“What is ‘conservatism’?” asks Mark Lilla in the Review’s November 6 issue. This is not an academic question. As he details, the alliance of alt-right neoreactionaries, Catholic postliberals, Christian nationalists, Straussian cranks, techno-futurists, misogynistic strongmen (and their acolytes, the “manosphere meatheads”), America First paleoconservatives, racists, and apocalyptists that makes up the MAGA right is guided not so much by an intellectual tradition progressing from Edmund Burke to Dwight Eisenhower as by “chthonic forces in human nature that at different points in history gather like a hurricane and can level any decent political order.” “The bottom of the conceptual box” that used to contain conservatism has given way, Lilla argues, and it is imperative to determine just what historical currents have washed Donald Trump and his enablers into power.
Lilla has been contributing to The New York Review for thirty years. He writes often about intellectual and political history, including essays on Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, and, beginning in 1998 with a précis of the beliefs of modern reactionaries, he has tracked the contemporary right for us, covering the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, the French right, and much more. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times and Liberties magazine, and his work has also appeared in, among many other publications, The Wall Street Journal and Le Monde. He is the author of nine books, including, most recently, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know (2025) and, from New York Review Books, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals and Politics and The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction (both 2016). Lilla is a professor of humanities at Columbia University.
This week I wrote to Lilla to ask him about fascism, Marx, and chthonic forces.
Daniel Drake: Toward the end of your essay you write that, while in his book John Ganz argues that “fascism” is the most appropriate term for the collection of right-wing tendencies that have cohered under Trump’s banner, you’re “not so sure.” Could you elaborate on your hesitation? What might distinguish this president and his movement from fascists, either historical or theoretical?
Mark Lilla: What gives me pause is what you might call “vilification inflation,” by which I mean the overuse of certain terms that bring with them automatic moral judgments. The more we apply terms like Nazism or fascism or antisemitism to basically different phenomena, the less apparent those differences will be and the less psychological force our judgments will have. A kind of moral fatigue sets in. That is why I think it wise to think of Nazism and fascism as terms referring to specific European movements that grew out of the twentieth-century interwar period in Germany, Italy, and Spain. We have plenty of other words left to describe unjust political movements and formations: tyrannical, authoritarian, racist, nationalist, and so on.
The specificity of European fascism has also been brought home to me recently as I’ve been reading I Will Bear Witness, Victor Klemperer’s astonishing diaries of the Nazi years, which were published to great acclaim in the 1990s and early 2000s. Klemperer was a Jewish professor of romance languages in Dresden who converted to Protestantism in his thirties, married a gentile woman, and somehow survived the war despite the ever-present threat of annihilation. The book is an astonishing record of how the Nazis operated, the ratcheting up of pressure, humiliations, threats, and violence—sometimes slowly and imperceptibly, sometimes in great coups de force. There certainly are parallels with some of the rhetoric and actions of the second Trump administration (not even a year old!), but the scale, omnipresence, and single-mindedness of Nazi repression was of an entirely different sort. Let’s not confuse them.
Indeed, I take your essay in part to be arguing that the current political juncture doesn’t have a ready historic precedent, and that it is incumbent upon us to try to articulate what unites this movement, beyond Donald Trump. As you write, “The bottom of the conceptual box gave way, and now we are left to sort it all out.” At the risk of being simple, who is the “we” to whom this responsibility falls?
Well, the responsibility falls to anyone who wants stay alert and actually understand the radical right and combat it, not just make theatrical gestures. We are in great need of wakefulness at this critical moment; we need to become more refined noticers. Take, for example, the symbolically overdetermined response to the murder of Charlie Kirk. Yes, the Trump administration is instrumentalizing it for their partisan purposes, revoltingly. Yes, the radical right is thrilled to have a martyr. But what to make of the genuinely spontaneous outpouring of grief, particularly among religious young people?
A few weeks after the shooting I happened to speak at Furman University, a formerly denominational school in South Carolina that still has a very religious student body. Many of the students I met expressed a kind of reflexive, underthought Christian nationalism: Given that we were founded as a Christian nation,… Nothing aggressive about it; just a false assumption. But given it, the Kirk killing was a major event for them, and it fits into a grander story about defending religion in a fallen, hostile world. I sense a lot of disgust with the contemporary world among young people today, and I keep meeting those who are returning to religion or converting for the first time. This is not just happening in the US; it is also true in Europe. The numbers are still small but have been ticking up every year recently.
These are just some of the reasons I’m coming to see Trump and related phenomena—the manosphere, the weird apocalypticism of tech types like Peter Thiel—in a longer historical perspective, comparing it to other moments of social uncertainty and despair when the “chthonic forces” that I mentioned in my essay came to the fore, shaking the worlds of politics and religion. I’m thinking here of episodes ranging from the Wars of Religion to the post–World War I period when, to many, Western civilization itself seemed to have committed suicide. At its root, all that we’re currently seeing has nothing really to do with conservatism.
One figure who doesn’t appear in your account of the historical course of conservatism (and, in a sort of implied contrast, of liberalism) is Karl Marx. He isn’t exactly part of the genealogy of conservatism, but do you think his work might have something instructive to say about the contradictions on the contemporary right that you highlight?
You know, there is an interesting group of young people on the right associated with the journal American Affairs who actually are thinking about Marx and even have connections with some European Marxists like Wolfgang Streeck, who has published with them. They are secular postliberals who want to see more political control of the economy to serve ordinary workers (and not “managerial elites”), and are especially interested in industrial policy and reining in finance capital. What gives the journal particular interest is that many of its contributors come from the financial world and actually know what they are talking about, unlike so many critics of “neoliberalism.” The journal is worth reading if only to see what a consistent conservatism would look like, one that actually recognized how our economy threatens the other values conservatives profess to care about.
What has your experience been at Columbia since Trump became president? To the extent you can even talk about it, how have you felt about the administration’s capitulations? How might higher education institutions—and the humanities in particular—weather this storm?
It’s monstrous what’s happening in Washington, and things have been particularly difficult at Columbia, which has had two interim presidents in the past fourteen months. Had there been more consistent leadership at the top during this period I’m sure the university’s response would have been more consistent and satisfying. They are doing their best in a tough situation. We all wish that universities had banded together early on to respond with one voice to the Trump threats, even going on strike if necessary, but the dynamics, both within each school and among all of them, made it nearly impossible to coordinate such a large-scale action. Failing that, each university has had to fight its battle alone. All I can hope for is Democratic majorities in one or both houses of Congress after the next election to start blocking these measures and then rolling them back.
That said, the universities are going to have targets on their backs for many years to come, now that it’s clear to politicians and the public alike just how much leverage federal and state governments have. In my experience, academics and administrators have just not reckoned with how deeply unpopular they are with the public—and in a democratic society, that matters. So they need to get their houses in order, as they should have long ago, regarding institutional neutrality and fostering genuine intellectual pluralism on campus. Such measures are called for given the university’s own mission; they do not constitute capitulation.
And there are worse things coming down the pike. A number of Republican states have already mandated the creation of “viewpoint diversity” programs at their universities, which can mean anything from actually encouraging pluralism to creating right-leaning, Republican-friendly bastions within the institutions. I’m all for having lots of different programs and centers on our campuses to interest and serve different constituencies, but state-mandated ones would just be intellectually second-rate partisan tools. The last thing we need.
English (US) · 