After Hurricane Ian devastated the U.S. state of Florida in late September, its Republican governor Ron DeSantis used some unusual language to criticize American press coverage of the storm. The “national regime media,” he said, had wanted to see Ian hit the city of Tampa, because that would have been “worse for Florida”—and helped the media “pursue their political agenda.” DeSantis’ comments were certainly odd in that there’s no record of journalists ever hoping for any harm to Tampa—but they were even more striking in their association of the media with a “regime” that’s hostile to his party and subverting his country.

For some time now, far-right members of the U.S. House of Representatives—such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Paul Gosar—have been railing against the “Biden regime.” Others on the American right have meanwhile argued that a more deep-seated and oppressive “regime” extends far beyond government—to the press, universities, nongovernmental organizations, and “woke” corporations. Ohio’s Senator J.D. Vance even claimed that the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was “censored by the regime.” And according to the former Trump national-security official Michael Anton, “the people who really run the United States of America” all belong to it. What are they talking about?

Laura K. Field is a scholar-in-residence at American University and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center in Washington. To Field, the rising popularity of the term is a sign of how fluidly extremist ideas are now migrating from the fringes of American politics into the mainstream—from niche intellectuals to ideological entrepreneurs to politicians, media commentators, and other influencers. Field notes that many of those who’ve helped popularize the idea of “the regime” had tried from 2016 to articulate an intellectual framework that supported the politics of Donald Trump—and are trying now to develop the framework for a right-wing populism that can outlast him.

Laura K. Field: The idea of a regime is relatively familiar. Political scientists have commonly used the term to refer to a system of government. But until recently, it’s not something you’d hear much in mainstream U.S. political conversation.

The new idea of “the regime” in America comes from a network of intellectuals, commentators, and politicians broadly aligned with the new-populist politics of Donald Trump—often called “the new right”—who’ve given the term a specific, negative, even cynical, new meaning in the U.S. context.

Fundamentally, it expresses a view of the Biden administration as an effectively authoritarian government—colluding with progressives who control the media, run the universities, and, increasingly, dominate, corporations. There’s a clearly sinister connotation to the rhetoric, tying in with the idea that the 2020 election was stolen and Biden’s presidency is fraudulent—while also conveying a broader sense that the left is exerting despotic power over Americans, and above all Republicans, in all kinds of ways. The regime is very all-encompassing and so very threatening.

Vyse: How did the idea take shape?

It might sound strange to a lot of liberals or other Trump opponents that there would be a real intellectual component to Trumpism, but there is. That’s what these intellectuals have tried to foster—and some of them have been effective, drawing on considerable knowledge about American history and political theory. They’ve been able to find ways to make sense of, and sometimes justifiably defend, what Trump-era Republicans have tried to do—even if the intellectual weight of it all didn’t always come through in what Trump would say.

One of the sources of this thinking, and of the idea of “the regime” in particular, is the Claremont Institute, a research and advocacy organization in California that understands itself as working to restore America’s founding principles—and that had close ties to the Trump administration.

[Michael Anton, a senior fellow at Claremont, is a former Trump national security official. John Eastman, the founding director of Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence and another senior fellow, was the lawyer who helped Trump rationalize his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.]

There’s a strong tendency at the Claremont Institute, and intellectually affiliated institutions, to view the United States as having been fundamentally transformed by progressivism—and to see themselves as counter-revolutionaries working to bring things back to a more authentic American condition.

There’s also a group of religious traditionalists—sometimes referring to themselves as “post-liberals”—who also use this language of the regime. Patrick Deneen, a Notre Dame professor and the author of Why Liberalism Failed, has a forthcoming book called Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. So it’s not necessarily just rhetoric; some of those using the language have big ideas about changing politics. Some post-liberal Catholics, for example, are outspoken in their support of Hungary’s very illiberal Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Some groups, such as the National Conservatism organization, promote a populist economic nationalism.

“There’s some truth to the conviction that liberals or progressives have more cultural clout than conservatives in America—that Hollywood has a liberal or progressive bias, and many mainstream news sources and universities do too. But this conspiratorial notion of a regime that includes the government, corporations, and law enforcement all colluding to oppress Republicans says something very different—and ultimately absurd. There may be a hardening of language on both sides of the American political divide, but it’s important to distinguish which parts of that reflect reality and which don’t.”

“A hard version of the of the idea of the regime suggests that a president not in league with it will be thwarted in office—and that votes in favor of his reelection won’t matter, because the whole system has been taken over by illegitimate forces outside voters’ control. There’s an implicit call to action in the argument—to radical, even possibly violent action—to stop what’s going on. If you genuinely believe that people don’t have the control they should have over their government in a democracy, there’s an imperative in that belief to upend the system.”

“The rhetoric of the regime works by being vague. It suggests a phenomenon that’s sinister, authoritarian, and aggressive, but it also gives those who use it a degree of plausible deniability about its more radical implications. They can say they’re only using it in an innocuous way. To an ordinary person, though, it has a very ominous feeling to it.”