Matt Walsh Hates The American Way of Life

He yearns for dictatorship

I’ve previously reviewed Matt Walsh’s movie Am I a Racist? While I obviously have major disagreements with Walsh, I found the movie hilarious. For this reason, I was disappointed to learn that he is a traitor.

Walsh recently advocated that Trump ignore the Supreme Court’s ruling requiring him to give illegal immigrants 24-hour notice before being evicted. While the Trump administration has already violated the spirit of a SCOTUS ruling, Walsh is suggesting that the Trump administration simply ignore what the Supreme Court says.

Of course, if Biden had done something like this—if Biden had ignored a court ruling in flagrant violation of hundreds of years of legal precedent—Walsh would have been first in line to call Biden a dictator. And rightfully so. As I’ve noted before, if the executive can ignore the courts, it is wholly unaccountable.

The only way the other branches check the executive branch is by passing laws which are upheld by the courts. If the president can ignore the courts, they can thereby ignore Congress too. Such a precedent would necessarily entail a descent into dictatorship. It would mean the executive only follows the other branches if it happens to feel like doing so.

I’m old enough to remember when Matt Walsh was proudly proclaiming that he would never vote for Trump. Trump winning, Walsh declared, would be a sufficient reason to stop being a Republican.

Now, it’s hard to know if Walsh is sincere in his newfound pining for dictatorship. Certainly he has every financial incentive to say that he loves Trump even if he does not. If he did not bend the knee before Trump, his career would never have taken off. But there’s some chance that he is sincere. People have a way of being convinced of a position when they have significant financial incentive to do so.

In his book Progressive Myths, Huemer spent lots of time criticizing progressive radicals. But he clarified that he dislikes woke radicals for the same reason he dislikes Trump: they both fiercely fight against American norms. America is quite a great country. Both want to burn our norms to the ground for the sake of short-sighted political gain.

Walsh has become a greater hater of American norms than the typical woke radical. Few people, even among the woke, would go so far as to suggest that the president should simply ignore the courts to pass their political agenda. Even their hatred of norms is not so great as to cause them to believe that the president should simply ignore inconvenient court rulings.

Despite the insanity of this statement—and of many of his views—Walsh is a mainstream political figure. He has 3.2 million followers on YouTube and his videos routinely get hundreds of thousands of views. He’s friends with Ben Shapiro and Michael Knowles, and is one of the most influential conservative commentators in the world. While on the left those who call for suspension of the constitutional order are fringe extremists, on the right, they are some of the most influential political commentators.

Some radical communists call for a vanguard party that will seize power and advance their political agenda without having to be Democratically elected. Walsh has effectively become an advocate for right-wing Vanguardism.

Brad Polumbo

nails it when he says Walsh “has officially come unhinged, and sounds like a radical, not a conservative, who would burn our constitutional order to the ground just to speed up the deportation of a few hundred people.”

So why is it that Walsh, like so many on the right, has become an insane radical utterly divorced from reality with no respect for norms or the constitutions? In my view, there are two main culprits.

One is that on the right, there is the cult of basedness. Being “based,” for those who don’t know, involves being extreme and unflinching. It is based to, for instance, confidently claim women shouldn’t have the right to vote. Though the view is obviously ridiculous on its face, one who advocates it is extreme and unflinching in the face of social pressure.

On the right, there is a curious cult of based. Being based is seen as the cardinal virtue. So long as one is unflinching and makes the left irate, this is seen as sure proof that what they say is true. As Hanania has written about, when right-wingers of political renown meet, they spend a good deal of time and effort signaling how based they are. Hanania summarizes a typical interaction:

After a bit of small talk and an order of drinks, the conversation becomes stilted and all parties have started to glance at their phones. It’s Max who takes the initiative.

“Did you guys see what’s going on with the Bukele thing? The district court judge told the administration that they had to try to get that illegal back from El Salvador. The lawyers basically submitted a required update saying that he’s with Bukele now, under his sovereignty. What else can they do?”

Max’s friend Alex chimes in. “That is so fucking based. Hope they tell Barrett off too when they get back to SCOTUS. You can never trust her. Haitian kids.” He lets out a laugh that is probably too loud, but that’s sort of the point.

There are, of course, cases wherein one should be based. I’m pretty based myself—confidently holding lots of views most people would think are insane, and not backing down from defending them even when people get outraged. But one should only be based in support of a true cause. Extremity for its own sake is no virtue. On the right, however, so long as one is being based—so long as their utterances could be superimposed onto the Wojak in the infamous meme—what they say is rarely questioned. Piety towards basedness comes ahead of reason or truth.

(The above meme is seen by many very online right-wingers as the only justification they need for their views).

But the second reason that so many have gone crazy is that to be a modern Republican, you have to hate our norms. You have to be willing to defend a man who attempted a coup, hates institutions, hates free markets, and plays fast and loose with court orders. After Trump attempted to overturn the results of the election illegally, in an election that he knew he lost, the only people who stuck with him were those who were willing to burn every norm down so long as it got them closer to the levers of power.

Some of these people were true believers. They’d never been real conservatives in any sense. They’d never cared about conserving values. While they’d supported Republicans, their political views were malleable. When Trump came along, talk about the constitution and norms ceased immediately. For these people, respect for norms had always been a farce.

Others, like Vance, were not true believers. They knew that Trump was not what his supporters believed him to be. They knew him to be a deeply capricious and incompetent fool who illegally attempted to overturn an election that he lost. They knew this and they didn’t care. So long as bowing before Trump would get them closer to power, they would do so.

In a world where being a pious Republican requires submitting to a man who respects norms about as much as geese respect laws against public defecation, it’s no surprise that Republicans routinely call for trampling on the constitution. To be a candidate Republican commentator, you must declare openly and loudly your fealty to a man who tramples on the constitution with wild fervor. Once one bows before a man who attempted a coup, them openly pining for a dictator should not be a surprise. They have already sold their soul and their principles; nothing remains to constrain them ideologically except blind deferral to power.