This week, in the middle of a harrowing New York Times story about Donald Trump’s plan to build a roster of pliant lawyers who will not check his most criminal and authoritarian impulses, there was a line whose full meaning likely escaped most readers. “The Federalist Society doesn’t know what time it is,” said Russell T. Vought, the former Trump budget director who is orchestrating his planning.
The Federalist Society, of course, is the Republican judicial-credentialing organization that supplies most of the legal and judicial talent to Republican presidencies, including Trump’s. Vought’s disparaging comment indicates that he believes the Federalist pipeline is not deferential enough to Trump.
But the more striking component of is the second part of the sentence: “doesn’t know what time it is.” In the last few years, this has become a kind of code-phrase for the post-liberal right.
“Post-liberal” does not mean liberal in the contemporary American sense of the center-left, but the wider philosophical tradition of liberalism dating from Locke, Mill, and so on, which treats individual rights and the rule of law as foundational. A conservative who knows what time it is recognizes that the left is poised to permanently seize power, and that the old rules of politics (following the traditional norms of liberal democracy) no longer apply in the face of this emergency.
The phrase appears to have been popularized by either David Reaboi or Michael Anton, both fellows at the Claremont Institute. Anton’s “Flight 93 Election” essay, which argued that losing another election would mean conservatism would perish forever, laid the foundational premise of the worldview. Reaboi, whose Substack is called “Late Republic Nonsense,” has echoed this Manichean analysis. “Knowing ‘what time it is’ is realizing that these institutions are crumbling, with or without you,” explained Reaboi, “and the surest way to get to something better is to allow them to crumble — and for as many people as possible to recognize that these things are, indeed, crumbling.”
The lingo has gained wide — though, crucially, far from universal — usage within the conservative movement. It is used by post-liberals to distinguish themselves from traditional conservatives. A conservative who does not know “what time it is” still believes the old rules of American politics apply, and that conservatives can still gain power through the traditional methods used by Reagan, Bush et al.
The idea the phrase conveys is confined to generality. In “Flight 93 Election,” Anton argued conservatives needed to seize power to stave off total extermination. There is no concrete program associated with knowing the time other than accepting the premise that traditional American democracy is on the precipice of extinction and likely to be replaced with something else.
“Does ‘limited government’ mean exercising restraint while those who loathe our system run roughshod over it? Does it mean the Constitution is a suicide pact, whereby conservatives keep their arms tied behind their back and the left waltzes to victory almost by default?” asked Ben Weingartan in a column for the Federalist headlined, “If You Don’t Know What Time It Is, Get Out Of Politics Now.”
Hudson Institute fellow John Fonte defined conservatives who know what time it is grasping that left-wing social ideology “cannot be moderated or reformed. It must be annihilated root and branch from all corners of American life.” The conservatives who don’t know what time it is consider these goals extreme, and the methods required to achieve them despotic (a point the time-knowers hardly contest, given that completely eradicating an ideology requires a rather brutal exertion of powers).
What is most telling is that the discourse knowing-what-time-it-is
lacks any defined limits. I have read numerous columns about the meaning of knowing what time it is, and they universally fail to state what it does not permit: street-fighting paramilitary groups? Trying to seize power after losing (another) election? Throwing political dissidents out of helicopters?
This is not to say that everybody who uses the phrase has affirmatively decided to take all, or any, of these steps. But the fanaticism of their logic leaves open possibilities that would not long ago have laid beyond imagination.
So when the leading planner of the next administration associates himself explicitly with a movement that casts its mission as an open-ended commitment to seizing and holding power by any means, it is a sign that the next Trump administration will be willing to take things much farther than the last one.
