Christopher Ketcham ,??? ?? ????? ??? April 8, 2025

Burn Down the House

A conversation with Katherine Stewart Harun Tan/The Baffler

Democracy in the United States faces a critical threat in the rise of fascist revolutionaries. These deadly serious right-wing extremists have found a home in MAGA and a source of cash in oligarchs hellbent on bankrolling the destruction of the American system of republican government. Antithetical in every way to conservatism, backed by deep-pocketed authoritarian elites, and allying far-right ideologues with Christian nationalists, the new fascism is a radicalized movement steeped in the rhetoric of bloodshed and upheaval, its goal to capture government and deploy the state’s monopoly on violence to remold society and crush dissent. The endgame is not only to merge the state with corporation and church—a modern redux of the classic fascist configuration of Mussolini and Franco—but the exercise of raw power, brute force, and unfettered avarice. Think of it as owning the libs with an AR-15 while bowing to Mammon and smashing what remains of the welfare state. With his second term underway, Trump is making swift progress implementing this vision of what journalist Katherine Stewart calls “reactionary nihilism.”

In her new book, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, Stewart marshals a truckload of evidence that these people are profoundly dangerous and, like all sociopaths, will stop at nothing to get their way. Yet, even at this late hour, she writes, we continue “to hear feel-good suggestions that the political conflicts of the moment are the result of incivility, tribalism, ‘affective partisanship,’ or some other unfortunate trend in manners that affects every side of the political debates equally.” That thinking, says Stewart, is delusional. “American democracy is failing because it is under direct attack, and the attack is not coming equally from both sides. The movement described in this book isn’t looking for a seat at the noisy table of American democracy; it wants to burn down the house.” I spoke with Stewart last month over email about the book, the early days of Trump’s second term, and our collective future as a nation. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

—Christoper Ketcham

Christopher Ketcham: It is bizarre and extremely concerning that small-d democrats, liberals, and anti-authoritarians—including myself and lot of the people I know—have shrugged off the threat of the reactionary nihilist revolutionaries, including what seems like the most extreme of the bunch, what I call the Christian fascists, what you call Christian nationalists. Why is the threat not taken seriously?

Katherine Stewart: One reason is that most Americans still see themselves as religious in some sense. And most of them perceive religion as something inherently moderate, mild, and tolerant. We just don’t have the experience of Inquisitions, of a Hundred Years’ War, and Crusades on our shores.

As a consequence, our default position in discussing religion is often in favor of civility. We want to believe that we are engaged in good-faith conversations with people who may differ on some issues but share our ultimate goal of getting along with one another and respecting one another’s rights and religious identities. We have to accept that sometimes this is not the case; when it isn’t, we have to accept that our inclination toward civility sometimes is used against us. Over and over again, too often we give those who are lending their support to this authoritarian movement the benefit of the doubt. We assume they are acting in good faith, and at times we extend courtesies that they don’t deserve. We frame debates as if both sides had an equal interest in truth and evidence. We need to be much better at discerning the lies and calling them out.

Another reason is that the movement leaders and political elites pushing Christian nationalism as a means to power have gone out of their way to associate criticisms of this extremist politico-religious movement with criticisms of plain-vanilla Christianity. Americans who identify as Christian don’t want to hear anything bad about their religion, so they plug their ears when you try to warn them, while others remain silent or look the other way because they don’t wish to be perceived as intolerant.

One step in responding to the situation is to educate people. They need to grasp, first, that highly politicized and dualistic religious ideologies, with good-versus-evil, God-versus-demons theology, can be so extreme that they can, at the very least, become tools for antidemocratic politics and, at their worst, create the permission structure for political violence. Also, they might consider that what many if not most American Christians think of as Christianity doesn’t fit comfortably with such a political religion. Indeed, many oppose it.

Crucially, we also have to help people see and understand that behind this religious front there is a giant wave of money and corruption. We need to focus some attention on the funders and their political allies who use religion as a shield for their larger aims.

CK: Go over the five groups you identify in the book—the funders, thinkers, sergeants, infantry, and power players—that comprise reactionary nihilism.

KS:In Money, Lies, and God, I pay very close attention to the money people, the funders. These people are the beneficiaries of the massive concentrations of wealth over the past five decades, and they are investing their fortunes, or a portion of their fortunes, in antidemocratic projects. I’m thinking of people like Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein or Barre Seid or the Wilks brothers or Tim Dunn or members of the DeVos/Prince family juggernaut. The funders are not any one type. Religiously they are all over the place. But they agree on one thing, which is the need to crush liberalism and what they call the “administrative state.”

But a lot of people are going to be hurt if they succeed in destroying a public administration, subject to ethics rules, and replace it with a privately controlled, corporate-managed state. This is where the “lies” in my title fits in. There’s been a tremendous propaganda campaign against “government.” When Americans are surveyed about the level of waste and fraud in government, they always come back with ludicrously exaggerated estimates. That’s not to say that waste and fraud in government agencies doesn’t happen; there’s room for improvement, just as there is in the private sector. But people need to be reminded of the very good things that government does, along with the many bad things that happen in countries with kleptocratic and cronyistic government or those with an effective absence of government. Other forms of conspiracism and disinformation are key tools for separating a sector of the electorate from the facts, which makes them easier to control.

Christian nationalism is arguably the single most important piece of the antidemocratic movement; it is an ideology and a political machine that motivates a lot of the voters or local activists, people I refer to as the foot soldiers. Many of them may not themselves identify as Christian nationalists, but with their actions they are lending support to a Christian nationalist agenda. I also show that this rank and file has to be distinguished from the small cadre of leaders, political pastors, and national activists, cohorts that I call the sergeants and power players, who are often driving the agenda.

If you’re looking for the people who articulate Christian nationalism in its most extreme theocratic form, you’ll find most of them among the sergeants and the power players and among a sector of the foot soldiers. (Although quite few of those foot soldiers would be surprised to discover what is actually being done in their name.)

I also shine a spotlight on a group of intellectuals I call the thinkers, many affiliated with a movement called the New Right. Technically, many of the intellectuals on the New Right aren’t quite what you’d call Christian nationalists; some seem nihilistic. They seem more driven, in some ways, by campus politics or political conflicts than anything else. For them it’s about power, and though they criticize the liberal elites, they are aiming to become a new elite.

CK: To be clear, Christian nationalism really looks to be the heart of the U.S. fascist movement.

KS: Christian nationalism is indispensable to the modern American form of authoritarianism. It explains the largest part of the movement’s popular support. That said, Christian nationalism doesn’t explain all of the movement, and it certainly doesn’t predict where the movement is going. To a significant degree, the Christian nationalist base is simply being exploited by wealthy oligarchs. And the end state that we are looking at isn’t a theocracy or a Christian nation exactly. It’s a nation ruled by a clique of corrupt cronies and power brokers who derive their money and influence from the corrupt individuals at the top and who impose a certain type of religion on everyone else in order to try to keep them in line.

CK:So without Christian nationalism, we wouldn’t have American fascism today?

KS: No, we would not. Certainly, there are other cultural movements that contribute to the construction of the antidemocratic coalition. They include the techno-libertarian strain that motivates some number of the young men who are apparently staffing some part of DOGE and the related ideology of the New Right. However, these other intellectual branches of the movement, which are often atheistic, are very small and would never be sufficient on their own to motivate the rank and file to support the movement. For that you absolutely need Christian nationalism.

CK: Let’s talk about the men—and they are almost all men—at the Claremont Institute and their pet project of eviscerating the administrative state, which is now being implemented at the direction of Elon Musk’s DOGE.

KS: The Claremont Institute is a think tank that came together in the late 1970s when a group of graduate students were inspired by the political philosophy professor Harry Victor Jaffa. It saw its original mission as bolstering democracy and America’s founding principles. It was always conservative but has become more and more reactionary and extreme over the years.

It has also become very powerful. A number of individuals connected to the Claremont Institute have taken up jobs in the new Trump administration and other sectors of Republican politics. So it’s not a weird fringe group hanging out on the beaches of California! It’s a group that is taking power in Washington.

Today, Claremont provides a platform for supporters of political violence and fundamental illiberalism. It publishes or affirmatively reviews or even offers fellowships to racist “replacement” theorists and other conspiracists, along with those who just want to burn democracy down. They are radicals who seem driven by the hatred of groups or aspects of life in the present that they map onto a fictional narrative involving an imaginary past.

In terms of the basic ideas emerging from this think tank, one of the most important ones is what the Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt would call the “state of exception.” In their view, America is so broken, and so certain to collapse, that any intervention is justified, and we need to set aside any laws and institutions that get in the way. More specifically, they believe that the source of this crisis is the rise of a so-called “woke elite.” They think that this woke elite has captured the administrative state; they say it is bent on absolutely destroying America and must be rooted out at any cost.

They use this “anti-woke” talk to justify the destruction of the infrastructure of a functioning government. Because expertise and rational governance, subject to ethics rules and a democratic process, is the enemy of autocracy and unearned wealth. Modern democracy relies on specialized knowledge. It relies on expertise and rational accountability to function. Trump’s people understand intuitively that this kind of rationality is inimical to their efforts to gain power. So they have set about destroying centers of expertise within the government. And they have continued to lie and spread disinformation as vigorously as possible. Very simply they understand that the truth is their enemy.

CK: Tell me about “anti-woke derangement syndrome.”

KS: Let me be clear: I’m inclined to think that identity politics has gotten out of hand, certainly on some sectors of the left but even more so on the embittered white right. The anti-woke movement has now become its own kind of wokery. But it’s mainly because I don’t think we have time to mess around with battles that are often entered into for their symbolism and virtue signaling, as opposed to considering the actual harms and lives that are at stake.

The anti-woke derangement syndrome, as I call it, points to the role of scapegoating and demonization in authoritarian movements. These movements always thrive by targeting a specific group and blaming most or all social ills on them. In its first stage, the anti-woke movement targeted the alleged beneficiaries of wokery as scapegoats: LGBT and black people. But as the movement has evolved, it actually has made a scapegoat of the “woke” liberal, who allegedly represents a kind of insidious insider threat that has a disproportionate amount of power. This group is represented as global, secretive, with lots of money, and part of an international conspiracy against the ordinary “folk.” Sound familiar? The “woke liberal” serves the same function as Jews and other groups have served in previous fascist movements.

CK: What about your broad-brush characterization of this movement as nihilist?

KS: The nihilism can be different according to which sector of the movement we are discussing. Adherents to extreme religious movements, such as the New Apostolic Reformation, may profess deep metaphysical beliefs and a faith in supernatural beings (God plus demons), but their belief system may simply be a cover for their desire for power and control. In other words, that’s all they really believe in: power for its own sake. I count that as a kind of nihilism.

In fact, I’d say it goes deeper than that. The belief system is often otherworldly. It says that this world is so awful it can only be redeemed in another fantasy world. I take that to be an expression of nihilism because it is essentially a condemnation of reality, a rejection of existence. And I think this nihilism shows up in their actions. Its purpose is just to satisfy an emotional need to witness destruction, to witness pain inflected on one’s perceived enemies. It is not directed at the construction or creation of anything new or better. And I think that’s broadly true of the way this movement operates.

Frankly I think we can see it in action right now in DOGE. Musk and the people around him have some kind of hatred or resentment of government as such, and while they spew a certain amount of rhetoric about government efficiency, it seems obvious from their actions that their emotional satisfaction comes from destroying or eliminating as much of government as possible in the most ham-handed way and putting civil servants “in trauma,” as Russell Vought, a central architect of Project 2025, put it.

CK: What are the specific goals you see the antidemocratic coalition working toward in a second Trump administration? And what do you see in the latest maneuvers and machinations from Trump II that can be tied to your overarching thesis about reactionary nihilism—i.e. the appetite for destruction?

KS: I think the prime example we can look at, again, is DOGE. It’s abundantly clear that they are taking the sledgehammer approach, smashing the administrative state as promised, in ways that will ultimately prove very costly. For example, they are sabotaging the IRS’s ability to collect taxes, which is likely to diminish receipts and increase cheating. They are cancelling contracts midstream, which essentially wastes money. They are taking actions against employees that have already brought lawsuits and will again cost money and eliminated a consumer protection agency that returned billions to the American taxpayer. So it’s clear the process is driven by ideological motivations rather than any rational or practical planning. Elon Musk captured the basic thinking when he showed up with a chainsaw and said he was going to defeat the “woke mind virus.”

All of this was foretold in a number of episodes in the first Trump administration. One episode I draw attention to in my book relates to the leadership governing Voice of America. Trump hired a New Right ideologue to head the unit. According to multiple news reports, he simply started destroying things—until it was too much for even Trump I. Now, Trump II has come back to make good on the destruction.

The nihilism is also evident in the moral cowardice of leaders of the Republican Party. The Hegseth Signal chat is a case in point. The members of the administration are flat-out denying what we can all see with our own eyes, which is that they engaged in an incredibly dangerous breach of security, and they did so without following lawfully prescribed processes. They lie to our faces about this, and no major Republican leader, as of this writing, appears to be standing up for the national interest. They all cave, just as they caved when Trump started backing Russia against Ukraine; just as they caved when the attacks on federal judges undermined the rule of law and the constitutional order. This is the behavior of people who appear to have contempt for democracy and believe there is nothing of value apart from power.

When I put the thesis of my book out there before Trump won the 2024 election, I was pretty sure I would get criticism for overstating the case. Two months into the second Trump administration, I feel that, if anything, I understated it. We no longer have a credible system of justice and law enforcement at the federal level. Our economy and the livelihoods of millions of Americans are under threat. Millions of people are likely to lose their Medicaid coverage and possibly even their Social Security benefits. The international order that helped to maintain a certain degree of peace and nuclear nonproliferation over the past eighty years is crumbling as Trump abandons European allies in favor of a kleptocratic autocracy. We are facing a huge crisis.