Opinion | Amy Coney Barrett and the Right’s Elite-Building Problem

This week Amy Coney Barrett joined John Roberts and the three liberal Supreme Court justices to leave in place a lower court order requiring the Trump administration to pay out nearly $2 billion in foreign aid reimbursements for contracts that had already been fulfilled and that the White House sought to cancel. This prompted anti-Barrett outrage among some conservative influencers, complete with epithets like “D.E.I. hire” and “D.E.I. judge.”

Anti-Barrett sentiment has been building for a while on the populist right; she’s been a conservative vote on the biggest cases of the last few years, from abortion to affirmative action, but she’s broken with the other conservatives on smaller issues in a way that’s consistent enough to constitute a pattern. (Though the data suggests that she’s overall still slightly less of a swing vote than Brett Kavanaugh.)

In this particular case, as the Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith suggests, the ruling constitutes more of a temporizing response than a strict rebuke of the Trump administration. But it still yielded a provisional defeat for the White House, and a warning shot for higher-stakes cases. And D.E.I. aspersions aside, I don’t think it’s crazy for Barrett’s critics to suspect that her vote was connected to her personal identity, not just her jurisprudential philosophy — that the mom of seven with kids adopted from Haiti and connections to charismatic Catholicism might take a dimmer view of the president’s cuts to foreign aid than other conservative justices.

But if you take that suspicion seriously, then Barrett’s foreign aid ruling is a useful case study in a point I made two weeks ago, about how the Trump administration might squander America’s rightward “vibe shift” by directly alienating people who should be part of a potential right-of-center elite.

The Trump cuts to foreign aid are not a threat to his broad electoral coalition: No mass constituency has a fighting-AIDS-in-Africa litmus test, and (not least because Americans generally overestimate how much we spend on foreign aid) slashing the aid bureaucracy is popular.

However, foreign aid does matter to some of the elite factions that are connected to the right without being full MAGA. It probably matters to some of the erstwhile liberals who moved rightward in response to anti-Americanism on the left, and who still want to believe in America as an exceptional nation exercising a fundamentally benevolent form of hegemony. And it definitely matters to Catholic and evangelical intellectuals and activists for whom pro-life activism at home is part of a continuum with aid and missionary work abroad, and who took pride in the kind of charitable partnerships with government that an earlier, George W. Bush style of conservatism championed.

If you talk to populists and New Right figures about these groups, you’ll hear two arguments. First, that the erstwhile liberals — the neo-neoconservatives, if you will — are interlopers and arrivistes, whose support for conservative causes is somewhat welcome, but who shouldn’t get any kind of veto over what the Trump administration does. (“Bari Weiss is not a conservative and never will be” is the simplest distillation of this argument.)

Second, that the John Paul II Catholics and compassionate-conservative evangelicals are either well-meaning anachronisms who don’t understand the exigencies of the moment and the corrupting influence of the “deep state” on charitable works, or else crypto-liberals who should join the ranks of those anti-Trump Christians who have already departed the right-wing coalition.

I think these are both mistaken ways at looking at political coalition building. The erstwhile liberals and the pro-life internationalists have already proven themselves willing partners for the populist right, by either migrating toward or remaining with the right-of-center coalition under Trumpian conditions — which makes them quite different from NeverTrump Republicans who have become functionally or explicitly Democratic. Unlike some corporate elites who suddenly discovered an affinity for Donald Trump after his return to power, they have ideological reasons, not just transactional ones, to oppose contemporary progressivism. They represent — I hate this term, but for want of a better one — the kind of human capital that a successful governing coalition needs to exercise power across a nation of 340 million people. And some of them, like Amy Coney Barrett, have actual power right now.

In a recent essay the evangelical writer Aaron Renn argued that the contemporary right has figured out that the only way it can take over important cultural institutions is from the top down — using government or corporate power to claim cultural territory, as with Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, Ron DeSantis’s effort to push Floridian higher education rightward, or now the Trump-Musk attempt to reshape the federal bureaucracy. The Federalist Society strategy that put justices like Barrett on the court is arguably the original successful example of this approach — because even though FedSoc worked within the law school system, it ultimately relied on top-down presidential appointment power to succeed.

Renn suggests that such a “capture or replace” strategy toward American institutions is generally superior to alternatives like “reform” or “withdraw and restart,” and further that “capture” pairs naturally with a strategy of “destroy or delegitimize” — because even when captured, some institutions (he cites U.S.A.I.D.) may be too far gone, too inherently leftist, for conservatives to easily remake.

From my perspective, though, a strategy of “capture or replace” seems quite different from “destroy or delegitimize,” and I worry that the right is tempted toward the latter strategy even when a strategy of “capture” makes more sense — both because it fears that it lacks the capacities to actually run the institutions it’s taken over, and because it fears the kind of compromises required to find partners in their administration.

If you want to see this question argued out a bit, I recommend the podcast interview I did this week with Christopher Rufo, the anti-woke, anti-D.E.I. crusader whose activism helped make the “vibe shift” a reality well before Trump’s return to power. Rufo is, in one sense, an advocate of the “capture or replace” position; as a board member of New College of Florida, which DeSantis is trying to make into a model of a conservative-leaning public liberal arts college, he’s involved in exactly that kind of effort in higher education.

But he’s also a strong supporter of the Trump administration’s apparent plan to dismantle the Department of Education, spinning off its major spending into other departments while eliminating the progressive-leaning grantmaking and curricular programming — which looks more like “destroy or delegitimize,” a refusal of institutional power rather than its exercise.

Why would you take this path, I asked him, instead of trying to remake the grantmaking and programming along lines that conservative educators might favor? His core answer was that the right just doesn’t have the personnel to effect such a takeover — you have to dismantle the system because there aren’t enough right-leaning educators to manage a successful and enduring capture.

Maybe this is true, and certainly the personnel problem is real — but it still seems to me like a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I know more than a few people in education who, without being deeply right-wing, would happily partner with a right-of-center administration that presented itself as a defender of educational standards, standardized testing and a revival of the liberal arts. I also suspect that I could staff up at least a small grant-making operation just by hiring people from the fast-growing, conservative-leaning world of classical education.

So if you tell yourself that such partnerships are so impossible or unadvisable that the only option is to eliminate the institutional power that you’ve claimed, you are pre-emptively telling people who might be your partners that you don’t want to work with them.

I think that’s the message that the Trump administration is sending to too many people thus far. Its official aspiration is to make a change of regime, to do more than just stick Republican figureheads atop a permanently liberal bureaucracy, to have a counter-elite fully in charge.

But successful regime change requires co-optation, persuasion and alliances. It requires not just knowing what time it is, but knowing who your friends and allies are. And it requires not turning potential friends into adversaries prematurely — especially, but not only, when they’re a swing vote on the Supreme Court.