From Whittaker Chambers to Pat Buchanan to Donald Trump?
It is helpful to pay attention to how today’s self-identifying “counter-revolutionaries” on the Right conceive of their own role and relationship to the Modern Conservative tradition. Crucially, they do not think they represent a departure – in fact, they claim to be fighting in the name of the *real* essence that defined Modern Conservatism, which in their mind now requires radicalism.
Take the example of Russell Vought, who is one of the architects of Project 2025 and will return to the White House with Donald Trump in January to reclaim his position as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. I grappled with Vought’s trajectory in more detail in my previous piece, but it is important to restate the broad outlines of his view of the world here: Over the past two decades, Vought went from being widely regarded as a “fiscal hawk” and – at least rhetorically – claiming “small government” principles to an ever more explicit, aggressive desire to mobilize the coercive powers of the state against the “enemy within.” Vought believes the constitutional order, and with it the “natural” order itself, has been destroyed: The revolution has already happened, “the Left” won. Power now lies with a “permanent ruling class” of leftist elites who control all major institutions of American life and especially the “woke and weaponized” agencies of the state. In order to defeat them, conservatives must become “radical constitutionalists” and stage nothing less than a comprehensive “counter-revolution.”
What is remarkable about Vought, someone who has spent his entire adult life as a rightwing operator in and around the power centers of the Republican Party, is that he disdains the conservative establishment, which he believes categorically errs in trying to preserve what is no more. The Federalist Society, for instance, is getting it all wrong, according to Vought, in committing to fighting within the boundaries of “normal” politics. Vought, on the other hand, wants to purge the government and “traumatize” the “woke” bureaucrats; he wants to use the military to suppress protests; and he is devoted to Donald Trump who he literally views as a “gift of God.”
And yet, Vought is keen to present both himself and Donald Trump in the tradition of Modern Conservatism. Not coincidentally, Vought opened his 2022 essay titled : “Renewing American Purpose: Statesmanship in a Post-Constitutional Moment” in which he outlined his “radical constitutionalist” vision by invoking the legacy of Whittaker Chambers. Chambers is a towering figure in the intellectual history of the Conservative Movement. A former communist and Soviet spy in the 1930s, Chambers emerged after his defection as one of the most prominent anti-communist voices; he became famous when he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee against fellow former Soviet spy Alger Hiss in 1948; his autobiographical reflections, titled Witness, published in 1952, quickly became one of the core texts of the emerging Conservative Movement.