https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/12/20/three-descriptions-of-our-current-turmoil/#comment-1121407
ChesterM says: What’s a conservative intellectual?
For context - The post by itself primarily stated -
The Scripts
1. The Authoritarian Turn. The Trump regime represents a sudden shift into a dangerous authoritarian future. This view is mostly held by centrists, which I think means most Democratic politicians.
2. More of the same. The Trump regime is the culmination of decades of slow erosion of democratic society. Trump is accellerating it. This is a more leftish view.
3. Constitutional Crisis. The Trump regime is just another constitutional crisis, based on an electoral victory and a challenge to the existing regime. It’s like the FDR administration creating the New Deal. This is the view of Trump supporters and conservative intellectuals.
Trump’s decisive Electoral College victory in 2024, after a campaign with more sharply defined stakes than in 2016, put a popular (if not quite majoritarian) imprimatur on such change. Following a playbook developed during the New Deal and refined in the civil rights era, Trump’s team is employing all the tools at its disposal to reshape the balance of power across state and society in line with campaign pledges to curb illegal immigration, shrink the federal workforce, restore religion in the public sphere, and advance a “colorblind” conception of racial equality.
The difference between the Authoritarian Crisis view and the More of the Same view is continuity. The former suggests that the US was mostly fine and getting better, but then Trump came along. The latter suggests that this regime didn’t come out of nowhere, but is an acceleration of a long process of deterioration. The Constitutional Crisis theory is based on the idea that for some decades the US has lived under a ‘liberal hegemony”, and the second Trump regime is a counter-revolution against that hegemony.
The authors generate a list of horribles which justify each script. I assume we all know the horribles for the first two. The list for the third is culture war issues, and Republican revanchism.
The MAGA movement wishes to dismantle not just a policy here or a doctrine there but a whole edifice of laws, norms, and values that it sees liberals as having imposed through their dogma of “living constitutionalism” and their sway over regulatory bodies, universities, foundations, and legacy media organizations. Although a “radical” reform agenda of such scale may not sound very conservative, nothing less will suffice, on this view, to overthrow the prevailing forces of institutional and ideological control.
Actions suggested by scripts
The Authoritarian Crisis view suggests that we need to return to an earlier era of cooperation and bipartisanship. The main goal is decentralization of power after a turn to the concentration of power in the Presidency.
The More of the Same partisans will want a broad array of changes in the structure of government, and aggressive efforts to attack oligarchical control, reactionary courts, and right-wing extremists stuffed into government at all levels.
The Constitutional Regime Change script suggests that liberals and others who disagree should continue with normal political opposition. If enough people don’t like Trumpian government they can just vote the scoundrels out.
[...]
Maybe most of the billionaires snd rank and file Trump supporters don’t think of themselves as prejudiced in any way. But they supported the overtly racist, xenophobic, misogynist, homophobic Trump. They probably like science and technology, but their Senators approved RFK, Jr., and stood by while he and Elon Musk wrecked governmental research.
There are other factors that reinforce this top-down justification and support for hate and fear, including inequality of income and wealth, inflation, and lack of critical thinking. But for many of us media-inspired fear and hatred make it impossible to see the actual causes of actual problems.
And that’s how we got here. Too many of us either wanted or ignored the hatred and justified their votes with the lies about the economy paid for by billionaires.
It is self contained, as an EmptyWheel thing, but it led me down two paths, both worth mention. which I shall call Diogenes in search of a conservative intellectual, and Clear and present danger.
Diogenes First
Start with the answer, then explain it - Jay Wesley Richards - who per his opening Widipedia paragraph:
Jay Wesley Richards is an American analytical philosopher who focuses on the intersection of politics, philosophy, and religion. He is the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in Heritage’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation.[1] He serves as an adjunct professor in the School of Business at the Catholic University of America[2] and the executive editor of The Stream and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. A former Presbyterian, Richards is now a Catholic.[3]
One of those. Like JD Vance. The link to his epiphany, links here. There is an hour long video where you can see how much you can take, or a short more contained article stating in part:
Jay grew up in a Presbyterian family in Texas. He credits his best friend growing up, who was Church of Christ, with his knowledge of the Bible. When he went off to college he experienced a crisis of faith from the challenges he met in class. The writings of C. S. Lewis and the Holy Spirit brought him back from the brink. While in seminary at Calvin College, he did a study of the Calvinist doctrine of limited atonement. This would be the first crack in the wall of the Calvinist edifice of his theological system. Years later, he decided to systematically set down a list of the controversial differences between Catholics and Protestants. To be fair to the Catholic position, he, for the first time, read about the Catholic doctrines as written by Catholic authors. This honest and thorough investigation would lead him home to the holy Catholic Church.
That's the start of it and enough of it. You have the link. Surprisingly, Richards has a Google Scholar page, which intriguingly offered a link where I failed to find the item described as:
In Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism is the Solution and Not the Problem, Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute Jay W. Richards and bestselling author of Indivisible: Restoring Faith, Family, and Freedom Before It's Too Late and Infiltrated: How to Stop the Insiders and Activists Who Are Exploiting the Financial Crisis to Control Our Lives and Our Fortunes, defends capitalism within the context of the Christian faith, revealing how entrepreneurial enterprise, based on hard work, honesty, and trust, actually fosters creativity and growth. In doing so, Money, Greed, and God exposes eight myths about capitalism, and demonstrates that a good Christian can be a good capitalist.
Is more needed? Well, there is more, so here goes, a brief eclectic trip.
I did a search = PhD Thesis of Jay W. Richards, which gave links but none to an actual thesis to read and weigh. There is a Heritage Foundation connection, what else should we expect, with a Catholic Kevin Roberts atop things there, and JD's having connections, best shown by a screen capture:
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| Click to enlarge and read "De Vos" |
Yes, that DeVos thing (which includes rightwing merc Eric Prince and the Amway ponzi fortune).
An IHE bio copyrighted 2025 begins, "Jay W. Richards, Ph.D., is Director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family, and the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute." Paycheck after paycheck, including the IHE (Institute for Human Ecology) at Catholic University.
There is also the Brownstone Institute tie of some sort, out of Austin, TX. Perhaps that's not a position, but an author or speaker link of some sort. An anti-vax how-to semi-screed from a Discovery Institute "Intelligent Design" "wedge" thinker:
Richards was a fellow at the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics and the program director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC).[6][7] He was the first fellow at the Discovery Institute to confirm the genuineness of the Wedge document.[8] Science organizations then paid attention to the institute after the document was published online, but Richards wrote "that the mission statement and goals had been posted on the CRSC's website since 1996."[9] Richards has expressed climate change denial.[10][11]
That is my offering of "a conservative intellectual." where his intellectualism can be shown in the quality of this hit piece, (here also - double duty), or in his advocacy and/or utopian musing elsewhere. A man of character. As I've described.
Did I say, Heritage Foundatione? Heartland Institute?
Locally, Minnesota has its "conservative intellectual," Katherine Kersten. A series of posts.
Another link.
Interchangeable, perhaps, although Richards swims many more places than Kersten. In a bigger ocean. More widely traveled.
Clear and present danger
Here things shall be presented tighter. Two links. Both Heritage Foundation. Both presaging a scurvy attack MO against the health and well being of this nation. Here (https://www.heritage.org/health-care-reform), and here (https://www.heritage.org/restoring-american-wellness). Each is presented as if sound policy deliberation, while each will pick your pocked. The second of those Trojan Horse items rings Richards into its grasp.
____________________UPDATE____________ ______
This is necessary. This perniciously misleading astroturfing item imitates a grassroots concern for a nation's health, but if you check the personnel at the bottom, ir is entirely a De Vos center production for Herritage, where Richards is top dog at De Vos center and the De Vos family and their people are brutally rightwing. It has no author attribution, directly, but it came from De Vos inside Heritage, and it is biased that way, despite the happy family frolicking in the outdoors at the outset:
If you can read but not understand, "Uustainable" means they - the Project 2025 perps - intend to down fund healthcare spending, for the rest of us, and are using tactics fit for Nazi propagandists under Goebbels - who to my mind could have invented Heritage Foundation.
Who the fuck frolics around with a flag, pride flag or US flag to the breeze -- nobody does. And such joyful postures are fake for the camera and captioning. The whole item is fake, and Heritage Foundation is real, and hence far scarier than fake. Richards? Not fake, but real in what he's doing.
You are the target. Or a target. Truly, he, Richards, is aiming it more at semi-gullible mainstream MAGA - MHGA susceptible minds, who cannot tell loathsome propaganda from legit concern for you and yours. If you doubt that, see the Richards authored thing linked below.
Richards has an agenda, he sells elixirs and fixes. He is hired to do exactly that. And he smilingly takes the paychecks.
And that is why I find Richards to be the quintessence of "conservative intellectual." Don't lose sight of the truth, "Conservative intellectual" is euphemism for callous hired hit man tied to an agenda.
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| https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/11/02/maga-maha-coalition-could-realign-american-politics/ |