The LA protests reveal what actually unites the Trump right

Philosophically speaking, the right has long been defined by its emphasis on the value of stability — as odd as it may seem in the era of Trump’s radically destabilizing administration.

Conservative theorists, most notably Edmund Burke, have long maintained that political flourishing depends on the existence of stable social rules developed gradually and from the bottom up over the course of generations. Those who seek to overturn this order, either through sweeping legislation or revolutionary violence, will inevitably do more harm than good.

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The answer, in part, is that it doesn’t. The intellectual right has adopted a self-consciously revolutionary mode of politics, seeing the current political order as a fundamentally corrupt system that deserves to be torn down. This is a reactionary rejection of Burkean conservatism, which is why so many erstwhile Burkeans became the Never Trumpers…

And yet, there’s a crucial element of the Burkean emphasis on order that the Trump right has retained: a belief that some specific elements of American life remain uncorrupted, and that the “woke left” must be defeated for those elements to again become the country’s defining traits. Traditional religion, conservative cultural values, a market economy, the notion of national pride, and even nationhood itself — these are the elements of the United States that the modern right sees as being under attack from the left and the institutions (like universities) where it is in control.

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From this was born the mythic underpinnings of the modern Trump right: a deep fear of chaotic, violent left-wing radicals, paired with a sense that mainstream liberals and nonpartisan experts are in thrall to said extremists. This is the narrative that knits together the various factions of MAGA 2.0: the tech right, the national populists, the atheist anti-wokes, the Christian nationalists, and on down the line. There are reasonable grounds to doubt that everyone believes it sincerely, but it defines much of the conceptual vocabulary right-wingers use to communicate across factional lines. We may not agree on everything, they say, but we are all against that.