The Modern MAGA Conservative Authoritarian State
This thesis is an elegant, thoughtful, and compelling explanation of the modern MAGA conservative movement and how it differs from the founding principles of our nation and the Democratic Party. It has stayed with me, and I wanted to memorialize it here in my blog. As I do not have the source material, this is a paraphrase. I hope I have done both the thesis and its author, Ben Wheeler, justice.
Conservatism, at its core, is about believing in a strict hierarchical society. Rather than being a philosophy of liberty or tradition, the right is actually a reactionary movement that defends power, privilege, and inequality.
This can best be understood by looking at our own history. The Loyalists, enslavers, and segregationists in American history were conservatives. The Loyalists would have maintained their power and status had the colonists not revolted against the Crown. Enslavers and later segregationists defended their power and privilege by continuing the subjugation of an entire race for centuries. The same political faction that supports ICE grabbing random people off the street also supported slave catchers. The law bound Black Americans while offering them no protection whatsoever. The law also protected White Americans, but did not bind them when they waged violence against Black Americans.
Fundamentally, America’s liberals and conservatives are not born from a dispute over the country’s founding ideology; rather, they are born from the dispute over whether to have a revolution at all. Liberals and their ideology are descended from the Declaration of Independence, which lays out an egalitarian, universalist vision for the country while also aiming to dismantle preexisting hierarchies. Its core rests on three revolutionary principles: human equality, unalienable rights, and the consent of the governed.
By declaring that “all men are created equal,” it directly abolishes monarchical rule because, if everyone is equal, then no individual is born with a divine right to rule over others. It also directly takes aim at strict hierarchical societies because, if everyone is equal, then no one has the right to oppress others. Furthermore, it argues that essential rights—specifically life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—are granted by a higher power rather than by the government, meaning it is impossible to legally strip them away.
America’s conservatives believe that human society is not a collection of equal individuals bound by a social contract but rather a divinely ordained, rigid hierarchy in which some are born to rule, and others are born to serve. In this framework, the state is an extension of the patriarchal family: the leader holds absolute, unquestionable authority, and subjects owe total obedience. This worldview is reinforced by a potent blend of cultural populism and Christian nationalism.
While Trump uses anti-establishment rhetoric to attack a perceived progressive elite, his base supports him because they believe he is tearing down a false hierarchy to restore the natural one: one in which White, Christian, traditional family structures sit at the top. Trump is willing to meet their demand to stop elevating others above them.
When a conservative demands "law and order," they are not calling for the impartial application of the rule of law to all citizens equally; they are calling for the enforcement of this social hierarchy. To a liberal, liberty is a universal right that must be shared equally to exist. To the conservative, liberty is a privilege of status. If everyone possesses it equally, it loses its value.
To conservative leaders, the police do not exist to enforce abstract, neutral statutes; they exist to maintain the boundary between the protected rulers and the bound subjects. Therefore, conservatives feel no shame when the state targets marginalized groups, liberals, or immigrants because, in their view, the law is performing its proper function.
This also explains why Trump's overt criminality does not alienate his base but rather reinforces his appeal as the ultimate patriarch. The ruler is completely above the law. To his followers, Trump is not a crook breaking the law; he is an absolute sovereign exercising his natural prerogative to protect them and punish their perceived enemies. He is the modern embodiment of the monarch who is protected but not bound by the rules.
Democrats have appealed to the universalist, egalitarian ideals of the Declaration of Independence in the hope that conservatives will see the error of their ways, but they are missing the fundamental reality that their conservative peers are operating on an entirely different wavelength. American conservatism is a fundamental rejection of the Declaration of Independence. John C. Calhoun stood on the Senate floor and called the proposition that all men are created equal "the most dangerous of all political errors."
This thesis does not ignore the libertarian wing of the GOP, but the conservative-libertarian alliance was always a marriage of convenience. Small-government rhetoric was weaponized primarily when the federal government began using its power to enforce integration and civil rights—in other words, when the federal government began dismantling traditional racial and economic hierarchies. When MAGA conservatives regained control, the illusion of anti-statism vanished.
The modern MAGA conservative defense of an authoritarian state and a leader who acts above the law is not a sudden deviation from its principles; it is the manifestation of them. Conservatives do not share the liberal distress over a collapsing republic because their ultimate loyalty is not to a democratic republic of equals; it is to an order in which power flows downward from a strong executive to a protected class. When Trump acts as a lawless sovereign, or when institutions of state violence tread heavily on the left, the MAGA conservative does not see a failure of American values. They see the natural order restored.
The fundamental error of the current Democratic Party is the belief that exposing structural contradictions will trigger a crisis of conscience on the right, but there is no shame in a contradiction that does not exist. The crisis of American democracy is not that one side is breaking the rules of the republic, but that it is operating according to an entirely different set of rules, in which the law is meant to weaponize privilege rather than guarantee equality. Democrats must understand that the MAGA right is not failing to live up to the ideals of 1776 but is actively fighting for the hierarchy of 1680, and they must respond to it accordingly.
