Something I've never understood about conservatism has always been the way it seemingly embraces both a behaviorist/determinist, and at the same time a free-will view of human behavior.
 
Conservatives often talk about rewarding or punishing good or bad behavior, and yet at the same time speak of the importance of personal responsibility: people being "self-made" or only having themselves to blame.
 
They often refer to social welfare programs as the "Nanny State", invoking dynamics of the citizen being treated as a child by a coddling, feminized government figure.  Instead, they would presumably favor the strong hand of a masculine figure who performs tough love by forcing them to go it alone.
 
This parenting metaphor relies on a theory of learning, more specifically, operant conditioning, in which bad behavior becomes habit through a process of reinforcement and is extinguished through punishment.  Aside from the fact that behaviorism as public policy is far more complex than this simple equation, what is striking is how conservatism then throws this deterministic view out the window. When it valorizes the idea of "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" as the morally justified way of earning one's fortune, or speaking of crime or poverty as being the result of poor personal choices that people could have made otherwise, they are relying not on a theory of learning but rather a notion of free will that requires only one's innate desires and reason to make good instead of bad decisions.
 
The only way I can make coherent sense of this is if they follow a sort of compatibilism in which a behaviorist account is responsible for part of one's decisions, with free will making up the rest.  The problem with compatibilism, apart from it not being based in any science or empiricism, is that it allows one to basically pick and choose how to establish the causality of any human action.  Where do you draw the line between determinism and free will?  Is there an age at which one gains this special innate efficacy unrelated to environment or learning history?  Or does one gradually develop it until, maybe by adulthood, when it is fully formed?  But then how much of it do you have?  Under what conditions would you ascribe all or part of an action to free will, and not determinism?
 
Rather, it feels like an arbitrary myth that, given the complexity of any one individual's environment and genetic learning history, you can sort of toss out as a reasonable hypothesis that you can get a free pass on to justify your particular justification as to why someone is deserving or not of any specific circumstance.  A millionaire can have made his money through freely choosing hard work and sacrifice, and so deserves to keep it as property.  A poor man chose not to work hard and thus deserves his poverty.  But if the government provides welfare (using part of the rich man's wealth to pay for it), the poor man's bad behavior of sloth and vice will be reinforced.  If a criminal is not punished he will not learn to change his ways.  If the government allows a man to keep his riches, it will reinforce his strong work ethic, but if he is taxed, his behavior will be punished.
 
The beauty of behaviorism is that it has decades of strong research supporting its conclusions about human behavior as determined by learning history.  Sadly, it is poorly understood by the public, not just by conservatives but by liberals as well.  However, because liberalism is far more concerned with fairness and equality than traditional and hierarchy, it is less allergic to being clear eyed about structural, environmental contingencies that undermine libertarian free will - if not in belief, at least in practical social policy.
 
 
 
 
 

I'm always interested in center-right perspectives on the mainstreaming of far-right extremism.  

But the self-analysis always seems to stop short of a deeper probe into what it is about the right wing, from a psycho-social perspective, that leads/has led to this.  In todays op-ed by the NY Times columnist David French, he starts off by noting:

It keeps happening. Since the ascendance of Donald Trump, with depressing regularity, right-wing men have been outed for using the most vile rhetoric.

He goes on to provide a litany of examples.  Then asks:
What is going on? Why are parts of the right — especially the young right — so infested with outright racists and bigots?

He then admits that there have always been bigots on the right, but goes on to claim that this is something new, and chalks it up to "hatred, combined with masculine insecurity and cowardice",  pointing to examples of how these have led to extremism, especially online.  He briefly argues the way back from here is real world experiences with the joy of family life.
It’s difficult to break the hold of bigotry and fury on the online right, but as is so often the case, the solution to online evil can be found in offline relationships, the family and friends who keep us grounded to the real.

Do they feel that it isn't inevitable?  That these are just extreme cases in an otherwise perfectly reasonable ideology -  that just as extreme leftists might embrace a violent, anti-democratic stalinism, but in general there is nothing particularly violent or anti-democratic about the left?

The problem with that framing is that anti-democratic communist left has essentially been non-existent for many  decades, while huge networks on the right, with hundreds of millions in funding, have only been building during that time and earlier.

The desire to carve a line between ideology and personal psychology is maybe comforting, but blinkers one to what drives mass movements.  There are clear lines to be drawn from basic right-wing ideological assumptions to its current extreme mainstream form.  Fundamental beliefs about  in- versus out- group circles of morality and appeal to traditional hierarchies inform deeply the MAGA phenomenon.  

I would like to see more - any - explorations of the ways in which these core beliefs of the right lead logically to where we now find ourselves.  French starts at hatred and toxic masculinity, but these should have been end points.  Of course those are bad things.  What's important is how we get to them.  

This allergy to look more deeply into why the right has always been fertile soil for bigotry - racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-immigrant hysteria - can partially be explained by a simple aversion by anyone to take personal responsibility for one's toxic baseline assumptions. 

But the more fundamental aversion to this line of inquiry is rooted in the right's epistemological embrace of the fallacy of appeal to tradition and its adherence to a limited moral circle.  If believes in the superiority of one's in-group, capacity for empathy for other perspectives is limited.  Other nations, religions and ethnicities are to a degree written out of moral consideration, while at the same time limiting one's ability to critically examine one's in-group.  The appeal to tradition then becomes a kind of self-preserving cocoon of ignorance in which progressive deconstruction and objective analysis of internal belief is waved away.  Existing hierarchies are in this way viewed, if not as beneficent, then at least as unimpeachable for fear of what may be worse to come.  Much right wing rhetoric is explicitly about this very anxiety: the left (in opposition to the right) is always seeking to "tear down" or "destroy" society.  At its best, conservatism cautions that change can lead to outcomes even worse than what they replaced.  (Stalinism and Maoism being the prime historical example).  But at its worst, conservatism serves to concretize hierarchies with great social harm - almost by definition to marginalized groups. 

But for the "best" version of the conservative impulse - a pointed reminder of unintended consequences - requires good-faith engagement with both the critiques and suggested solutions put  forward by progressive change.  The track record of conservatism on this front is dismal.  The  engines of progressive change can be found in three pillars of democratic society: the university, journalism, and worker unions.  These institutions are at their core instantiations of hierarchical deconstruction. 

In academia, subject matter expertise is fostered via robust collaboration within and across fields in the form of research and peer-review.  In journalism, power is held to account when sectors of power in society are examined in current events and historical context is provided.  In unions, workers come together to create power in solidarity in a context in which capital would otherwise hold  absolute power.  While not perfect, they are integral to maintaining a healthy opportunity not only of equitable power relations in society but also an expansive epistemology that maintains avenues for multivalent discourse through pluralistic empowerment.

The absence of conservative support for these three institutions speaks volumes.  Conservatives have no real presence in academia or journalism, aside from the more apolitical fields where critical discourse is most infrequent, and conservatives are essentially opposed the very concept of unionization.  Instead, what we have are a smattering of token conservative academic thought that trots into the discourse almost exclusively in reactionary form, without good-faith conversation with progressive thought, and seemingly existing only to brandish credentials instead of serious arguments.   Conservative journalism is even worse.  With almost no investigative reporting, reactionary articles provide cherry-picked anecdotes designed not to explore uncomfortable realities and critically dissect social systems and and their actors, but principally to justify the current status quo or attack ideas or actors that have already been assumed to be malevolent.  

The result is a conservative movement that has become ever more isolated from critical thought and ultimately even ideological coherence.  Having given up on basic tools of objective analysis, it exists in a self-contained vacuum.

​On a recent and especially thought-provoking episode of the Straight White American Jesus podcast (#59), "Why Don't They Care", Daniel Miller Swaj, Professor of Humanities at Landmark College, proposed the theory that a key to right wing thought is the defining of one's identity outward, towards what one is not, rather than inwardly, towards what one is, as is more common on the left.  Because of a narrow assumption of what is correct - through an unquestioning of tradition and authority - the identity is highly fixed, and defined by what it is not.  This then leads to not only a lack of empathy, but active antipathy, in which one is always on the lookout for out-group "enemies", or those in whom to find evidence of the righteousness of the in-group.  In a vicious cycle, the lack of empathy inhibits the learning about out-group experiences, which inoculates one from feeling further empathy.  Swaj then develops this further, arguing that this leads to perpetual insecurity:
 
If that's all that one's identity is [attacking others], it's a highly insecure identity, and the more that those who undertake all of these efforts to attack others, insist that they're doing so because they're secure and who they are, the more pronounced that insecurity is.
 
 
I find this line of thought compelling.  However, a couple things might be teased out as well.  To start, this aligns with political values research that finds differences between the left and right in what valence environmental events have.  Conservatives are found to be more reactive (psychologically and physiologically) to negative environmental events, and especially threats to their in-group.  This contributes to caution and avoidance towards novelty, and a hewing to remain closer to social order.
 
It seems clear that conservative thinking reinforces more conservative thinking.  In behavioral terms, advanced social responses are defined as rule-following.  Immediate or local stimuli do not need to be present to occasion reinforced responses (e.g. delicious flavor reinforces licking candy) if the behavior of rule following has been reinforced and a rule is developed out of combinations of responses to stimuli.  From Daniel Cerutti (1989, Journal of Experimental Analysis of Behavior),

In rule-governed behavior, previously established elementary discriminations are combined in complex instructions and thus result in complex behavior. Discriminative combining and recombining of responses produce behavior with characteristics differing from those of behavior that is established through the effects of its direct consequences. For example, responding in instructed discrimination may be occasioned by discriminative stimuli that are temporally and situationally removed from the circumstances under which the discrimination is instructed.
​
 While there do appear to be phenotypic dispositions that correlate with political ideology, they would seem to be sets of weak complex sensory tendencies that on their own do not form political thought, but could push certain individuals towards or away from certain idiosyncratic tendencies of behavior that fall along various points of the left-right spectrum.  Rather, one's political ideology is far more a product of a learning history that has reinforced sets of behaviors towards particular environmental stimuli and subsequent formation of rule sets.   For example, if I grow up in a house in which immigrants, democrats, the government, etc. are pointed to and spoke of in negative terms, and related rule following thoughts and behaviors are reinforced, then I will likely be shaped into a conservative.  The environment one is raised in will condition this identity.
 
But if conservatism is self-reinforcing through avoidance of novelty (negative reinforcement)  and preference for in-group or sameness (positive reinforcement), what is the internal logic of conservatism that drives this avoidance and in-group preference?  Human story-telling can be powerful reinforcers of rule-governed behaviors. 
 
At the highest level, this has always been the role of religion and myth, as well as archetypal symbolism throughout the arts, political rhetoric and family and local cultural narratives - each working together to reinforce basic sets of moral and value directions.  It is a defining feature of human society that we use these shorthand heuristics to guide our lives.  Because it is a mentally taxing effort to evaluate and process daily social situations, placing our "faith" in a set of core moral values allows us to give over to them some portion of our personal operational control, freeing ourselves up to either investigate these complex situations at our leisure or ignore them entirely and focus on other, more immediate and often simpler stimuli.
 
The term Prompt Dependency, from Applied Behavior Analysis, might provide useful additional insight here.  It refers to the process by which the independent performance of a behavior has not been reinforced as much as a behavior that has followed a prompt in the environment.  For instance, if I only take out the trash after being told, and when I take it out on my own I don't receive adequate reinforcement, I will be considered "prompt dependent" to a degree.  Prompt dependency is in direct conflict with most of our moral values: independence, courage, hard work, self-control, etc.
 
In a way, the conservative emphasis on tradition and status quo operates as a form of prompting for rule-governed identity to a greater degree than does the liberal openness to novelty.  For the conservative, the rule-set is simpler, more narrow, and less in need of questioning.  For the liberal, the rule set is always been challenged by novelty.  With each new experience, the behavior of learning something new, imagining the thoughts and experiences of another, understanding the history and context becomes reinforced.  Novel experiences, without as rigid an identity rule set to fall back on, must be responded to by the liberal without relying on the availability of social prompts that provide security and safety.  It is precisely this process, though, that reinforce the behaviors that forego the need to adhere to rigid-rule prompting and allay the aversiveness of new experiences. 
 
To illustrate, if a liberal does not believe all moral rectitude is to be found in a specific interpretation of a particular religious text, then a repertoire of alternative moral rule-sets must be learned.  To a conservative, homosexuality might be wrong because it says so in a bible.  However, a liberal who has forgone the ultimate authority of the bible (or at least that interpretation), must begin to apply different calculations.  Does the behavior cause individual or social harm, and why or why not?  Where does the behavior come from?  What have other societies thought about it?  What does the individual think about it?    Or, if the liberal is religious and seeks authority in the same bible, they may have developed meta-critique such as what was the historical context of the passage?  How has it been interpreted?  Are there internal contradictions between that particular piece of text and other themes in the bible? 
 
The history of human thought can be traced by the development of frameworks of inquisition and truth seeking with great, if not central, import to morality.   Philosophy looks deeply at things like epistemology or reason.  History examines what has happened in the past and science examines what can and cannot be observed as true facts about the reality.  Journalism reports on how people are living their lives and the systems in which they live them. 
 
All of this can be so much work!  But liberal rule-following reinforces greater fluency in utilizing these frameworks.  As such, this makes encountering novelty and adjusting one's moral perceptions more manageable. 
 
In 2023, with the mainstreaming of conspiracy theorizing and the seeming inconsequence of evidence and fact, this high-level rule-following seems to have been drawn into greater relief.  How do we know what we know and why do we believe what we do? 
 
I will end here for now, but a topic I would like to explore further is the importance of belief in free-will versus determinism, and how the belief reinforces one's rule-governed behavior, specifically in regard to political ideology.  As an epistemological matter, determining one's beliefs about the causality of human actions would seem greatly impactful to their moral stance on a given behavior, as well as what moral stance they believe a society should take.  This would seem relevant to variety of central ideas as widely ranging as criminal justice, economics, education, religion, and much more.
 
 
 
 
Discrimination theory of rule‐governed behavior, The Journal of Experimental Analysis of Behavior, Daniel Cerutti, 1989

Apparently, here's this techno-utopian thing going on in Silicon Valley.  Something happened that went from maybe benignly libertarian-left seeming, to all these far-right monarchist technocracists like Mencius Moldbug, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and a whole coterie of permanently online neo-fascists.
 
They seem to basically believe in their genetic and cultural superiority, being that culture as it may a weirdo ironic nihilism.  I've never quite gone to deeply into it, but I felt I've learned about it from the edges.  Something in the past two decades erupted as an old-guard blood and soil paleo conservatism began to crawl out from under the depths of neoliberal economic policy and social justice awareness breathed out into the academy and orbiting spheres of cultural creation and left political activism. 
 
As Clinton played nice with Gingrich to weaken the welfare state and deregulate, dreaming of a future in which everyone was a PMC, and no one did manual labor.  Murphy Brown took swings from Dan Quail and the AIDS crisis faded into a strange sunset.  Homosexuality finally spread from the metropolitan ghettos to some level mainstream acceptance.  Right wing radio boiled and seethed, as Bush Jr. talked about "compassionate conservatism" and welcoming immigrants.  But then 9/11, and the fear it inspired, melted into the impotence of Iraq and Afghanistan, and when the country turned away from a jingoism-rung-hollow, towards Barack Hussein Obama, the Tea Party movement erupted from the great recession like a bare-chested drunken biker and violently puked on America's front lawn, chunks of racist memes and violent rhetoric sopping in an inchoate stew of economic and social displeasure.
 
When the GOP could do no better than Romney/Mc Cain, who trucked no conspiratorial nonsense or overt racism, Trump stepped (escalated) in with his golden shoes of shit and began shucking his confidence games to an audience primed and eager to suckle his hate and dumb machismo.  "They hate you and they hate me, so I'll fight for you" were the words they needed to hear.  They had become outsiders.  It was clear who they had lost the culture war to (Hollyweird and Colleges).  And while they were no worse off than the left financially, they were too afraid to go to college anymore because their kids were coming home Woke for the holidays and insulting the family.  Their towns were filling with immigrants.  You had to press 1 for English.  Girls were kissing on TV. 
 
They seemed to have two choices: fall back into the safety of the Benedict option of homeschooling and further public retreat with the world fell further into sin; or the more dangerous but glorious Flight 93 option of taking the school boards, courts and capitol building by force.  Covid 19 made that choice for them.  The shutdowns were cinematic - like something straight out of a movie, a Hollyweird zombie apocalypse.  This is what they had all been preparing for: the gays and PMC elites injecting them with gay microchips and harvesting their souls.  Trump pulled hard on the truck horn and blasted his nonsensical clown suit flower in everyone's face, standing with his comically long red tie and surrounded by cheeseburgers.  Rush Limbaugh peed himself a little in excitement, "He's really doing it!"
 
Michael Anton, of the far-right Claremont institute, analogized the passenger revolt that stormed the cockpit and diverted Flight 93 from hitting the Pentagon as the crucible faced by the GOP in stopping the Democrats from destroying the country with their progressivism.  The analogy was a call for vigilante violence: when faced with an existential threat, extreme measures were justified.  The bedrock assumption was hyperbolic and conspiratorial, assuming Democratic governance as illegitimate and corrupt, and so justified extrajudicial and authoritarian measures.  As John Ganz pointed out in a recent column, historical fascism is best understood as a heterogenous amalgam of various interests, each seeing the same enemy in its sights, but with their own unique fear of victimization:
 
"It’s important to remember that fascism, especially in its original incarnation in Italy, was never a fully coherent ideology. Like the symbol of the fasces itself, it’s a bundle of things bound together, a syncretic and cobbled-together system of politics that encompassed several ideological tendencies. As the Madonna song goes, it brought together the bourgeoisie and the rebel. Mussolini’s party began with avant-garde futurists and radical syndicalists in the cities, but within a couple years attracted the most conservative sections of the bourgeoisie in the countryside. The historian Alexander de Grand calls this intrinsic fragmentation hiding behind consensus “hyphenated fascism”: so, you had conservative-fascism, nationalist-fascism, technocratic-fascism, syndicalist-fascism, Catholic-fascism etc. Each saw in the fascist movement and state the possibility of realizing their own program. This was made possible because of the excessively abstract terms of fascist pronouncements and the political skill and mercurial nature of fascist leaders: it was about being opposed to common enemies like liberalism and Marxism while at the same time “restoring national greatness.” Everybody had their own idea about what that looked like. But all would replace tiresome and frustrating regime of democratic political contestation with the rule of competence, or, what the sociologist of fascism Dylan Riley calls the “a technocratic rejection of politics as such.”
 
In the contemporary US you have the business-cranks opposed to taxes and regulations, the religious-cranks wanting Christian Theocracy, the race-cranks opposed to multiculturalism, the sex-cranks advocating patriarchy and heteronormativity, and the techno-cranks, convinced of their own superiority in guaranteeing economic and cultural excellence through a regime of top-down technocratic governance.
 
But the one central, reactionary throughline in all these groups is their deep sense of existential threat to traditional hierarchies of power that they see as essential to sustaining their own particular freedom - that is (whether consciously or not) their own position of comfort.  The supremacy of the White Christian Heterosexual Male is seen as required for human flourishing.  Each group comes at this from their own idiosyncratic angle, arguing from economic, social, religious or historical evidence that inevitably reaches back to better times, the before-woke.  The common feeling is one of personal resentment, a feeling of an identity that has been excluded from its rightful place of superiority.  The thinking is Manichean and zero-sum.  A cosmopolitan pluralism in which all groups share power is dismissed as contrary to the Natural Order in which hierarchy is unavoidable.  A loss of status for the traditionally dominant group can only lead to it subservience.  No matter how loud the naive rhetoric of DEI claims otherwise, not only is pluralism impossible, but its proponents know it - even if only at the unconscious level - and are thus driven by a mendacious lust for power.
 
This all may smack of projection, but it's a logical outcome of a coherent worldview.  The reactionary mind, motivated by its own lust to safeguard its comfort by maintaining power over other groups, assumes attempts at equality as attempts at replacement.  If true freedom is only ever held by wielding power over others, then it is all a game of dominance.  The trick then is in determining which group, which set of values and norms is best.  This is where the reactionary turns to history - albeit always a carefully curated perspective designed to emphasize the natural supremacy of their particular group. 
 
This historical reading is fundamentally tautological: since dominance is part of the natural order, evidence of a group's dominance is evidence of their right to dominate.  Just as the animal kingdom has a natural energy pyramid, so do does the society of man.  The idea of a man sharing power with a woman, a white man sharing power with a black man, a heterosexual with a homosexual, a Christian with a Muslim, an owner with his workers, etc. is akin to lion sharing the savannah with a gazelle.
 
Traditional centrist conservatism has always made a sort of deal on this point.  It will concede pluralism and equality as morally correct, just as long as traditional structures are left unassailed.  The leap it makes to bridge these seemingly contradictory premises is to assume that every individual has the power within them to transcend the degradations of these structures, either by assimilating to the dominant group, or by accepting a second-class status as a sort of freedom in its own right, owing to the beneficence of the dominant.  A worker can start his own business and be his own boss, or he can stay within his rank and enjoy the privileges bestowed upon him by the flourishing of a subsequently growing economy.  A woman can enjoy the privileges of bestowed by a flourishing patriarchal society.  A homosexual can still go to church and get to heaven by suppressing their urges.  People of color and immigrants can learn to speak English correctly and otherwise act white.
 
If all of that sounds like a raw deal, well, conservatism was never about your feelings.  If it sounds dishonest and incoherent, well, a thriving ideology is never required to be coherent.  Magical thinking can be a powerful tool to avoid contradictions, especially if the promise is nothing less than absolute safety and comfort.  To look more deeply at the incompatibilities in this line of thinking, to critically deconstruct and analyze social science and data on actual safety and comfort - things like the availability of human rights, access to power, economic mobility or equity, rates of suicide and despair in populations oppressed by traditional hierarchies - is to confront discomfort and loss of status among the dominant.  This is why conservatism has always been appealing to those whose status is threatened by progressive ideology.
 
The gauzy thinking of centrist conservatism took a big hit in recent decades.  The election of the first black president, the legalization of gay marriage, the consecutives failures of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to establish functioning democracies despite over a trillion dollars spent, and the psychic toll taken by American military prowess appearing flaccid, and more recently the nationwide BLM protesting against police brutality and the literal shutting down of American cities in Covid Lockdowns at the behest of eggheads, all reported on by a mainstream media which gave neither sufficient justification nor succor to the wounded pride and deep existential angst of conservative paranoia. 
 
In this vacuum, conspiracies festered and frothed.  An entirely alternate reality took form in right wing media and think tanks such as Fox News, Breitbart and the Claremont institute.  The old centrism was untenable, ineffective as it was in stopping the march of what an increasingly warped world view perceived as enemies on all sides.
 
So, fascism - maybe ugly but necessary.  In Silicon Valley, what has been seen as the best of us came to be seen as possibly the worst of us - contributing as it seemed to be to ever-extreme wealth inequality, the datification and algorhythmic exploitation of society through social media, and an increasingly uneasy realization that the internet future was making us more dependent and thus less free.  What's more it seemed to be providing a seed bed for our darkest social impulses.  The bigotry that centrist conservatism had always been able to hand-wave away was being pushed back against in terse online exchanges fed by monetization.  The incoherence between the valorization of hierarchy and promise of equality was being tested.  Reactionaries, unable to square the circle, chose hierarchy and began to give up on equality.  Because equality was only ever given lip-service, they had no real understanding of what it meant - especially in relation to the lived experience of non-dominant groups. 
 
For decades, conservatives had adopted "colorblindness" and a superficial understanding that bigotry was wrong - despite their policies always seeming to promote its deleterious effects.  Not interested in understanding what it was, where it came from, or what perpetuates it, they were ill-equipped to answer those who pointed to bigotry's existence.  They spent their time denying, downplaying, or misdirecting - anything to acknowledge the fact that it lived in the very ideological vacuum they had created between hierarchy and equality.  White, male, heterosexual, Christian supremacy leads inexorably to bigotry.  To acknowledge its continued existence was to acknowledge the incoherence core to their ideology. 
 
The flight 93 position meant they had to go on the attack.  Pointing out bigotry was met with rhetorical violence: a bad-faith mendacity in which defeating one's opponent meant you could use any tools at your disposal, as long as the threat to your identity was neutralized.  You were in fact the bigot, and furthermore were unpatriotically opposed to free speech.   Your science and academic studies were corrupt, your policies merely those of a deep-state, globalist agenda.  Truth was no longer possible, and words no longer had meaning.  Every critique could be dismissed as merely part of a Marxist Woke agenda.  Just as the passengers couldn't stop the terrorism through negotiation, and instead had to storm the cockpit and crash the plane, Trump was in his rights to call for mass deportations, flight restrictions from Muslim countries, pushing radical judges through congress, and the storming of the capital to overturn his electoral defeat.  The legal consequences for Trumps repeatedly flagrant disregard for the rule of law were seen as more evidence of political persecution.
 
Having stepped outside of democratic norms, it is only logical to begin to ponder what might be put in its place.  To the reactionary traditionalist, the obvious answer is Monarchy.  There is much to appreciate in how hierarchical structures were maintained by kings, especially if one is more interested in order than equality and the rights of man.  If you squint just right, a benevolent vision can be seen. 
 
As Moldbug himself writes, reading the racist apologist for imperialism, James Froude:
 
"Froude describes a Tudor society which is completely ordered—which consists, from top to bottom, king to knave, of these relationships of mutual obligation. They are relationships of family, of feudalism, of guild traditions such as apprenticeship, of the Church, of political patronage, of commercial patronage and monopoly, and of course of law and government. It was impossible to live a normal human life outside this tapestry, and nor is it at all clear why anyone would have wanted to."
 
Misfits, screwups and parasites constantly fell out of the fabric, the era being after all primitive, and every arm of government was charged with eradicating this human bilge. If Tudor England, or any European sovereign of the era, had tolerated vagrants, beggars and the idle, it would have been inundated with a mountain of them in a second. As it was, it seems there were quite a few. The difficulty of operating in these primitive conditions demanded a social fabric at which the 21st century can only stare in amazement, like a general contractor contemplating a cathedral. And these people, indeed, built cathedrals. They were not libertarian cathedrals."
 
Dominant thus hierarchy may not be pretty, but it works.  The same cannot be said for democracy, which Moldbug and post-centrist conservative fascists have deluded themselves into believing through multitudinous fever-readings of current end historical events, always with an eye to the protection of their own self-assumed supremacy and legitimate privilege, is cancerous.  Moldbug again:
"the true spirit of democracy is anarchy, dissolution of hierarchical authority. To the radical, this flame, if not snuffed out, cannot be withstood. To the reactionary, the cancer will either kill the patient or be eradicated. To both, no stable compromise is possible or desirable."
 
In their high Silicon Towers, IQs checked at the elevator doors, a vision of post-democratic society is beginning to take shape, and it is enticing.  Shamed and shunned, this is their chance to storm the captain's chair.  But in this telling, not only will the barbarian (probably low-IQ) terrorists be vanquished, and national disaster averted, but these insurgents know how to fly the plane.  Upwards they will pull the yoke, into the golden clouds of benevolent rule, order once again restored to its rightful, natural position.

I've often wondered how it came to be that the party of Lincoln became the party of Trump, and the party of segregation became the party of the Voting Rights Act.

UC Davis History professor Erich Rauchway wrote a nice little blog post over a decade ago detailing how it basically happened between 1866-1936.  He ends with this nugget:
Now, one can get cleverer and point out that although the rhetoric and to a degree the policies of the parties do switch places, their core supporters don’t—which is to say, the Republicans remain, throughout, the party of bigger businesses; it’s just that in the earlier era bigger businesses want bigger government [federal aid for the transcontinental railroad, for the state university system, for the settlement of the West by homesteaders; for a national currency and a protective tariff] and in the later era they don’t [banking, securities, and currency regulation; relief for the unemployed and pensions for the elderly; wilderness conservation; improvements to roads and electric infrastructure; support for unionization; and much else].