When conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat asked Doug Wilson to assess his influence in an October 2025 interview, Wilson replied: “more influential than I used to be, and at significantly higher levels.
Wilson leads a church in Moscow, Idaho and is the founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), a Christian nationalist network that aims to establish a theocracy in the United States and return the country to its purportedly Protestant roots. Though perhaps a bit smug, Wilson’s admission that he influences the upper echelons of power is not an exaggeration. Russell Vought and Pete Hegseth have both been linked to Wilson, Hegseth attending CREC-affiliated churches in the suburbs of Nashville and in Washington DC. While little that the Trump administration does is surprising at this point, Wilson’s growing influence should still give us pause and provoke questions. What enabled a pastor from an Idaho college town who openly advocates theocracy to exert such influence? How did he gain a foothold in the Trump administration when he gives primacy to Calvinism and risks alienating conservative Catholics like JD Vance.
As it turns out, Wilson is not the first Calvinist theocrat with libertarian leanings to hold sway in the Republican Party. Wilson follows in the footsteps of RJ Rushdoony and Gary North, the architects of Christian Reconstructionism whom I profile in my recent article in Critical Sociology. Through examining the radicalization trajectories of Rushdoony and North, I seek to explain how it is possible that extremists like Wilson who embrace doctrinal purity and command relatively small movement bases are able to exert ideological influence and shape the party agenda. This outcome is puzzling because standard accounts of radicalization suggest that small, sectarian movements with uncompromising positions are likely to splinter and implode without achieving influence. Although this represents the conventional way of viewing radicalization on the left and often motivates the rejection of radicalism within Democratic circles, a new wave of research suggests that radicalization on the right had few disadvantages and was surprisingly fruitful.
In recent years, scholars such as Melinda Cooper and Nancy MacLean have brought to light the little-known right-wing figures who helped dismantle the welfare state and transform American politics. This literature not only underscores the right’s discipline, theoretical sophistication, and organizational prowess, it also reveals that many right-wing figures were just as divisive, extreme, and sectarian as activists and intellectuals on the left. Thus, when we take a closer look at the right-wing counterrevolution, conventional wisdom about radicalization no longer appears accurate, particularly the idea that radicalization sets movements on a dangerous path that reaps few rewards and ends in destruction. With respect to this stylized account, Christian Reconstructionism represents a deviant case that can help us reconsider the prospects of radical politics at a critical moment when pundits like Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias are urging Democrats to moderate their positions and pursue economic populism on a strictly limited basis.
To pinpoint what factors altered the fortunes of radicalization and helped Reconstructionists avoid isolation and implosion, I compare the radicalization trajectories of Rushdoony and North with that of Ken Knabb and Ben Morea, the leading figures of the American Situationist movement. From the late 1960s into the 1970s, ultraleft grouplets inspired by the Situationist International (1957-1972) and Guy Debord’s critique of postwar capitalism proliferated on the East and West Coasts, publishing journals and pioneering new forms of direct action. At first, it might seem odd to compare a movement that cherished autonomy, promoted the model of workers’ councils, and revolted against the organized left with a movement that sought to institute biblical law. However, Situationism and Reconstructionism were central to the left-libertarian and right-libertarian movement families, respectively, and their leaders shared several commonalities. They developed strong critiques of educational institutions and the state, embraced decentralization, and fell into the sect-building trap. But despite these similarities, Reconstructionism came to provide a key intellectual foundation for the modern Republican Party, while Situationism was reduced to a relic, becoming an avant-garde curiosity debated by art historians.
To understand these sharply different outcomes, we need to focus on a key factor that shaped both movements: the uneven development of the American party landscape.
Surveying this landscape shows that the Democratic and Republican parties formed two distinct institutional environments. Although the formal parties constitute weakly bounded blobs in the United States, the Republican Party bloc has become highly coordinated, disciplined, and unified since the 1970s. Essentially, the Republicans have accomplished what leftist parties aim to do. To quote Gramsci, they achieved “a unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills, with heterogeneous aims, are welded together with a single aim.” These integrative dynamics indicate that the Republican Party bloc has a hegemonic configuration, one which draws radicals into the party project. This bloc also boasts robust intellectual and organizational resources, which help radicals refine strategy, build connections, and grow. The Democratic Party bloc’s resources are comparatively underdeveloped and its interest-group configuration does not produce synthesis. Instead, this atomized bloc tends to dilute radicalism and offers few opportunities for radicals to exert influence.
Taken together, the configuration and resources of the Republican Party bloc insulated the leaders of Christian Reconstructionism from the deleterious effects of radicalization and enabled them to achieve ideological influence from the margins. The case of Gary North is especially illustrative, underscoring the abundance of resources available to right-wing radicals and the seemingly endless opportunities that came their way, even when they erred. From the beginning of his radicalization trajectory, the evidence shows that the right-wing associational sphere was vibrant and provided North with resources and opportunities. These resources came in the form of grants from conservative foundations and mentorship, North studying under the sociologist Robert Nisbet at UC Riverside. After completing his PhD in history, North soon became known for his prolific writing fusing market fundamentalism with conservative Christianity. However, his intellectualism always had an acerbic edge and over time, his prophesying became more apocalyptic. If his strain of Christian Reconstructionism started closer to Austrian economics, by the 1980s and 1990s, it had more in common with survivalism and the emerging militia movement. This militant turn damaged North’s relations with Rushdoony, but it did not end his career. Power brokers like Ron Paul and organizations like the Mises Institute continued to give North opportunities, keeping North securely within the Republican fold and enabling him to exert influence.
When I examine the trajectories of Knabb and Morea, I show that they largely match up with standard accounts of radicalization, specifically the destructive dynamics that Todd Gitlin highlights in his writings on Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Weathermen. As he describes in The Whole World Is Watching, “the New Left was like the character in the Roadrunner cartoons who in his fervor and ignorance speeds over a cliff but keeps running, running, running—until he looks down and sees he is running on air. Then he crashes.” Yet the right-wing cases challenge this standard narrative. North also kept running and running, but the dense, integrative configuration of the Republican Party bloc formed a web that cushioned his fall. In fact, no crash occurred and the Reconstructionist nicknamed “Scary Gary” continued to find pathways to influence the Republican agenda despite his marginal position and divisive reputation.
Ultimately, this comparison problematizes the assumption that radicalization is inherently destructive and incompatible with American party politics. Hegemonic parties with robust resources can nurture radicals and substantively integrate their ideas, avoiding the process of dilution that is characteristic of the Democrats’ listless interest-group configuration. As debates about the two-party system remain a point of contention on the left, the Republican case serves as a reminder that social movements should not completely discount the Democratic Party bloc and its potential to generate political opportunities.
This means thinking about what kinds of institutions and forms of coordination need to be developed to help movements build power and ensure that radicalization moves in a progressive direction. The trials of the Rainbow Coalition and, more recently, Your Party in the UK indicate that this may be easier said than done. Despite these challenges, Vincent Bevins’ recent book on the mass protest era shows that street mobilizations have not produced durable wins and suggests that movements still have much to gain from re-engaging with the party form. This need not entail resuscitating bygone models of the mass party like the chimeric dream of cloning dinosaurs. Rather, it must entail bold experimentation, keeping in mind Gramsci’s conception of the revolutionary party as a transformative laboratory.
Matthew Grumbach is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley
This article is based on Matthew Grumbach, “The fortunes of radicalization: How the party environment determined the fate of radical movements in the late 20th-century United States.” Critical Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1177/08969205251396567.”
Image: Doug Wilson speaking with attendees at The Believers Summit at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida on July 28, 2024. Photo by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.