The Nefarious Figures Behind the Far-Right Who Predate Trump

After watching both the presidential debate that may have doomed Joe Biden’s candidacy and the Supreme Court’s most recent nefarious decisions — destroying the bedrock regulatory premise of Chevron deference, and the immunity ruling that effectively crowned the president (well, one specific president anyway) an unaccountable King — many Americans have snapped out of their stupor.  The realization that the Republicans are not merely playing politics but instead waging a blatant, anti-democratic war against their political opposition and the very bedrock principles that uphold our democracy and society has shaken many to their core. 

For those just now seeing the sprawling, twisted machinery of the American New Right, the Heritage Foundation is a name they are hearing for the first time. The Heritage Foundation and the Republicans’ Project 2025 are arms of a decades-long beast striving to drag America back to a mythical past. In this delusion, the United States is an ultra-capitalist, white, Christian nation, not the pluralistic democracy we have long celebrated.

The last few weeks have offered a crash course in understanding that massive and increasingly powerful authoritarian infrastructure. To better understand the moment currently facing us — a far-right captured Supreme Court and an openly anti-democratic presidential candidate who has already attempted a coup — we must look at some of the key players of this now clearly articulated and ongoing rightwing takeover. 

Looking back on this history of the far-right, a few names — some known, some less so — emerge as critical players. James Buchanan is one of those lesser-known names, and our current moment has been shaped in part by his mission, financed by corporate interests. In the 1970s and 1980s Buchanan initiated a now massively important trend of establishing intellectual enclaves within university settings. These efforts were designed to generate financial support, recruit conservative scholars, and create content favoring pro-business perspectives. The aim was to shift the educational focus away from liberal conceptions of the public good towards more conservative ideologies that perceive government intervention as an encroachment to individual liberties. Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance and his Yale law degree are a measure of this movement’s success.

Another man in this small circle of banal cartoon villains is Paul Weyrich. He was never elected to office, nor is he a name most people outside of particular circles would know, but if you are under 50 years old he has influenced almost every facet of your day-to-day life. In the early 1970s, he created the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Heritage Foundation, convinced co-founder of the Moral Majority Jerry Falwell to get into politics, and coined the name “The Religious Right,” all while bringing evangelicals into the growing right-wing movement. 

This movement has shaped the policies of presidents and legislators in both parties for 40-plus years. These include propositions that call for Constitutional Conventions to enshrine pro-business and anti-labor rewrites of our founding documents — like the No Runaway Article V Conventions Act, which attempts to restrict the purview of any Constitutional Convention to only what the states call for and nothing more. Many legal scholars have repeatedly pointed out that nothing in the constitution specifies that a convention can or must be restricted to specific topics, which makes this legislation a roadmap for a complete undermining of our founding documents. 

Weyrich’s contributions to the decay of America and the rise of overt and proud fascism, wrapped in a flag and carrying a bible, cannot be understated. And while ALEC’s meetings are private, so too are their legislative successes and failure rate; we do not know where ALEC’s model brings about the passage of new legislation, so we cannot directly quantify the full spectrum of Weyrich’s impact. This is by design, and does not change the fact that ALEC’s explicit goal is deregulation and unfettered capitalism at all costs. They want to gut the government’s ability to regulate the environment altogether. We are in a post-majority rule phase of American history, and increasingly in a post-constitutional law phase. In other words, a backslide from democracy to anocracy and autocracy. 

Then there is Leonardo Leo, the current president of the Heritage Foundation and another mastermind of the brazen corruption we are now experiencing. The seemingly overnight explosion of far-right attacks on our rights are anything but sudden. Leo and his compatriots have been enacting and expanding on their 50-year plan to push the country to this perilous moment and bring democracy to the brink of destruction at their hands. The overturning of Roe v. Wade is their signature accomplishment in this effort, but it is not their only attempt to remake America.

This extremist vision of the United States’ future as a pseudo-democracy is ruled by a — forgive the term — “deep state” of corporate, governmental, and outsider extremist elements who run the country to benefit the leadership class and their cronies. At the same time, it would use the total weight of American intelligence and military power to control the domestic front and stifle any opposition they may face, as well as promulgate a foreign policy that looks at the world through the lens of domination and explicitly fascist, Christian White Power frameworks. 

The American New Right’s infrastructure isn’t confined to The Heritage Foundation or its direct correlates. Every faction, with its own specific policy interests, are as opportunistic as they are pragmatic, willing to subvert democracy and craft policies that fundamentally break the essential values of democracy in the process.

Take Steve Bannon, perennial political instigator and proud fascist, and one of the key figures within the far-right network. His infamous phrase, “flood the zone with shit,” perfectly captures how the more recent onslaught of mis- and disinformation surrounding right-wing causes and actual liberal policy has skewed the playing field. By doing so, Bannon and his ilk have drained the life out of other groups and efforts pushing politics in a positive, pro-democracy direction. The overwhelming noise has become their strategic weapon, ensuring that the far-right’s vision dominates, leaving little room for any alternative discourse or action. 

Authoritarianism can be viewed as a series of systems and subsystems working together to not just dominate but to restructure and redefine everything in the day-to-day life of those who live under its massive and repressive shadow. These systems do not appear overnight. They must be built, maintained, and expanded until they have enough power and gravity to outweigh the nominal democratic systems at play. We are quickly approaching such socio-political tipping points. 

The American far-right and their political organs within the Republican Party are waging an authoritarian hybrid war against all of us and the systems that create, maintain, and progress democracy. They use information warfare, the “lawfare” of a captive court system, and seemingly relentless political corruption to fundamentally undermine and redefine the rights of millions of Americans. They continue to tell us that this is a starting point for those reversals and much, much worse. As the majority, we are running out of time, and we must come together to protect our futures from being stolen by small ideas and smaller people.