The United States is destroying itself -- Rebecca Solnit

[JHB]

34. There's no need for a passive voice when the murderer is clear: the Far Right that calls itself "conservative"

Last edited Sun Apr 12, 2026, 11:45 PM - Edit history (1)

There's only one side here that is willing, even eager, to destroy everything in its quest for absolute power, and it's not the Democrats nor any part of the Left.

There are a number of Radical Right factions who see Trump as their ticket to grabbing all the marbles.

There has always been a faction of the Conservative Movement that had a sneaking admiration for the Bolsheviks. Not the ideology, of course, but for the ability of a small radical faction to play other factions against each other, maneuver for leverage, employ useful idiots to obfuscate their true intent, and being absolutely ruthless when they saw a chance to take total control.

These Conservo-Bolsheviks have always wanted to do away with the New Deal, get rid of the income tax, any program or policy that helps ordinary people. To them, America's "golden age" was literally that: the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, when "great men" built great industries, amassed huge fortunes, and didn't have to put up with any damn government hampering them for trifles like "grinding people under their heels." This is the leadership of the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society and Project 2025, people like Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh who actively worked to paint Democrats as "the enemy". They demonized Bill and Hillary Clinton so that less extreme Republicans wouldn't decide they could work with a "pro-business" Democrat who was content to work with and tweak the Reaganomics framework rather than to reverse it. If the squishier ones went that way, the Conservo-Bolsheviks could kiss any chance of more extreme measures goodbye. Thus, we've had the last 35 years, with Republicans hamstringing Democrats at every opportunity while going for broke whenever the opportunity presents itself, all while consistently putting conservative operatives on the Federal courts.

Overlapping with them are the Pluto-Bolsheviks. They share a lot of goals with the Conservo-Bolsheviks, but being the guys footing the bills, they want to make sure the outcome is tailored to their liking. This is the Kochs, the Mercers, all sorts of billionaires and multi-millionaires. This group was especially active in trying to get enough support for a new constitutional convention, where the nation's foundations could just be rewritten to their liking, locking in their own personal obsessions and making reform pretty much impossible. And by making reform impossible they would make revolution inevitable.

Next up are the Theo-Bolsheviks, an odd coalition of extremist Evangelical Protestants and right-wing Catholics. They think America has been in a moral nosedive since the 60s, and they're out to put the country "back" to a place it never really was, but the facade makes them all tingly. These are the various Trump-loving Evangelicals who rationalize his behavior as that of a modern King Cyrus, the hardliners of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Opus Dei people, all the Catholic RWers on the Supreme Court, etc. Even if the Theo-Bolsheiks came out on top, they're doomed to simply turn on each other due to the "Catholics aren't Christian" views of the Evangelicals. But for the time being they have enough in common with each other and the other factions that they can work together on "step 1: taking control."

The latest addition are the Techno-Bolsheviks: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and others who have adopted Curtis Yarvin as their guru. Yarvin argues that American democracy is a failed experiment that should be replaced by an accountable monarchy, similar to the governance structure of corporations. They fully believe they're the only ones who have brains. The rest of us are pretty much insect drones, and lesser beings whose expertise can be replaced with AI. In other words, they're F***ING NUTS, and they'd be harmless if they were muttering into their cups together at some dive bar, but instead they're some of the richest men in the world, and their views overlap enough with the other groups that they're all useful to each other.

These are the people trying to murder the United States. This Confederacy of Right Wing Bolsheviks see Trump as a vehicle to fast-track their wish lists and overrun any obstacle to seizing total power. This is not a "both sides" matter. Only one side has the knives out.