“Did You Say Democracy?” The US Modern Right Encounters a Revolutionary Word

The title of this paper derives from that of an address the anti-New Dealer polemicist Merwin K. Hart gave at the Nassau Club in Princeton, in 1940. Hart, who had written propaganda from the Francoist zone during the Spanish Civil War, argued that democracy “is the rallying cry under which the American system of government is being prepared for despotism.” “American democracy,” he suggested, was an invented tradition, and the concept of democracy was a codeword for socialism, destructive of the actual political traditions that had sustained America. After World War Two, the intellectual-activists of the U.S. right pursued Hart’s argument, none more persistently than the political theorist James Burnham, who repeatedly in the National Review argued in Spenglerian terms that democracy was an instrument of “liberal ideology” at odds with the traditions of “the West” that sustained America. Burnham systematized the critique of democracy and extended it to a transnational and transcolonial arena to argue that even as America and European imperial metropoles were committing “suicide” by succumbing to democratic belief, the cause of “the West” had shifted geographically to the imperial zones of colonization, especially in Africa, where, he argued, “the white resistance” in Algeria, Rhodesia, and South Africa worked to expose democracy as a fiction for the force of sheer demographical quantity. With this paper, I’m interested in putting the right’s outright anti-democratic thought in conversation with what philosopher Willmoore Kendall aptly described as “mixed feelings” for the concept on the right. And I’m interested in tracing the arc of Hart’s opposition to America as “the arsenal of democracy” to Burnham’s endorsement of racialized trans-imperial resistance to democracy-premised liberation.