Carter’s pollster Pat Caddell had been pressing the book on the White House for months. So its author came to dinner at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, seated beside First Lady Rosalynn Carter, in company that included the sociologist Daniel Bell, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the broadcaster Bill Moyers, and other diagnosticians of the American soul. Caddell briefed the room on the nation’s darkening mood. By July, Carter would deliver his “Crisis of Confidence” address from Camp David, remembered ever after as the “Malaise” speech. Its most quotable lines echoed Lasch.

The address worked, and Carter’s approval briefly jumped before collapsing along with his Cabinet. Carter had kept Lasch’s diagnosis of a self-absorbed consumer culture and discarded everything that gave Lasch’s diagnosis its power: above all, his focus on corporate concentration and the degradation of work. The analysis, in short, of who holds power and what they do with it.

Lasch protested afterward, in a letter to Caddell, that his target had been the managerial and professional elite, not the ordinary Americans Carter’s speech scolded. It did not matter. The first politician to govern with Lasch in hand had used the book the way a preacher uses a text, for the sermon it could yield rather than the argument it made. Carter was a Democrat. Ronald Reagan, a Republican, mocked the sermon all the way to the White House, and the party of the New Deal has flinched from the word “malaise” ever since.

Forty-seven years later, the borrowing from Lasch continues — only, from the other direction, the Right, and it has become a genre. The conservative writer William Voegeli’s essay in a recent issue of the Claremont Review of Books, “The Political Contradictions of Trumpism,” is an important entry: a patient reading of Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites, published posthumously in 1995, as a book important for understanding Trumpism as an ideological movement, its demonology and its idiom. (Sure enough, a copy of Revolt reportedly once sat on the desk of JD Vance’s speechwriter.) Voegeli, though, is honest enough to concede what he calls the “hard parts,” meaning Lasch’s complete analysis of class power and political economy, which the Trumpians generally decline to inherit.

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But these developments raise a question, largely unaddressed by those, on the Right and the Left, who claim ownership of Lasch’s legacy: how does the work of a man formed on the Marxist Left, a historian who spent the 1960s explaining why American socialism died, become devotional reading for the party of the so-called New Right? The answer, in good part, has to do with Lasch’s own refusal to address modern political economy as it actually exists, and the Jeffersonian romanticism he substituted for proper class analysis.

Lasch trained at Columbia under the liberal historian William Leuchtenburg and made his name in 1965 with The New Radicalism in America, which treated intellectuals not as free-floating minds, but as a social type with interests of its own. By the time he published The Agony of the American Left, in 1969, Lasch was working the same seam as the revisionist historians of his generation: the argument, built by C. Wright Mills and elaborated by Gabriel Kolko and James Weinstein, that 20th-century liberalism was not capitalism’s adversary, but its administrative wing, and that the professionals who staffed the wing constituted a power formation in their own right.

Lasch’s lifelong villain — the credentialed stratum he would later call the “thinking classes” — descends in a direct line from that critique. This matters, because the genealogy has been quietly repossessed. The anti-elite bludgeon that the Right now brandishes at every university and newsroom was Leftist property first, forged to explain why corporate liberalism absorbed every Left challenge thrown at it.

The Left, in short, held the patent on the villain that now obsessed the Right. In 1977, the year Lasch published his book on the family, Haven in a Heartless World, Barbara and John Ehrenreich coined the term “professional-managerial class” in Radical America, a New Left journal, to explain their own movement’s uncomfortable social base. The phrase the online Right now wields as a slur was minted by socialists as an instrument of self-examination, a fact Barbara Ehrenreich was still patiently explaining four decades later.

The two analyses were siblings with different tempers. The Ehrenreich critique kept the professional class inside a theory of capitalism, a stratum living off the surplus that workers produced. For Lasch, however, the critique of the liberal professionals increasingly took on a moral cast: in his telling, they were a stratum living off the deference that ordinary people no longer owed.

What happened next is that the academic and professional Left became, demographically, the very class that the professional-managerial concept described. And the professionals, it turned out, didn’t like to question their own class origins and function in the system. They had sinecures to protect. Lasch didn’t stop his probing, however. He carried the analysis forward, almost alone through the 1980s, which is one reason he sounded increasingly like a man without a party. He was one.

Meanwhile, the Left began writing his obituaries early. Haven, for example, argued that the helping professions had colonized the family. And that the radical anti-family ideas of the Left really supplied after-the-fact alibis for the market’s corrosion of the traditional family. Likewise, in Narcissism, Lasch diagnosed the supposedly emancipated American personality as a product of consumer capitalism. He was, in other words, poking at his own side.

The fights that followed were almost entirely intramural, and the fiercest were with feminists who heard in his defense of the besieged family a defense of its hierarchies and said so at length; in the Village Voice and the feminist journals, his name became shorthand for nostalgia. By the time his critical history of progressivism, The True and Only Heaven, appeared, in 1991, Left critics treated him as a moralist in exile from his own side, while conservative ones circled his body of work with wary interest. That book assembled his counter-tradition, the social forces he would celebrate: the producers, the farmer and the artisan, the small proprietor, the petty-bourgeois lineage whose ethic of “competence” and limits he upheld against the technocratic religion of progress.

The Revolt of the Elites, completed with his daughter Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, the Syracuse University historian, as leukemia killed him at 61, arrived a year after his death with the inversion of Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses that everyone now quotes. Harper’s ran the title essay months before publication, so the professional classes got to read their indictment in one of their own house organs.

The Right began claiming him before the estate was settled. In his last years, Lasch himself published in First Things, telling conservatives in a 1990 essay headlined “Conservatism Against Itself” that the market they worshiped devours the traditions they mourn; the essay reads today like a warning label the New Right has declined to heed. Then, conservative thinkers set about completing the adoption process, to make Lasch one of their own. Roger Kimball gave Revolt a long, respectful accounting in The New Criterion in 1995, disagreements included. Patrick Deneen wrote an admiring essay in 2004.

Through the Bush years, while the academic Left remembered Lasch mainly for what progressives saw as his retreat, the paleoconservatives kept him in circulation: Jeremy Beer’s “The Radical Lasch” in The American Conservative in 2007; the Front Porch Republic circle; the Intercollegiate Studies Institute reading lists; and, in 2010, the standard biography, Eric Miller’s Hope in a Scattering Time, issued not by a university press or Big Five imprint, but by Eerdmans, an evangelical house. In short, the Right — or the faction of it that would become today’s New Right — had completed its ownership claim to Lasch a decade before Donald Trump’s fateful ride down the escalator.

The Trump era only underscored Lasch’s significance to the Right. Ross Douthat put Revolt on his reading list for the incoming era in December 2016. Two months later, Axios reported that Steve Bannon counted it among his favorite books, which drew a furious rebuttal in The Baffler from Chris Lehmann, a former graduate student of Lasch’s, who insisted that Trumpism would have appalled his teacher.

Josh Hawley’s keynote to the first National Conservatism conference in 2019 foregrounded Laschian themes: an American middle betrayed by a leadership class loyal to the globe. By the time Compact, co-founded by UnHerd’s Sohrab Ahmari, launched in 2022, the formula was recognizably Lasch’s: a strong social state, a conservative culture. Law & Liberty convened an anniversary forum in 2021. With a few honorable exceptions, these conservative adopters of the Lasch legacy dropped his anti-capitalist political economy.

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Why is the operation so easy? The problem is that Lasch’s populism has no workplace in it. For a writer whose great subject was the fate of ordinary people under corporate capitalism, the employment relation is almost entirely absent from his books. Read The Culture of Narcissism beside any book about workers of its decade, and the silence becomes glaring: the book anatomizes the manipulated consumer and the therapized client on every page. But the supervised employee barely appears. The workplace as a domain of social domination finds little place in the Laschian corpus.

His moral exemplars are owners in miniature, the freeholder and the master craftsman, members of a class that had, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist before he was born. Compare Lasch to another Left academic who studies the same issue, C. Wright Mills. The latter’s white-collar Americans were employees to the bone, people whose class position consisted precisely in having a boss. Lasch, by contrast, barely noticed the boss.

When wage earners do appear in The True and Only Heaven — a rare exception — they arrive as 19th-century labor republicans and syndicalists, men who wanted the trade to make them proprietors of their own craft; they matter to Lasch, that is, exactly insofar as they resemble owners. Lasch elided, however, the 20th-century employee: the person who clocks in at somebody else’s firm and will retire, or be discarded, from somebody else’s firm. Unions in their 20th-century form figure as one more bureaucracy, a managerial stratum administering workers, rather than as vehicles that allowed workers to pool their bargaining power and thus improve their wages and working conditions.

His defenders will answer that the omission was the argument; that in the Jeffersonian tradition Lasch championed, permanent wage labor is the disease and proprietorship the cure. It follows, the thinking runs, that organizing on the employment relation would only ratify the disease. Perhaps. But a serious politics cannot be based upon the idea that everyone will one day become an owner. The history of political economy in the 19th and 20th centuries, on the contrary, is a story of capital separating the Jeffersonian yeoman and artisan from his land and his tools.

To be sure, Lasch wasn’t wrong in his critique of unions as sclerotic and bureaucratic. But he took this true observation as a permission slip for neglecting the wage relation almost entirely. Which, as it happened, made him congenial to the elements of the Right which were happy to have his critique of the globalist professionals at a cultural level, but which remained averse to collective bargaining and the redistribution of power within the firm.

A class politics anchored in ownership and Jeffersonian virtue carries none of this. It asks only that you resent the credentialed, and that is an appetite the American Right has never lacked. The Right could adopt Lasch’s villain whole, the arrogant professional stratum, without having to consider what defending the villain’s victim would mean on a material plane: at the level of wages and labor law. Ultimately, nothing in The Revolt of the Elites is unassimilable by a party of capital.

Yet the Right’s near-full adoption of Lasch doesn’t do justice to the Left position he actually held, its shortcomings notwithstanding: a Left that could distrust the professional stratum without falling in love with the market; a Left that took the moral world of working people seriously as something other than false consciousness.

The Trump Accounts went live on July 4, and Hannah’s daughter is among the 6 million children whose parents have opted in, so far, but they may not be getting what they bargained for. 

Most parents, like Hannah, are thrilled to have an opportunity to invest in their child’s future. Tax attorney and retirement-planner Adam Bergman, founder of the IRA Financial Group, claimed his children will “be tax-free millionaires.” Others are a little skeptical of the Trump connection. Hannah says her partner criticized her for setting up the account. “He was like, ‘Trump’s name is on it, you never know who they’re tracking with that,’” she says. Some, also, are worried that this will be yet another empty promise, like the savings from DOGE and tariffs. 

In promoting this plan, Trump told the nation, “We’re doing something much better than giving the next generation a handout. We’re giving them ownership of America’s future.” But in January, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent said the quiet part out loud. Trump Accounts, he proclaimed, would “render socialist notions moot by making every citizen a shareholder.” He called the program “the largest merger in history between Main Street and Wall Street,” and for once the hype was accurate, because a merger is exactly what the accounts are, and in a merger, somebody is always the acquirer.

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All children under 18 can be enrolled, but a Trump bonus of $1,000 from the Treasury is reserved for every citizen baby born during Trump’s second term, roughly 14.3 million children, about $14.3 billion. The funds will be invested in S&P 500 index funds and held at Bank of New York Mellon until the child is 18, and then converted into an IRA. Parents open the account with IRS Form 4547 or at TrumpAccounts.gov; the activation notice arrives from no-reply@TrumpAccounts.Treasury.gov, which is its own small poem. The tracking app was designed in partnership with Robinhood, the firm that put confetti animations on stock trades until regulators objected, and the app’s projection screen shows a parent what patience purchases: $6,000 or so by 18, $243,000 by 55, assuming historical returns and no further deposits. Fifty-five: the horizon of reward offered to a person three weeks old is the far side of her working life. 

Then comes the private money, stacked on top like a christening gift from people the child will never meet. Michael and Susan Dell have pledged $6.25 billion to put $250 into accounts for some 25 million children in ZIP codes below a median income threshold. Barbara and Ray Dalio, billionaire investor and founder of Bridgewater Associates, put up $75 million for Connecticut’s children. Micron announced $250 million, with the president himself relaying the news. More than 50 companies, SoFi and Charter and BlackRock and Charles Schwab among them, have promised to match the federal $1,000 for employees’ children, and the press releases all strike the same notes of opportunity, ownership, and the American Dream, in the cadence of a benefits enrollment packet. Which, structurally, is what the accounts are. 

The offer is in many ways an old one. Every time American capital has faced a crisis of legitimacy, it has responded by offering the public a sliver of ownership instead. Not power over the enterprise. Not a claim on its governance, and certainly not a raise. There is no recognition of the labor. A share: the smallest unit of belonging that capital can issue without changing anything about itself. Shareholder democracy is the recurring ideology of wage defeat, and you can date its recurrences by the troughs of labor’s fortunes the way a geologist dates strata.

Consider the last time the phrase “every citizen a shareholder” ran this hot. In 1954, the New York Stock Exchange, under its then-president G. Keith Funston, launched a campaign called “Own Your Share of American Business.” The Exchange had a problem: hardly anyone owned stock. A Brookings census commissioned by the NYSE itself had found only about 6.5 million adult shareowners in 1952, a small percentage of the population. So, the Big Board went into mass-merchandising mode. Its Monthly Investment Plan let a family buy into the market for as little as $40 a quarter, stock on the installment plan, like a Frigidaire. 

Theodore Repplier of the Advertising Council, back from a world tour and convinced that “capitalism” carried an unpleasant odor abroad, rebranded the American system as “people’s capitalism,” and Eisenhower endorsed the phrase for worldwide use by the United States Information Agency. The campaign was test-marketed on Americans themselves at a 1956 exhibition in Washington, in cheerful defiance of the Smith-Mundt Act’s ban on domestic propaganda, before being shipped to trade fairs on several continents. The exhibit’s message was that the United States had dissolved the class question: here the worker was a capitalist, and so there was nothing left to fight about. Yet a 1958 American Economic Review article found that stock ownership remained radically concentrated at the top. The campaign was a success: not at making workers rich, but at its real aim of making the question of who got what sound obsolete.

That is the ancestry Bessent was claiming in January, whether he knew it or not. The people’s-capitalism campaigns flourished in the 1950s precisely because the wage question had been settled, temporarily, by the thing the campaigns never mentioned: a third of the workforce in unions, and contracts with wages high enough to afford the suburbs. Ownership talk was the dessert, not the meal. The next recurrences, however, came when the meal was being taken away. 

Peter Drucker, business and management guru, announced in 1976 that “pension fund socialism” had arrived: workers would own American industry through their retirement funds. Yet at almost exactly that moment, the industrial order that funded those pensions began to be dismantled. The rise of globalism, coupled with neoliberalism, created an economic order that saw American manufacturing offshore at an alarming rate. By the next decade, companies like GM had more pensioners than employees. Two years later, Congress wrote section 401(k) into the Revenue Act, a technical provision for deferring executive bonuses, and by the early 1980s, a benefits consultant named Ted Benna had convinced employers that it could become the replacement for the pension itself. The defined-benefit pension was a claim on an employer. The 401(k) is a claim on the market. The transition was narrated, throughout, in the language of ownership, empowerment, and choice, and it moved decades of market risk from firms onto households, which is not a side effect of the design but the design itself.

Each new scheme came with changes to other retirement plans or Social Security, in addition to changes in other benefits. In the long term, they were never pure additions. So, while the Trump Accounts do not mention a bait and switch, we should be mindful of the history lesson behind these efforts. 

George W. Bush gave the pattern its most candid name. He proclaimed the “ownership society” as manufacturing employment cratered and the union share of the private workforce slid toward single digits. His centerpiece, unveiled in 2005, was the plan to partially convert Social Security into private accounts. That campaign failed. The Trump Account is the same proposal approached from the other end of life. You could not persuade a 60-year-old to trade her guaranteed benefit for a portfolio, but a newborn needs no persuasion. Michael Lind, no man of the Left, has already made the blunt version of this point: accounts like these will furnish politicians with a standing excuse to cut the universal programs.

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The honest counterargument deserves its paragraph, though. Compounding is real; $1,000 at historical equity returns genuinely becomes a meaningful sum over five or six decades, and universality is nothing to sneer at, since the program reaches the children of parents who would never open a 529, with no means test and no stigma. A baby in the poorest ZIP code in Memphis could now hold the same instrument as a baby on the Upper East Side. All true, and all beside the structural point, because the instrument is identical, but the machine attached to it is not. Contributions can run to $5,000 a year, which means the account compounds family wealth wherever family wealth exists and compounds the initial $1,000 wherever it does not. The projection screen shows every parent the same curve. The curve will be climbed by the children whose grandparents can feed it, which is to say the account does not offset the existing distribution; it is a multiplier sitting on top of it.

And notice what the multiplier runs on. The heartbeat of this plan is the S&P 500’s returns; thus, the very returns the app so cheerfully projects are in meaningful part the earnings that firms retain by holding labor costs down, automating when possible, and buying back their own shares. The newborn shareholder’s interests have been enrolled, from the crib, on a particular side of a particular ledger. This is the part of the program that deserves the word ideological, used precisely. American elites rarely bother suppressing opposition when they can reorganize identification instead. The Trump Account redistributes almost no wealth; the Treasury’s own thousand is a rounding error against the contribution architecture above it. What it redistributes is a point of view. The child will grow up checking a balance whose health depends on the market’s side of every fight she might otherwise have joined. Welfare capitalism used to do this with company stock and a company picnic; the historians among us wrote books about it. Now it arrives by app, with an employer match announced in a press release, and the company picnic is a push notification.

Meanwhile, hold the offer up against what is not on offer. Real wage growth is flat, and prices are still too high for the average American. No one in Washington is proposing that the newborn’s father be paid more, or that his schedule be predictable, or that his warehouse recognize a union. The proposal on the table is that his daughter own 11 basis points of the warehouse’s landlord. There is a genuine political theory in this, and Bessent stated it without blushing: make every citizen a shareholder. Thus, ownership talk answers the wage question by changing the subject, as it has now changed the subject four times in 70 years. 

Which returns us to the child. Civics used to be a set of claims about what citizens owe each other; the Trump Account is a claim about where security comes from, installed before one has the ability of speech. She will learn, from the first time her parents check the app, that her future is a balance; that the balance moves for reasons no one around her controls; that patience is the whole of virtue and 55 the horizon of reward; and that the government’s founding gift is a trading position. A position must be held. Holders do not strike, do not agitate, do not ask who set the terms; they wait, and check the screen, and hope. That is the citizen the account is designed to produce, and the design will work on many. The $1,000 is real, the compounding is real, and so is the lesson. 

We have decided to tell American children where they stand by opening the market to them at birth. They will spend the next 55 years watching an app to check their standing, but will find out that the market was never the thing that stood for a decent or happy life. It was simply the thing that got there first.

And parents, of course, don’t have a better option, or aren’t aware of one. “Real parents, Left or Right, don’t have time to get involved in labor activism,” Hannah says. “We’re just working and investing and trying to set our kids up for the best success rate.” 

And so, the republic, in its 250th year, has settled its account with the newborn. Not a nursery, not a clinic, not a school, not her father’s raise; a custodial 530A, managed by Bank of New York Mellon, gamified by the makers of the confetti trade app, topped up by a chip company’s press release. She is three weeks old and already long the S&P.  Her first civic document arrived from no-reply@TrumpAccounts.Treasury.gov, which is the entire social contract in a sender field: here is your stake, do not write back. 

The number was once unthinkable. BuzzFeed went public in late 2021 at a valuation of more than $1.5 billion. As a private company, it had been worth $1.7 billion, and was the unicorn that set the benchmark for the decade’s digital-media venture funding. Allen acquired the entire operation for roughly 7% of that peak figure. Most of the purchase price is a five-year promissory note; the cash portion was only $20 million.

Meanwhile, Vox Media has spent the past three years quietly accepting that its 2015 NBCUniversal valuation of a little more than $1 billion is not coming back. Penske Media took a controlling stake in 2023, at a $500 million valuation, half what NBC had paid eight years earlier. Vice Media, valued in 2017 at $5.7 billion (yes, billion), filed for bankruptcy in May 2023, sold to its creditors for $350 million, and by February 2024, stopped publishing on Vice.com altogether. The brand survives. The company does not.

This is not really a story about three failed startups. This is a story about a genre of media that disrupted nothing, lasted briefly, and is now being sold for parts. Each of these companies was an experiment in betting that new distribution platforms could underwrite editorial ambition. The bet was wrong, but for a few years it looked right.

Vice began in 1994 as a Montreal free magazine, founded by Suroosh Alvi, Shane Smith, and Gavin McInnes; that last went on to found the Proud Boys, an awkward provenance that Vice Media still prefers to leave underdiscussed. By the mid-aughts, the magazine had relocated to New York and developed an aesthetic of irony-laced gonzo reportage: well-educated young men visiting war zones and methamphetamine encampments with their smirks intact. An HBO deal in 2013 conferred prestige. The editorial product retained its faux-outlaw posture. At its peak, the company ran 35 offices, an HBO show, an in-house creative agency called Virtue, and a record label. James Murdoch invested through Lupa Systems. So did Disney, TPG, and Technology Crossover Ventures. The 2017 valuation implied that Vice had cracked the code of monetizing youth-culture authenticity.

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It had not. What Vice had cracked was the willingness of corporate advertisers to pay premium rates to associate themselves with disreputability. When that willingness faded — and it began fading the moment the brand became too familiar to be transgressive — Vice had nothing left.

BuzzFeed’s story is more interesting, because the journalism, for a stretch, was real. Jonah Peretti, a co-founder of The Huffington Post, built BuzzFeed in 2006 as a viral-content laboratory. The famous early product was the listicle: “21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity.” But in 2012, Peretti hired Ben Smith from Politico to build a news division on top of the listicle engine. Smith’s bet was that the same social-platform mechanics that propelled animal-rescue videos could also propel investigative journalism. He hired aggressively, opened bureaus across the world, and soon presided over a newsroom whose international reporting on the Chinese government’s mass internment of Uyghurs won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize. BuzzFeed News published the (dubious) Steele dossier in 2017. It covered Silicon Valley with greater sophistication than most of the legacy press. For five or six years, it was the most consequential newsroom in American digital journalism.

The catch was that the apparatus rested on Facebook’s referral algorithms. When Facebook decided, around 2018, that it had grown tired of subsidizing publishers, BuzzFeed’s traffic collapsed. The news division burned cash. In an April 2023 staff memo, Peretti admitted that he had “overinvested” in the news division because he loved the work, and confirmed what had been obvious for months: BuzzFeed News was shutting down. About 180 staffers were laid off.

Finally, there was Vox Media. Founded by media executive Jim Bankoff with seed funding from Comcast, the firm traveled a different route to the same destination. The Vox website launched in 2014 with two policy bloggers, Ezra Klein from The Washington Post and Matt Yglesias from Slate, joined by Melissa Bell, an editor with a digital pedigree from the Post. Vox’s premise was technocratic. Smart people were busy and confused; journalism’s job was to package the underlying expertise behind the news. The site’s design templates — an index-card-styled “explainer” footer, providing background context on stories, embedded charts, and house-style explainer videos — were copied by other publications. At its peak, Vox had a Netflix series called Explained, a billion-dollar valuation, and ambitions to be the equivalent of CNN.

Each of these companies succeeded by being native to the larger social-media platforms it depended on. Each was undone the moment the platforms changed terms. The collapses were not symmetrical. Vice went bankrupt. BuzzFeed shrank into peddling snark and lists, and shed half its workforce. Vox negotiated a soft landing inside Penske’s stable of legacy titles, which includes Variety and Rolling Stone. But the trajectory was the same.

Klein left Vox for The New York Times opinion section in late 2020. Matt Yglesias departed a week earlier for a Substack newsletter called Slow Boring, where he now earns considerably more than he did at Vox. Smith, the founding editor of BuzzFeed News, decamped in 2020 for a Times media column, then in 2022 co-founded Semafor, a newsletter platform, with the former Bloomberg Media chief Justin Smith. Semafor today employs some 80 people, has 750,000 newsletter subscribers, and generates more than half its revenue from live events. Lauren Williams, the BuzzFeed News deputy editor, left to start Capital B, a black-civic-journalism nonprofit. Other BuzzFeed alumni founded subscription products on Substack and Beehiiv. At Vice, the diaspora was wider and quieter: writers scattered to legacy outlets, independent production, freelance. 

Each departure made the same point. The value the platforms had accumulated was always portable. The audience attached itself to writers, not to the brand. When the writer left, the audience left, too. BuzzFeed could not retain Ben Smith’s authority because Ben Smith was the asset. Vox could not retain Klein’s subscribers because they were reading Klein, not Vox. These companies turned out to be temporary scaffolding around durable individual reputations.

This is, of course, what newspaper proprietors used to understand. H.L. Mencken’s name sold The Baltimore Sun. Walter Lippmann’s column ran in 250 newspapers because it was Lippmann’s column. Westbrook Pegler, Stewart Alsop, Jimmy Breslin, Mike Royko: their bylines moved subscriptions. The new-media companies briefly persuaded themselves that the brand was the asset. They were corrected. The talent walked. The shells remain.

The transactions of the past three years tell a story not of media renewal, but of media dismantlement. Vice’s $350 million 2023 sale to a consortium led by Fortress Investment Group, Soros Fund Management, and Monroe Capital was a creditor takeover dressed as a sale. CNBC reported at the time that the new owners planned to hold the company for two or three years and “further shave off the business.” They did. By February 2024, the new CEO had announced “several hundred” additional layoffs and confirmed that Vice.com would cease publishing original content. The website would now syndicate or partner with others. The brand was kept alive because brands have residual value. The journalism was finished.

Vox’s 2023 deal with Penske Media was less brutal but more revealing. Jay Penske, who built his fortune in motorsports media and entertainment trade publications, took the largest outside stake at a valuation that halved Vox’s 2015 mark. Vox now sits in a bigger portfolio alongside media commentary and taste-curation outfits. These brands continue to elevate cultural trends, but they are more about vibes than news. Their editorial ambitions have been quietly downsized. This is what survival looks like.

The Byron Allen acquisition of BuzzFeed is the most candid of the three transactions — and the most instructive. Allen is not a journalist. He is a Detroit-born comedian who built a syndication and distribution empire from a foundation in 1990s television production. He owns 13 broadcast affiliates across ABC, CBS, and NBC; 10 cable networks, most prominently the Weather Channel, which he bought in 2018; four streaming platforms; and a two-hour late-night comedy block on CBS that just expanded into Stephen Colbert’s old slot. He understands the economics of distribution. 

When Allen looked at BuzzFeed, he did not see a journalism asset. We can imagine that he saw three things. He saw a recognizable brand, nostalgia for which could be monetized. He saw a content library of two decades of audience-tested digital material that could be licensed to an AI company. And he saw an integration opportunity: his BuzzFeed could feed his streaming infrastructure, with the hope of growing ad revenue. He said as much in his announcement: “Our vision is to build on the iconic foundation of BuzzFeed and HuffPost by expanding into free-streaming video, audio, and user-generated content. As of this moment, with the power of AI, BuzzFeed is officially chasing YouTube to become another premier free video streaming service.”

Note what is absent from that sentence: any reference to journalism, reporting, or news. Note also the AI mention. Peretti’s new title, head of BuzzFeed AI, is the giveaway. The asset Allen is buying is not the company. It is two decades of human-written content that can be used to train AI systems, plus a brand name under which machine-generated content can plausibly run. The Reuters licensing deal at $200 million annually, the OpenAI partnership announcements, and the recent Disney-OpenAI billion-dollar deal: these are not isolated transactions. They are the new revenue model. Publishers’ archives have become a training data inventory. Their brand names have become trust-laundering vessels.

For buyers of declining new-media brands, there are three distinct logics that overlap.

The first is distribution integration. A company like Allen Media Group, which owns broadcast and streaming pipes, can use a content brand to fill those pipes more cheaply than it can produce original content. The economics are roughly the ones William Randoph Hearst used in the 1920s, when his magazines fed his newspapers, and his newspapers fed his radio stations. The form is updated; the structure is identical.

The second is intellectual-property licensing. The archives have value as content libraries that can be repackaged for streaming, podcasts, or, increasingly, AI training. Vice’s old documentaries get licensed. BuzzFeed’s listicles get repurposed into vertical video. The journalism, where it ever existed, becomes incidental to the intellectual-property play.

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The third is what we might call brand-laundering. A trusted-sounding brand name carries value beyond the journalism that originally built that trust. Algorithmic content running under “BuzzFeed” or “Vice” carries credibility freight that the same content would not carry under its own name. This is why the brands survive even when the newsrooms don’t. The empty shell is the asset.

The dominant theme is that none of these logics requires the people who originally made the brand worth anything. Once the talent left, the shell still had financial value. Not as a journalism business, but as a content asset, a brand asset, and an audience asset, monetized in ways the original founders never imagined and would not have wanted.

What this tells us about the state of the media industry in 2026 is not subtle. The mid-tier digital publisher is dead. The economics that briefly sustained newsrooms of 200 or 300 journalists at outlets like BuzzFeed and Vice no longer exist. Programmatic advertising has collapsed. Google’s AI overviews have throttled search referral traffic. Facebook deprioritized news years ago. Apple’s privacy changes wrecked targeted-ad economics. The only viable models left are very small (Substack, individual subscriptions) or very large (The New York Times, with its 11 million digital subscribers, has functionally replaced the regional newspaper system as the country’s national paper of record). Everything in between is being either absorbed into the very large or stripped for parts by the financiers.

The consolidation logic has reshaped every other consumer industry over the past two decades. Private equity buys the brand, fires the staff, and runs out the residual value of the customer relationship until it runs dry. Gannett, MediaNews, Tribune Publishing, McClatchy: the American local-newspaper system was hollowed out this way over 15 years by hedge funds like Alden Global Capital. Digital media are now experiencing their own such moment, abbreviated and accelerated. What took the local papers a decade and a half is taking the new-media companies about six years.

The familiar pieties about democratization will not survive contact with this story. The new media was supposed to break the gatekeeping monopolies of legacy publishers. It did so, briefly, replacing them with venture-funded shells whose economics were never sustainable. But once those shells collapsed, the gatekeeping has reconstituted in a more thorough form than before — we used to have gatekeepers at a constellation of local papers; now there’s only The New York Times.

This is the lesson of the last decade, and it is older than the internet. Disruption is rarely what the disruptors claim it is. It is more often a redistribution of who collects the rent.

In any other decade, this would be a Hollywood trade story. In 2026, it is a diagnosis.

Young men now quote Bateman the way a previous generation quoted Fight Club’s Tyler Durden, which is to say that American Psycho has migrated into aspirational territory. Young men want to be the novel’s looksmaxxing, empty-sex-chasing protagonist. Mary Harron, who directed the original 2000 film version, keeps telling interviewers she is “mystified” by this. She always understood the novel as satire — specifically, “a gay man’s satire on masculinity.” Harron is a careful reader and a better director, and she still cannot quite say the obvious thing. It is not mystifying at all. A culture that elected Donald Trump twice — Bateman’s explicit role model in the 1991 novel — was always going to lose the ability to distinguish satire from a mirror. The Bateman problem is not that readers misunderstand Ellis. It is that they understand him the way a thirsty man understands an oasis.

The trends that culminated in the valorization of Bateman were already latent when the novel and the Trump presidency were mere gleams in the eyes of ambitious men. When Ellis came on the literary scene, it was as part of a Bennington College cohort that also included Jonathan Lethem, whose work the new film will inadvertently eulogize. Lethem attended Bennington College in Ellis’s class of 1986 but dropped out halfway through sophomore year, having had what he later called an “overwhelming collision with the realities of class” — his bohemian parents, he discovered, had actually been poor; the Bennington students were actually rich. 

Lethem went back to Brooklyn and spent the next 30 years writing the inverse book to everything Ellis produced. Where Ellis’s characters sit sealed inside their class privilege like terrarium specimens, Lethem’s characters can’t avoid their neighbors, can’t unsee the block, can’t pretend the adjacent kid’s trouble is not also theirs. The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem’s breakout book, pays homage to Jane Jacobs, a pioneer of urban community preservation, who valued neighborhoods above all else. Lethem’s Fortress is the great Jacobsian novel of the post-Jacobsian era, a long aching chronicle of the Brooklyn block as moral organism and what gentrification does to it — which is not only to displace people, but to implicate the remaining residents in the displacement.

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Call Ellis’s model the city of fear. His urbanism is vertical, predatory, cold; the characters don’t walk, but are driven, their class positions reinforced by every sealed surface. The streets happen to other people — people they don’t look at, people for whom the correct response is either the averted gaze or the raised partition. 

Call Lethem’s model, by contrast, the city of guilt. His urbanism is horizontal, all stoops and sidewalks, the corner store whose owner knows which kid’s mother is sick, and its governing emotion is the impossibility of moral insulation. For a long generation, American urban writing ran an unofficial referendum between these two visions, with every essay on gentrification mentioning Jacobs and her opposing force, the builder Robert Moses, who bulldozed whole neighborhoods in New York City in the name of Progress. Every Jacobs-versus-Moses seminar, every fight over bike lanes and broken-windows policing contests the ground between them. 

The referendum is over. Ellis won.

He won in the obvious places. Bateman’s Manhattan is now the Manhattan that turned SoHo into an outdoor luxury outlet and converted its own middle-class adulthood into an unwinnable quest for success and hipness. He won in the less obvious ones, too: in the Ubered, DoorDashed, Amazon-Primed private-city experience of the educated young, who have been trained to encounter the public street the way Bateman encountered it, as an interruption between secured spaces. He won in the quiet disappearance of the mixed-use retail block, the conversion of the corner bodega into a ghost-kitchen, the diner into a co-working subscription. He won, most painfully, in the Brooklyn Lethem actually wrote about. The Boerum Hill neighborhood — the central nervous system of The Fortress of Solitude — was gentrifying even during Lethem’s childhood; brownstones there cost between $3.5 to $8 million today. Nearby Bed-Stuy lost its black majority during the Eric Adams mayoralty. There, brownstones that sold for $50,000 during the period the novel depicts now trade north of $3 million. The homeowners who cashed out are not, in the main, analogs to the people Lethem’s narrator grew up watching. They are the beneficiaries of the Ellis settlement.

He won, too, in Altadena, a close-knit California community that was a suburban equivalent of Bed-Stuy. A year after the January 2025 fires, nearly 70% of severely damaged homes there show no rebuilding activity, and black and Asian homeowners — Altadena was an anomaly of black homeownership, with an 80% ownership rate in 2023, roughly double the national average — are the most likely to remain stalled. Commercial lease prices in the surviving blocks have spiked. The people who understood Altadena the way Lethem’s narrator understood Boerum Hill’s Dean Street are being priced into storage. The speculators circling the burned lots understand those lots the way Ellis’s characters understood the street: as inventory, passed through tinted glass.

The TikTok embrace of Bateman is therefore not a misreading, but a graduation certificate. The readers who now quote him admiringly grew up in the city he built — organized around sealed interiors and contempt for exteriors — and correctly identify him as a role model in this new world. Guadagnino’s casting trouble is the final footnote. You can no longer play Bateman ironically if there is no longer a shared moral floor against which the irony registers. The actors who have passed on the role may or may not have theorized it this way, but they have felt it. The character no longer reads as the predator he was designed to be, because the culture has lost its capacity to recognize predation. The only honest performance now would be the straight one, which might be why so many A-list actors have turned down the role. 

Some untidiness, however, mars Ellis’s victory. On Jan. 1, Zohran Mamdani became the 112th mayor of New York City on the most Lethemite platform of the postwar era: a four-year rent freeze on roughly a million rent-stabilized units; the addition of 200,000 permanently affordable units over 10 years; a revived Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants; public grocery stores and free buses; and a pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes. The campaign was unapologetically Jacobsian in its moral grammar — the block as moral organism, the tenant as legitimate claimant on the landlord’s conscience, the city as shared custody rather than asset class. Mamdani’s election, and the wave of younger Gothamites who embraced him, suggest a new playbook for Chicago, Minneapolis, and Boston. Lethem’s vision returned like the repressed: the city of guilt asserting itself as policy after two decades of being merely literature.

Mamdani’s first 100 days have been a tutorial on why Ellis won. The new mayor inherited a $12 billion deficit and has cut it to $5.4 billion, in part by appealing a court order that would expand the city’s rent-voucher program — thus breaking a promise he had made on the trail. He proposed a 9.5% property tax hike that the deputy speaker of his own progressive council immediately branded “not equitable,” opening the first crack of what could become a tax revolt. Former Mayor Eric Adams, in his final weeks, stacked the Rent Guidelines Board with appointees designed to delay the rent freeze; the preliminary vote is not expected until May, the final until June, and any freeze would not take effect before October.

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The Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan released in early April has already drawn the attention of Trump’s Justice Department. The pied-à-terre tax requires the state legislature’s cooperation, which Albany is withholding. None of this is precisely a failure — yet. It is the normal friction of governance meeting the permanent architecture of American urban capital. It is also, without exception, the machinery Ellis described. The real-estate state — the phrase is the author Samuel Stein’s — is not moved by elections. It is moved by ownership, and ownership is a formidable opponent. 

The wave of socialist mayors should be read honestly. It is not the Lethem vision reasserting itself as lived urban reality. Neither is it a victory for Jane Jacobs over Robert Moses. It is the Lethem vision appearing as electoral ethics inside cities whose physical and financial architecture is permanently Ellis. Americans now vote for the city of guilt and live in the city of fear. The vote registers the yearning; the architecture registers the verdict. You can campaign against the real-estate state, but you govern inside it. You can read The Fortress of Solitude on the F train, but the F train is delivering you to a neighborhood that priced out the families Lethem wrote about a decade before the book came out.

Guadagnino’s film, when it arrives, will be an accidental document of this settlement. He will find a Bateman, or he will not; the picture will be well-reviewed, or it will not; Bale’s ghost will be appeased, or it will not. None of that matters. Ellis’s novel, written in 1991 as a scalding joke about a world the author assumed his readers would recognize as grotesque, is now read by those readers as reportage — or even a how-to guide. Lethem’s novel, published in 2003 as an elegy for a Brooklyn block that was already mostly gone, is now read — when it is read — as speculative fiction. The city of fear won. The city of guilt is what we are now obliged to feel about having let it.

Voters in favor of such changes have been supportive as politicians in red states give speeches against local universities, legislators circulate viral clips denouncing campus ideology, and college presidents suffer ritual humiliation when called to explain what, exactly, happens in an Office of Inclusive Excellence. These voters imagine their representatives are putting an end to biased hiring practices, shutting down alienating classroom polemics, and making campuses safe for conservative speech. 

The reality, however, is much more complex. The opponents of DEI have weaponized regulation and are creating a Pandora’s box of tools that can be used and reused by successive administrations — all to the detriment of higher education. 

A look at new state-level bills being enacted — the certification language, the reporting dates, the audit authority, the clauses decreeing that money may be withheld and not later restored — reveals much more than the substitution of one ideology for another. Instead, we are seeing the establishment of a new system of governance. It is much bigger than DEI and the current political moment. 

Ohio is the clearest place to witness the shift, because the state has already moved beyond messaging into the mechanics of enforcement. Gov. Mike DeWine signed Senate Bill 1, the “Advance Ohio Higher Education Act,” into law on March 28, 2025. The statute bars public institutions from establishing or continuing DEI offices; prohibits DEI training and orientation except in narrow circumstances; forbids institutions from recreating the same functions under another label; restricts universities from stating official positions on “controversial belief or policy”; and requires a three-credit course in American civic literacy. The law took effect last June.

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One issue is the law’s vagueness, which masks matters of fundamental importance. What is a “controversial belief or policy,” and what is the curriculum of the new required course in “American Civic Liberty,” and who gets to decide? In the usual functioning of universities, faculty would, for better or for worse. But under Ohio’s law, politicians — with few if any qualifications — will be empowered to reject curriculum. 

Universities will have no metrics by which to judge their own compliance and will operate under constant surveillance. Any student could report any faculty member to the state at any time: an enlargement and statewide codification of a DEI measure in place at some universities, except now in the opposite ideological direction. It is nigh impossible for any teacher to uphold a requirement to stay within unknown bounds on any “controversial belief or policy” as judged by any student. The rule is bound to severely impact teaching.

Moreover, under existing arrangements, faculty have already been rigorously reviewed by their peers; their courses are also peer-reviewed; and universities receive extensive and serious peer-review through national and state accreditors, plus discipline-specific reviews. It isn’t a perfect system, but it is a system nonetheless, and could help address student concerns, if that is the desire. Instead, in order to correct one perceived problem, the state has instituted a new system that will destroy student-faculty relations and drain the coursework of meaningful content: essentially, each student will be dragooned as a potential informant on professors, who will have a strong incentive to steer clear of any controversial topic (Proust and homosexuality? Foucault’s diagnosis of power-knowledge? Aristotle on natural slavery?).

And this system will have teeth. Consider the Ohio bill now following behind Bill SB1. House Bill 698, introduced in February, would require each public institution to annually certify that it is complying with the statutory obligations created by SB 1. Beginning in fiscal year 2028, if an institution fails to submit that certification, the state university chancellor “shall withhold” the university’s share of a designated set-aside of funds that pay for classes. If a certification is found to be “recklessly false or fraudulent,” the chancellor may withhold the entire share. More striking still, the bill says withheld funds might not later be released even if the institution comes into compliance. Meaning, even if the errors are minor and corrected quickly, the instructional funds withheld might be lost forever. The state has built a lever and attached it to an essential revenue stream.

HB 698 is invasive in another way, too. The bill would require institutions to produce a public inventory of employees who, on Jan. 1, 2025, had DEI-related duties and were reassigned by Sept. 25, 2025. Universities would have to identify those employees by name, list their former and new titles, describe old and new duties, detail compensation changes, and provide a justification report explaining why the reassignment complied with the law. The president and board chair would have to certify that report. The bill aims to prevent universities from renaming, relocating, and redistributing functions, and it is designed to catch them doing so. This is understandable from the perspective of lawmakers but represents an unprecedented penetration of the state into granular aspects of university life — where it will have new abilities to impose political ideology. 

Such changes on local campuses are the first consequences of the new administrative order. At the University of Cincinnati, the implementation page simply states that “all four” identity centers have closed. Another university page says the central equity and inclusion office has also closed. At Ohio State, cultural and awareness observances — such as Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Pride Month, Juneteenth — may continue, the university says, but administrative support is permitted only under certain conditions, and funding can only be sourced from donations or gifts to the university. The university also says that it has paused communications that move beyond recognizing such occasions while it reviews the law’s restrictions on institutional statements.

This represents a transfer of authority inside the institution: the center of gravity is moving away from the administrator, the faculty committee, the dean’s meeting, and the campus debate, and toward general counsel, compliance staff, HR, and whichever office must eventually certify to the state that the university has obeyed. Lawyers become the curators of permissible language. Budget officials become interpreters of ideological risk. These laws do not simply ban. They reorganize decision rights. The change will also require the hiring of another layer of administrators to ensure institutional compliance, which will further constrain university budgets and siphon money away from student instruction.

The money matters because Ohio’s State Share of Instruction fund, which underwrites teaching, is not a decorative line in the budget — it is the core public subsidy for public higher education. SSI was funded at about $2.16 billion in fiscal year 2026 and $2.18 billion in fiscal year 2027. The Ohio Legislative Service Commission’s analysis of HB 698 says the state budget has already set aside $75 million of SSI funds (intended to support student instruction) for fiscal year 2027 to be distributed under the bill’s compliance framework (meaning the funds will go toward compliance mechanisms). One does not need to know the precise exposure of every campus to see the point. We can only expect the share of funds diverted toward compliance to grow. 

In Iowa, this logic has moved beyond public universities. There, House File 2488, passed by the state house on Feb. 24, 2026, but not yet law, would apply not just to state institutions but to private colleges, as well, if they participate in the Iowa Tuition Grant program — which is to say, almost all of them. The bill would prohibit participating private institutions from establishing, sustaining, supporting, or staffing DEI offices or doing DEI work, with some carve outs.

Similar to the design in other states, under the Iowa bill, any person may report a suspected violation on any college campus to the attorney general. The attorney general must notify the institution and the state department of education within 15 days. The institution then gets 30 days either to  prove it has fixed the matter or persuade the attorney general that no violation occurred. If it fails, it becomes ineligible for the Iowa Tuition Grant program beginning with the next academic year. 

Texas offers a preview of where such initiatives tend to end up. The Texas State Auditor’s Office issued the first required higher-education audit under that state’s DEI restrictions in February 2025. The auditor reviewed the Texas A&M University System’s 20 components and five community colleges. Most entities were found compliant, but the audit still flagged Texas A&M University-Central Texas over contract language and McLennan Community College over an employee training video. The findings themselves were small. The institutional meaning was not. Once the state creates auditable categories, someone eventually begins checking contracts, websites, trainings, handbooks, and organizational charts against them. To combat this, universities will need to hire their own internal policing and compliance staff.

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That is why the present moment can’t be understood simply as a dispute over whether DEI offices had become too large, too jargon-heavy, or too detached from the core educational mission — though they plainly had. They expanded carelessly. They confused student support with progressive catechism. They made themselves vulnerable through mandatory trainings whose claims outran their evidence and whose language alienated even sympathetic audiences. When anti-DEI clips go viral and red-state politicians grandstand, most audiences (though too few academics) can see exactly what the problem is. 

To admit all this, however, is not to concede the larger point. The danger, which is being hidden by the cultural unpopularity of DEI on the Right and the adoption of new, more pressing causes on the Left, is that state governments are building a reusable apparatus for directing universities through appropriations, attestations, complaint systems, public reporting, and audit authority.

Today, the target is DEI. It will not stay there. Once the mechanism exists, it can be turned toward rules governing anything. The state need not relitigate the culture war each time. It need only redefine the category, set the reporting date, and threaten the funding. For some states, this would require revision of the law; in others, the laws are vague enough that any administrative interpretation could set a yo-yo in motion. 

Universities still tell stories about themselves that belong to an older age. They imagine governance as a matter of argument: faculty debate, committee process, a report circulated for comment, a meeting running long in a room with bad carpeting and weak coffee. That world has not vanished, but it is no longer where power most decisively sits. Under this new dispensation, power lies with the office that certifies compliance, the official who can trigger an inquiry, the auditor who can define a violation, and the budget language that quietly waits for someone to miss a deadline.

The new university leash is not a slogan. It is not even, in the end, an idea. It is a system of control to be yanked by anyone who holds the leash. And it tugs whether anyone is persuaded or not. 

Three decades on, Nick Fuentes — a 27-year-old livestreamer who has praised Adolf Hitler, dined with a president, and attracted what one conservative columnist estimates to be between 30% and 40% of Republican staffers under the age of 30 as covert sympathizers — is broadcasting to millions on Rumble and X (formerly Twitter), and provoking a civil war inside the Heritage Foundation. The gatekeepers are gone. The gates went with them.

To understand why Francis matters today, one must understand what he was actually advocating. The surface-level story — that he descended into explicit white nationalism and was rightly shown the door — is true but incomplete. Beneath it lies a more durable intellectual structure that has outlasted every attempt at suppression.

Samuel T. Francis was born in Tennessee in 1947, attended Johns Hopkins, and earned a doctorate in history from the University of North Carolina. Rather than pursue an academic career, he took up politics and journalism. He was a staffer at the Heritage Foundation and then served as a staffer for a trio of conservative senators — John East, Jesse Helms, and Jeremiah Denton — before turning fully to journalism. He joined the hyper-conservative Washington Times in 1986, moving further to the Right, becoming a fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and publishing at Right-wing outlets such as Modern Age and Chronicles. He embraced the “paleoconservative” label and, by the 1990s, threw his lot with overtly white-nationalist organizations and outlets. 

Francis built his framework on the foundation of James Burnham’s thought. Burnham, the ex-Trotskyist-turned-National Review editor, argued that modern societies were increasingly governed by a technocratic administrative class, rather than by either capital or democratic will. Drawing on these ideas, Francis developed an analysis of what he called Middle American Radicals, or MARs.

He defined MARs as a class of white, non-college-educated workers whose defining political conviction was, as he put it, that “the rich give in to the demands of the poor, and the middle income people have to pay the bill.” They were not a purely economic category or a conventional interest group, but a civilizational constituency — people who felt that the culture, institutions, and country they had inherited were being deliberately dismantled above their heads.

In his 1994 collection, Beautiful Losers, Francis delivered his verdict on the mainstream conservative movement: “American conservatism is a failure. Virtually every cause to which conservatives have attached themselves for the past three generations has been lost.” The culprit, he argued, was not liberalism, but conservatism’s own capitulation — its willingness to fight on terrain defined by its enemies, using arguments its enemies had already won.

He was anti-interventionist in foreign policy, fiercely hostile to mass immigration, contemptuous of free-trade orthodoxy, and equally contemptuous of movement conservatism’s alliance with corporate capital. Sound familiar? 

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He believed neoconservatism was a mirror-image liberalism wearing a different badge. He became increasingly convinced that culture — and behind culture, ethnicity — was the decisive terrain of political life. This last conviction led him, by the mid-1990s, to positions that cost him his career, but not his influence.

At the 1994 American Renaissance conference, Francis called on those present to “reassert our identity and our solidarity … in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites.” He said the quiet stuff out loud. No dog whistle. The Washington Times moved against him shortly after. He was pushed out, socially and professionally. The establishment declared the matter closed.

The matter, however, was not closed. Francis’s 1996 essay in Chronicles magazine, “From Household to Nation,” articulated virtually the entire Trump playbook more than two decades before Trump descended the golden escalator. He had privately advised Pat Buchanan to stop calling himself a conservative: “Go to New Hampshire and call yourself a patriot, a nationalist, an America Firster, but don’t even use the word ‘conservative.’ It doesn’t mean anything anymore.” Buchanan largely ignored the advice. That advice seemed to skip time. Trump seemed to receive the message. 

When First Things revisited Francis’s Chronicles essay in 2019, the conclusion was that it read like a manifesto written for the recently inaugurated President Donald Trump. Francis had been dead for 14 years. His ideas had been in office for two. 

Nick Fuentes was born in 1998, seven years before Francis died. He has, to the best of public knowledge, never cited Francis directly. He does not need to. The intellectual inheritance is structural, not bibliographic.

Consider the parallels. Fuentes positions his movement — America First — as a rejection of mainstream conservatism on the grounds that mainstream conservatism has been captured by globalists indifferent to ordinary Americans. He is explicitly anti-interventionist, virulently anti-immigration, contemptuous of free-market dogma, and convinced that culture, civilization, and above all race are the true stakes of political life. He loathes the Republican donor class precisely as Francis loathed it: as a cosmopolitan elite willing to sacrifice the nation’s particular character on the altar of capital. Even the Catholic traditionalism through which Fuentes frames his civilizational politics echoes Francis’s conviction about the decline of the West — though Francis himself, in his later years, explicitly attacked Christianity as an obstacle to white racial consciousness. 

Where Francis wrote dense analytical columns for a Washington audience steeped in the National Review, Fuentes livestreams nightly to young men on Rumble, performing a mixture of political sermon, ironic provocation, and adolescent theatrics that Francis would likely have found vulgar. The medium has changed almost beyond recognition. The message has not.

Fuentes has also adopted precisely the long-march strategy, borrowed from the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, that Francis commended to the right: infiltrating institutions from below rather than confronting them from without. He instructs his followers not to identify themselves publicly as Groypers, but to join local Republican committees, become precinct officials, and embed themselves in party infrastructure — shaping candidate selection and platform language from within. Whether or not this is succeeding electorally, it is undeniably shaping the cultural atmosphere of conservatism’s activist base.

When the conservative establishment marginalized Francis, it could do so because it controlled the infrastructure of conservative opinion. The flagship magazines, the think tanks, the television bookings, the donor networks: all of these gave gatekeepers genuine leverage. A writer expelled from that world was expelled into real obscurity.

That world is gone. The institutions that once enforced ideological discipline — the likes of National Review, The Weekly Standard, and the American Enterprise Institute — have either collapsed in influence, been ideologically conquered by the populist tendency they once policed, or rendered irrelevant by the collapse of the media economy that sustained them. Talk radio gave way to podcasting. Cable gave way to streaming. Elon Musk’s purchase of X restored to the far right a megaphone that deplatforming had partially silenced.

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The numbers tell their own story. Fuentes’s Rumble livestreams now attract around a million views per episode. His October 2025 Tucker Carlson interview — a sympathetic two-hour conversation in which Carlson did not challenge a single position — was watched by more than 6.5 million people. When Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation responded to the subsequent controversy by attacking Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition of the globalist class” — a phrase widely understood as antisemitic code — the episode illustrated not merely Fuentes’s reach but the degree to which the institutional right no longer possesses the will, let alone the capacity, to enforce its own limits.

There is also a deeper sociological reason why the 1994 playbook cannot be replayed. When the Republican establishment marginalized Francis, it could rely on a substantial constituency within the party — moderate Republicans, old-fashioned Eisenhower conservatives, country-club traditionalists for whom explicit racialism was genuinely beyond the pale — to ratify the exclusion. That constituency has largely departed the GOP, or been reduced to irrelevance within it. The party Francis spent his career analyzing has become, in its composition and instinct, closer to the constituency he imagined than to the one that rejected him.

Francis spent his career insisting that the conservative movement was too compromised and too timid to fight the battles that actually mattered. He was pushed out. His framework stayed. His 1996 analysis — arguing that nationalism and populism, not free-market orthodoxy, represented the Republican party’s authentic future — has since become received wisdom across the MAGA movement.

Fuentes is not Francis. He is cruder, more theatrical, less analytically rigorous, and more explicitly antisemitic in ways that Francis — for all the darkness of his later positions — generally avoided in print. He is also digitally native and operating in an environment where the concept of a career that can be ended by institutional disapproval has largely ceased to apply. When there are no institutions left with the authority to excommunicate you, excommunication becomes impossible.

Francis died in 2005, the year YouTube was founded. He never saw the internet’s capacity to route around editorial gatekeepers — the technology that would have given him, in a different world, a platform of precisely the kind his ideas now reach through other mouths. There is a grim irony in the fact that the man who most accurately diagnosed the conditions that would produce Trumpism paid the conventional price for saying so and did not live to see his analysis vindicated.

That his ideas lived on without him is, in the end, the most telling verdict on the strategy of exclusion: it silenced the man and amplified everything he stood for. Sam Francis was pushed to the margins. Nick Fuentes inherited the center.