It is worth grappling with this genealogy: Chambers to Buchanan to Trump. What is it about Chambers and Buchanan that the self-declared “post-constitutionalists” find endearing? What is about them the explicitly radical, “counter-revolutionary” Right wants to invoke?
Whittaker Chambers was an imposing presence in the intellectual circles of Modern Conservatism until his death in 1961. Because of his personal history as a former communist spy, the Right saw him as a powerful witness to the acute leftist threat. For coming forward to testify against Alger Hiss, he was seen as a brave leader who spoke his conscience, even when confronted with a hostile liberal orthodoxy. Chambers, who converted to Christianity in the 1940s, also represented a distinctly religious interpretation of the threat America was supposedly facing – a crisis of faith as much as a political challenge. And finally, Chambers was convinced that communism and liberalism were deeply intertwined: Liberalism was basically a less overtly violent, but equally dangerous form of communism; communism merely the most radical expression of liberalism. For people like Chambers, as George Nash put it in the 1970s in his field-defining study of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, “liberalism meant treason.”
More than thirty years after Chambers’ death, Pat Buchanan led an – ultimately unsuccessful, at least in the moment – rightwing revolt against the Republican establishment in the 1992 GOP primaries. Buchanan was not an outsider. He had worked for both Nixon and Reagan in the White House. But he also channeled the frustrations of “paleo-conservatives” who thought the Republican Party was in the hands of elites who did not do nearly enough to push back against the liberal onslaught of racial, cultural, and religious pluralism, who wanted to take a more explicit stance against egalitarian democracy, who demanded more radical measures in defense of an ethno-nationalist vision of “real America” as a white Christian homeland. Crucially, Buchanan was also instrumental in shifting the Right’s focus more explicitly to what came to be called the “culture wars.” In his infamous speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention, Buchanan raged against “unrestricted abortion on demand,” “radical feminism,” “the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women,” “discrimination against religious schools,” “women in combat,” “environmental extremists,” “the raw sewage of pornography that pollutes our popular culture.” America was indeed changing, Buchanan warned: “But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God’s country.” Buchanan pleaded with his fellow Republicans to understand that “this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”