 55 percent of white women, for a 6-point gender gap among white voters. That gap was just 1 point bigger this year according to exit polls — 60 percent to 53 percent, for a 7-point gender gap among white voters. But the gender gap among nonwhite voters increased by significantly more.
Among Black voters, even as the vast majority of both men and women voted Democratic in both elections, Trump gained 2 points of support among men and lost 2 among women, moving the gender gap from 10 points in 2020 to 14 points in 2024. The gap is even more striking among Latino voters, one of the groups among whom Trump gained the most support overall compared to 2020. Four years ago, 36 percent of Latino men and 30 percent of Latino women supported Trump, a gender gap of just 6 points. That gap nearly tripled in 2024, as Trump’s support among Latino men went up by almost 20 percentage points: He won 55 percent of Latino men and 38 percent of Latino women, for a gender gap of 17 points.”
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“49 percent of men and 37 percent of women aged 18 to 29 supported Trump, for a 12-point gender gap, 3 points larger than in 2020. The gap among men and women aged 30 to 39 was also 12 points, while it actually shrank among voters over 50.”
“It’s astonishing how little thought many past presidents put into their Supreme Court appointments. In the past, justices were often chosen for idiosyncratic personal reasons, or to please a particular interest group or voting bloc, and without much, if any, inquiry into how the nominee was likely to decide cases.
President Woodrow Wilson, for example, appointed Justice James Clark McReynolds — an awful judge and an even worse human being who Time magazine once described as a “savagely sarcastic, incredibly reactionary Puritan anti-Semite” — in large part because Wilson found McReynolds, who was US attorney general before he joined the Court, to be so obnoxious that the president promoted him to get him out of the Cabinet.
Similarly, President Dwight Eisenhower complained late in his presidency that appointing Justice William Brennan, one of the most consequential left-liberal jurists in American history, to the Supreme Court was among the biggest mistakes he made in office. But Ike’s White House never vetted Brennan for his ideological views, and Brennan was selected largely because Eisenhower was running for reelection when he made the nomination, and he thought that appointing a Catholic like Brennan would appeal to Catholic voters.
Even in 1990, after top Republican officials had published lengthy documents laying out their party’s vision for the Constitution, they still hadn’t developed a reliable system for vetting Supreme Court nominees to ensure that they were on board with the party’s agenda. Bush chose the center-left Justice Souter over other, more right-wing candidates largely due to misguided advice from his top legal advisers.
As journalist Jan Crawford Greenburg reported in a 2007 book, Souter beat out early frontrunner Ken Starr — the same Ken Starr who would go on to hound President Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky investigation — in large part because Bush’s right-wing advisers feared that Starr was too liberal. According to Crawford Greenburg, then-Deputy Attorney General Bill Barr opposed Starr because of a low-stakes dispute over “a federal law that permitted private citizens to sue for fraud against the federal government.”
Much has changed since 1990. On the Republican side, the Federalist Society — a kind of bar association for right-wing lawyers with chapters on most law school campuses and in most major cities — now starts vetting law students for elite legal jobs almost as soon as they begin their studies. And Republican presidents can rely on the Federalist Society to identify ideologically reliable candidates for the bench. As Trump said in 2016 while campaigning for president, “We’re going to have great judges, conservative, all picked by the Federalist Society.”
Nor is the Federalist Society the only way Republicans vet potential Supreme Court nominees. Every single one of the Court’s current Republican members except for Barrett previously served as a political appointee in a GOP administration, roles that allowed high-level Republicans to observe their work and probe their views.
Democrats’ vetting process, meanwhile, is more informal. But it’s been no less successful in identifying Supreme Court nominees who reliably embrace their party’s stance on the most contentious issues. The last Democrat appointed to the Supreme Court who broke with the party’s pro-abortion rights stance, for example, was Justice Byron White — a dissenter in Roe v. Wade appointed by President John F. Kennedy in 1962.
The result is a modern-day Supreme Court where every single member was carefully selected by their party to ensure that they will not stray on any of the issues where the two parties have settled views. Every Republican justice voted to abolish affirmative action on nearly all university campuses, with every Democratic justice in dissent. Every Republican voted to give the leader of the Republican Party broad immunity from criminal prosecution, with every Democrat in dissent. Every Republican except for Roberts voted to overrule Roe (and Roberts merely argued that the Court should have waited a little longer), while every Democrat dissented.”
“In reality, Project 2025, an initiative put together last year by the right-wing Heritage Foundation to plan for the next GOP administration, was shaped by longtime close allies of Trump. Detailed planning for a second Trump term agenda along these lines is very real, and though the Project 2025 initiative itself has seemingly fizzled out, other groups have picked up the slack.
Furthermore, many of Project 2025’s key proposals — to centralize presidential power, crack down on unauthorized immigrants, deprioritize fighting climate change, and eliminate the Department of Education — are fully and openly supported by Trump.
Yet Trump’s intentions are less clear on a vitally important issue where Project 2025 made some particularly extreme proposals: abortion.
The project’s plan called for using presidential power to aggressively restrict abortions in several ways. Trump, wary of these proposals’ unpopularity, has said during the campaign that he won’t support some of them. He also evidently feels hesitant to outright disavow the social conservatives who have long been a key part of his base.”
“Modern neopatriarchy begins from the opposite fear; the concern is not communist collectivism, but liberal individualism.
The neopatriarchs believe we live in an age where people prioritize self-actualization and fulfillment above all else. Young adults, they argue, live in extended adolescence, lost in some combination of video games, drugs, and casual sex; as they age, raw hedonism is replaced by single-minded foci on money and career. According to neopatriarchs, this liberal social model fails men and women alike, funneling them toward a spiritually empty existence that all but guarantees disappointment and depression, and it fails society by discouraging the production of children who are quite literally required if the country is to have a future. (Immigration, needless to say, is not seen as an acceptable solution.)
The solution, for neopatriarchs, is to return to the past. Men need to rediscover the old John Wayne vision of masculinity, making traditional male gender markers (including acting as fatherly provider) into defining aspects of their identity. The state should play a role in encouraging this reversion, primarily by changing policy to cultivate “masculine” virtues and incentivizing marriage and child-rearing.
In his recent book Manhood, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley urges men to embrace strength and stoicism as routes for self-improvement, calling on them to take on the roles of “warrior” and “builder” in their everyday lives. The psychologist Jordan Peterson has long dispensed similar advice, helping turn him into a conservative guru. In his forthcoming book Dawn’s Early Light, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts argues that contraceptive technologies “break the most basic functioning elements of civilization” by liberating individuals to have consequence-free sex out of wedlock. Vance, who wrote the forward to Roberts’s book, has mused about eliminating no-fault divorce for similar neopatriarchal reasons.
Neopatriarchy can be distinguished from straight-up patriarchy primarily through its treatment of women. Unlike some Christian fundamentalists or alt-right scribblers, neopatriarchs do not assert that women are obligated to be homemakers as a result of divine commandment or natural law. All they insist on explicitly is that women have lots of children, and that choosing to focus primarily on raising said children is no worse than having a career.
It’s obvious why liberals and leftists would have problems taking this seriously. If Americans are supposed to be having more kids, and American men are supposed to be more traditionally masculine, then who’s supposed to be doing the work of raising all of these kids? The answer, of course, is wives (as it’s certainly not immigrants). Neopatrarichy may not explicitly call for a reversal of the feminist revolution, but that’s basically what it’s going for.”
“Former President Donald Trump has lately been trying to distance himself from Project 2025, claiming it was cooked up by the “severe right” and that he doesn’t know anything about it.
But it turns out the severe right is coming from inside the house.
Kevin Roberts, the self-proclaimed “head” of Project 2025, has a book coming out in September — and the book’s foreword is written by Trump’s vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, who lavishly praises its ideas.
“Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism,” Vance writes, according to the book’s Amazon page. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”
What ideas? Like Vance, Roberts is obsessed with the idea that the left controls major American institutions — he lists Ivy League colleges, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education and even the Boy Scouts of America. The book argues that “conservatives need to burn down” these institutions if “we’re to preserve the American way of life.” (Vox has requested a copy of the book, but has not yet received one at the time of this writing.)
Obviously, this poses a problem for Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the virally unpopular Project 2025 and its lengthy agenda for what he should do if he wins, which includes proposals to restrict abortion access and centralize executive power in the presidency.
And it’s one more indication that Trump’s pick of Vance might be politically problematic for him. Vance has a fascination with provocative and extreme far-right thinkers, and a history of praising their ideas. He is not a running mate tailored to win over swing voters who are concerned Trump might be too extreme — quite the opposite.
The book was written and announced before Vance was chosen as Trump’s running mate. But there’s some indication that people involved had some late second thoughts about it. It was originally announced as “Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America,” with a cover image showing a match over the word “Washington.”
More recently, though, the subtitle has been changed to “Taking Back Washington to Save America,” and the match has vanished from the cover.”
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“Project 2025 contains a multitude of proposals in its 922-page plan, not all of which J.D. Vance necessarily supports.
But he’s on record backing ideas similar to those put forth in two of Project 2025’s most controversial issue areas.
The first is abortion. Project 2025 lays out a sweeping agenda by which the next president could use federal power to prevent abortions, including using an old law called the Comstock Act to prosecute people who mail abortion pills, and working to prevent women from abortion-banning states from traveling out of state to get abortions.
Vance is on record supporting these ideas. Last year, he signed a letter demanding that the Justice Department prosecute physicians and pharmacists “who break the Federal mail-order abortion laws.” In 2022, he said he was “sympathetic” to the idea that the federal government should stop efforts to help women traveling out of their states to get abortions. That year, he also said: “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”
At other points, Vance has struck a different tone. ““We have to accept that people do not want blanket abortion bans,” he said last December. And this month he said he supported a Supreme Court decision that allowed the abortion bill mifepristone to remain available. Here, Vance is trying to align with Trump, who — fearing political blowback — argues he merely wants abortion to be a state issue, despite his long alliance with the religious right. But Vance’s record implies his true agenda might be otherwise.
The second controversial area where Vance is sympatico with Project 2025 is centralizing presidential power over the executive branch. The project lays out various proposals to rein in what conservatives view as an out-of-control “deep state” bureaucracy — mainly, by firing far more career civil servants and installing far more political appointees throughout the government.
Vance, as I wrote last week, has backed a maximalist version of this agenda. In 2021, Vance said that in Trump’s second term, Trump should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” The courts would try to stop this, Vance continued, and Trump should then “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
So it’s no big surprise that Vance would write the foreword for a book by Project 2025’s architect. They fundamentally agree on how they see the world, and in much of what they want out of politics: a battle against the left for control of institutions, and expanded government power to stop abortions.”