After Hurricane Ian devastated the U.S. state of Florida in late September, its Republican governor Ron DeSantis used some unusual language to criticize American press coverage of the storm. The “national regime media,” he said, had wanted to see Ian hit the city of Tampa, because that would have been “worse for Florida”—and helped the media “pursue their political agenda.” DeSantis’ comments were certainly odd in that there’s no record of journalists ever hoping for any harm to Tampa—but they were even more striking in their association of the media with a “regime” that’s hostile to his party and subverting his country.
For some time now, far-right members of the U.S. House of Representatives—such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Paul Gosar—have been railing against the “Biden regime.” Others on the American right have meanwhile argued that a more deep-seated and oppressive “regime” extends far beyond government—to the press, universities, nongovernmental organizations, and “woke” corporations. Ohio’s Republican Senate nominee J.D. Vance even claimed that the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was “censored by the regime.” And according to the former Trump national-security official Michael Anton, “the people who really run the United States of America” all belong to it. What are they talking about?
Laura K. Field is a scholar-in-residence at American University and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center in Washington. To Field, the rising popularity of the term is a sign of how fluidly extremist ideas are now migrating from the fringes of American politics into the mainstream—from niche intellectuals to ideological entrepreneurs to politicians, media commentators, and other influencers. Field notes that many of those who’ve helped popularize the idea of “the regime” had tried from 2016 to articulate an intellectual framework that supported the politics of Donald Trump—and are trying now to develop the framework for a right-wing populism that can outlast him.
Graham Vyse: What’s “the regime”?
Laura K. Field: The idea of a regime is relatively familiar. Political scientists have commonly used the term to refer to a system of government. But until recently, it’s not something you’d hear much in mainstream U.S. political conversation.
The new idea of “the regime” in America comes from a network of intellectuals, commentators, and politicians broadly aligned with the new-populist politics of Donald Trump—often called “the new right”—who’ve given the term a specific, negative, even cynical, new meaning in the U.S. context.
Fundamentally, it expresses a view of the Biden administration as an effectively authoritarian government—colluding with progressives who control the media, run the universities, and, increasingly, dominate, corporations. There’s a clearly sinister connotation to the rhetoric, tying in with the idea that the 2020 election was stolen and Biden’s presidency is fraudulent—while also conveying a broader sense that the left is exerting despotic power over Americans, and above all Republicans, in all kinds of ways. The regime is very all-encompassing and so very threatening.
Vyse: How did the idea take shape?
Field: When President Trump took power, he didn’t show a very clear sense of what he stood for politically beyond the rhetoric of his presidential campaign. In that context, there were a number of right-wing intellectuals who identified with the politics of Trump’s campaign and offered ideas about what it might ultimately stand for—and arguments for these ideas.
It might sound strange to a lot of liberals or other Trump opponents that there would be a real intellectual component to Trumpism, but there is. That’s what these intellectuals have tried to foster—and some of them have been effective, drawing on considerable knowledge about American history and political theory. They’ve been able to find ways to rationalize, and sometimes justifiably defend, what Trump-era Republicans have tried to do—even if the intellectual weight of it all didn’t always come through in what Trump would say.
One of the sources of this thinking, and of the idea of “the regime” in particular, is the Claremont Institute, a research and advocacy organization in California that understands itself as working to restore America’s founding principles—and that had close ties to the Trump administration.
[Michael Anton, a senior fellow at Claremont, is a former Trump national security official. John Eastman, the founding director of Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence and another senior fellow, was the lawyer who helped Trump rationalize his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.]
There’s a strong tendency at the Claremont Institute, and intellectually affiliated institutions, to view the United States as having been fundamentally transformed by progressivism—and to see themselves as counter-revolutionaries working to bring things back to a more authentic American condition.
Some of these intellectuals have have been effective, drawing on a lot of knowledge about American history and political theory. They’ve been able to find ways to rationalize, and sometimes justifiably defend, what Trump-era Republicans have been trying to do—even if the intellectual weight of it all didn’t always come through in what Trump would say.
There’s also a group of religious traditionalists—sometimes referring to themselves as “post-liberals”—who also use this language of the regime. Patrick Deneen, a Notre Dame professor and the author of Why Liberalism Failed, has a forthcoming book called Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. So it’s not necessarily just rhetoric; some of those using the language have big ideas about changing politics. Some post-liberal Catholics, for example, are outspoken in their support of Hungary’s very illiberal Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Some groups, such as the National Conservatism organization, promote a populist economic nationalism.
Vyse: How do you see these sources as having influenced mainstream Republicans?
Field: One way was through direct influence on the Trump administration. President Trump’s 1776 Commission is an example. This was the advisory committee, formed late in his administration, which created a report on “patriotic education” responding to The New York Times’ 1619 Project—and which had argued that the “true founding” of the United States was the year American slavery began.
The Commission’s report uses the word regime a number of times to describe tendencies on the left—including reference to “identity politics” as a “regime of formal inequality” and “a regime of rewards and privileges assigned according to group identity.”
Another way is through new-right influencers like Curtis Yarvin, who’s known to be one of the fathers of something called the neo-reactionary movement or Dark Enlightenment. He’s still somewhat obscure in the Republican mainstream. But he’s close with the billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who’s in turn been a big supporter of J.D. Vance and other populist Republican candidates, and his ideas have gotten quite a lot of play on the right.
Yarvin talks a lot about “the cathedral,” which is essentially another way of speaking about “the regime”—or specifically, the place of the media and the universities in it. But it suggests a there’s something spiritual or quasi-religious at work in the regime, with a lot of dogmatism and orthodoxy. Ultimately, he wants to overturn democracy and create a new regime—a sort of techno-monarchy.
Vyse: Another idea I’ve heard from Yarvin concerns what he sees as the failure of democratic elections to change what goes on in the U.S. government. He argues that “the regime” or the “deep state” have much more entrenched power than voters understand, and the bureaucracy was able to prevent Trump from actualizing his agenda as president throughout his term—before it colluded in stealing the election from him in 2020. Do you see that argument taking hold on the new right?
Field: Absolutely. This is a hard version of the of the idea of the regime, which suggests that a president not in league with it will be thwarted in office—and that votes in favor of his reelection won’t matter, because the whole system has been taken over by illegitimate forces outside voters’ control. There’s an implicit call to action in the argument—to radical, even possibly violent action—to stop what’s going on.
If you genuinely believe that people don’t have the control they should have over their government in a democracy, there’s an imperative in that belief to upend the system. And we’ve seen it play out. It’s a logic that led to the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.
If you genuinely believe that people don’t have the control they should have over their government in a democracy, there’s an imperative in that belief to upend the system. And we’ve seen it play out. It’s a logic that led to the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Vyse: I suppose the element of truth in Yarvin’s narrative is that Trump really was stymied at various points by his staffers, advisors, and administration officials. Sometimes it was because he was trying to do things that were impractical, impossible, or illegal, but the dynamic existed.
Field: Sure. He was elected within a constitutional system, not one in which he could simply enact his will. Every president is stymied.
Vyse: So Yarvin seems to be arguing that the guardrails that exist on a presidency shouldn’t really be there at all, and the president should have massive unilateral power.
Field: Yes. It’s certainly the case that an administration might be bloated or that those guardrails might be placed imperfectly, but Yarvin doesn’t take a particularly nuanced view of those issues. He speaks as though every effort to thwart Trump—every reasonable legal barrier—was illegitimate, when actually, they’re some of the best features of the U.S. constitutional order. Of course, people like Yarvin aren’t really saying the system needs to be reformed; they’re saying it needs to be overturned. They talk a lot about dismantling the administrative state.
Vyse: Are there other examples of language or ideas emerging from the new right you’d see as having become similarly mainstream?
Field: One example is the idea that “critical race theory” is being taught in America’s public schools. That idea really took off, and it didn’t come from Donald Trump initially. New-right figures decided “critical race theory” would be an effective term to use to go after certain educational approaches to anti-racism or race consciousness that they disagreed with. The young right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, who led this effort, tweeted in early 2021 that his goal was “to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’” Using this language became a powerful mode of attack.
Elements of the new right have also mainstreamed the idea of a Great Replacement—a conspiracy theory that nefarious forces are attempting systematically to import immigrants into the U.S. to “replace” the native-born population.
The rhetoric of the regime works by being vague. It suggests a phenomenon that’s sinister, authoritarian, and aggressive, but it also gives those who use it a degree of plausible deniability about its more radical implications. They can say they’re only using it in an innocuous way. To an ordinary person, though, it has a very ominous feeling to it.
The rhetoric of the regime works by being vague. It suggests a phenomenon that’s sinister, authoritarian, and aggressive, but it also gives those who use it a degree of plausible deniability about its more radical implications. They can say they’re only using it in an innocuous way. To an ordinary person, though, it has a very ominous feeling to it.
To be clear, there’s some truth to the conviction that liberals or progressives have more cultural clout than conservatives in America—that Hollywood has a liberal or progressive bias, and many mainstream news sources and universities do too. But this conspiratorial notion of a regime that includes the government, corporations, and law enforcement all colluding to oppress Republicans says something very different—and ultimately absurd. There may be a hardening of language on both sides of the American political divide, but it’s important to distinguish which parts of that reflect reality and which don’t.
Vyse: Thinking about that hardening of language on both sides, isn’t talking about fighting “the regime” in some ways analogous to talking about being part of “the resistance,” as many on the American left did after Donald Trump’s election in 2016?
Field: As you say, people on the left started talking about being part of “the resistance,” because they saw Trump as essentially illegitimate in certain respects. I sympathized with that, because Trump is a demagogue and there’s a cruelty to his language and his actions. Some of the first things he did after taking office were enacting an order banning travel from predominantly Muslim and announcing that he was going to prohibit transgender Americans from serving openly in the military. Still, liberals and progressives have to remember, he was elected by the American people according to American law.
I do see the idea of resisting as different than trying to delegitimize the whole system, though. There’s a certain danger to America’s fundamental system of government coming from the right that isn’t coming from the left. Language is hardening on the left too, but it’s largely against legitimate threats from the right. I know that sounds hyper-partisan, but it doesn’t mean conservatives are wrong about everything; it means there’s a fundamental asymmetry in how language is hardening in American political life.
There’s some ongoing commentary, on right and the left, about the term fascist being thrown around on the left. And there’s some truth to that. But what I largely see on the American left—setting aside random people on Twitter using the term as a catch-all description of the right—is a lot of conversation about the word and whether it’s appropriate. There’s a lot of parsing and endless discussion about it. President Biden said some Republicans are “semi-fascist,” but that’s about as far as it’s gone among Democratic politicians.
When right-wing leaders use language like the regime, the public is being primed not necessarily to accept the results of elections—and possibly push back against results they don’t like. There’s real uncertainty about what’s to come, especially given what happened on January 6th. Maybe this all ends up being just a bunch of overblown rhetoric. Or maybe there’s potential for more political violence. I don’t think people are going to try to topple “the Biden regime,” but the possibility of more radical action is in the air.
