Kristin Kobes Du Mez, in her book Jesus and John Wayne (2020), describes how evangelical support for Trump was not an aberration or a merely pragmatic compromise but rather “the culmination of evangelicals’ embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and

As with the anti-CRT campaign, the anti-trans campaign, and the antiabortion campaign, the anti-ESG movement was about narrowing the playing field, limiting freedom, and taking choices off the table.

It is distinct from other expressions of Christianity in that it is political and seeks political domination. The writer Katherine Stewart puts the matter clearly: “It does not seek to add another voice to America’s pluralistic democracy, but to replace our foundational democratic principles and institutions with a state grounded on a particular

Alamariu repeatedly fell prey to a particularly juvenile form of cognitive bias: the supposition that every “insight” that is titillating or cruel must also be secretly true and important.28

Like Vermeule, Rufo disavowed the idea of liberal institutional neutrality, and of liberal public reason (“political life moves on narrative, emotion, scandal, anger, hope, and faith—on irrational, or at least subrational feelings that can be channeled, but never destroyed by reason,” he wrote). For Rufo—since neutrality is an illusion—the

The New Right mistakes academic liberalism for the real thing. They assume that liberalism’s embrace of political neutrality means a simple rejection and disavowal of all particular conceptions of the good life, and of values like “truth, liberty, and happiness” (or “the Good, the True, and the Beautiful”), in favor of an empty commitment to

both Deneen and Hazony “have mounted a frontal attack on the entire individualist, rights-based liberal political tradition that they trace back to John Locke.”

But in its worst iterations, the Straussian love of abstraction liberates them from any due diligence about on-the-ground facts, and the preference for the world of ideas and big thinking releases them from normal intellectual constraints of empiricism and historical accuracy.

The true task of Trumpism, according to Krein, is the “destruction of the soulless managerial class, a task inseparable from the assertion of a healthier culture and a stronger elite in its place.” His programmatic recommendation reads: “The political project of supreme importance is therefore the transformation of passive Middle Americans into a