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.

This, increasingly, is what ex-presidents do: they trade on their brand, milking their fanbase for cash. Obama has his media company, his tedious podcast with Bruce Springsteen, his paid appearances. The Clintons had their consultancy and speaking fees. After all, how can they continue to hobnob with their billionaire friends unless they, too, get filthy rich? Trump, I figured, was a little different: already wealthy, it was adoration he sought.

Freedom Tour tickets ran from the thousands for a seat close to the stage all the way down to $45 for those at the back. (There was a still lower level that got you a seat watching a video screen in an overflow hall.) Intrigued, I purchased a ticket for the cheap seats, wondering how the disgraced prophet would try to shore up the faith among his followers. Biden and his media stenographers would have it that these followers are an extremist, angry force active in the land, still fulminating over a thwarted coup attempt. His opposition researchers have already coined a new insult: “ultra MAGA”. And I wanted to know: what is happening to Trumpists during their period in the wilderness?

*

The Austin Exhibition Center is a massive space that’s right downtown: it is easy to reach, so I expected to see some protestors, especially given the role of Trump-appointed justices in the recently leaked Roe v Wade ruling. But there were none, just a dude selling car air fresheners shaped like prominent Democrats (because “Liberals Smell”).

Trump fans, on the other hand, had turned up en masse, and early. It took over an hour to clear security, which provided me with ample time to check for signs of the “multiracial whiteness” that The Washington Post warned us about. And indeed, I saw that Trump had attracted Asians, Hispanics and a small number of black people in addition to white people, although within each of these very broad categories there was great diversity.

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Among the white people, for example, there were representatives of the big-beard-and-shaved-head cohort, older rural Republicans, preppy college kids and black T-shirt Infowars types. The gender split seemed close to 50/50. The vibe was good humoured despite the long line: people were expecting a good show. A Trump impersonator walked up and down, posing for pictures. The woman in front of me asked if she could touch his hair. “Go for it,” he said, adding: “It’s real, completely real.”

*

Dinesh D’Souza was wrapping up as I entered the hall. The Left had captured all the institutions, he said; nothing could be done. Conservatives needed to withdraw and create new ones, a culture within the culture. This got some applause, but the message struck me as defeatist and un-Trumpian.

D’Souza was followed by the author of a business book, who wanted to live in a world where you could still tell jokes without fretting about offending people. He then told a mild gag, about getting punched after “helpfully” fixing a lady’s skirt, which would have been suitable for broadcast pre-watershed any time in the past 50 years. The crowd laughed: this guy was definitely more entertaining than Dinesh D’Souza.

Next up came Kevin Sorbo. Democrats get Jay-Z and Beyonce, MAGA people get the star of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. An outspoken Christian conservative with a penchant for trolling liberals (“If men can’t comment on abortion because they don’t have a uterus, why does the Left comment on gun control?”), Sorbo was dropped by his Hollywood agents and ejected from every social media platform bar Twitter. But he has fought back by forming his own production company and now makes successful films for the Christian market. I half-remembered a line from The Brothers Karamazov, describing Alyosha, the protagonist: “he had gone beyond the fear of appearing ridiculous.”

To me this has always sounded like the greatest of freedoms, although those who achieve it are not always likeable. Trump had done it; he could afford to. Sorbo had done it and paid a price, but he had survived. The audience, with fewer resources, were being encouraged to do the same, to own the MAGA-ness that earned them the contempt of the elites. “I’m not here to wake up the sheep,” said Sorbo. “I’m here to wake up the lions — and you guys are lions.”

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This would emerge as a major theme of the day. There were barely any references to policy, to Roe v Wade, to Ukraine, or even to the Republican Party. Very little organising was going on. The American Freedom Tour was not a rally; it was a revival meeting bringing believers together so they could strengthen each other in the faith and return renewed to the world to tell the truth.

Sorbo, at least, did not attempt to lead the audience in prayer, though the MC who came on between the “acts” did. The Bible instructed us to pray for our leaders, he said, and that included Joe Biden, even if he was not the audience’s favourite person. He pulled it off: heads were bowed, and everybody went silent to join him in a prayer for the president.

*

By lunchtime it was clear that Trump had drawn a huge crowd: the number “8000” kept coming up. Yet the success in Austin appeared to have caught the organisers off guard: there was hardly any merch for sale, just a whiny-voiced snake oil salesman pitching membership of the “inner circle” for $30,000 a pop, an online system for investors that was supposed to be foolproof, and copies of Trump’s latest book, Our Journey Together, which you could get signed by his son.

Trump had missed an opportunity, as his followers loved T-shirts and hats. The variety was spectacular: a grinning Trump sprinkling stars that formed the word “America”; Trump as Theseus holding up the severed head of the Gorgon Medusa; and “God, Guns and Trump”, to name but a few. “Ultra MAGA” was already a T-shirt. Trump’s fans are serious about their beliefs, but they are also in on the joke.

The tone, however, hardened in the afternoon. Introduced to us as “Donald Trump’s pastor”, Mark Burns, an ultra-energetic black preacher and Christian media entrepreneur, was the first speaker to really push evangelical conservative stances on abortion and gay marriage, but he also came out swinging against transgender athletes, Black Lives Matter and CRT.

And then he invoked the name of Rosa Parks. All American children are raised on the story of how she rejected an unjust law and refused to take her seat at the back of the bus. Burns offered a radical reinterpretation of the story: the second-class citizens of today are not black people but white Christian conservatives, and the time might come when they might have to follow Rosa Parks’ example and reject unjust laws.

*

“It seems from what the speakers are saying that Trump is thinking of running again,” said a middle-aged man, sitting behind me. “I thought he was going to hand over the baton. How old is he?”

His friend did a quick Google search. “It says here he’s 75. He’ll be 77 and a half at the next election.” There was a pause. “He’s still sharp, though.”

“I heard one of the speakers say he is the greatest president of our lifetimes,” said the first man. “Well maybe some of the young folk here don’t remember, but I was around for Reagan…”

The consensus was that Reagan was better than Trump. The conversation then switched to a discussion of Elon Musk’s tweets, the border situation and Disney’s declining stock price. These men were well-informed professionals who had arrived later in the day and were worried they had missed rock star Ted Nugent. Although he was never mentioned by name, Chris Rufo’s influence loomed large in their conversation — and at the Freedom Tour in general. Trumpian causes such as the border wall might get the occasional shout out, but Rufo’s, with his leaks and campaigns against woke institutions, were the driving force. But Rufo is aligned with Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, not Trump. Even at the ex-president’s own event, the centre of gravity seemed to have shifted: the agenda is no longer set by Trump.

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The men behind me had not missed Ted Nugent. The rock star landed, playing the Star-Spangled banner on electric guitar, telling the audience that although he loved us “madly”, he would love us even more if we “went berserk on the skulls of the Democrats and the Marxists and the Communists”. This soundbite would briefly light up Twitter the next day, juxtaposed with the news of the racially motivated mass shooting in Buffalo. He did not receive boos, but Don Jr’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, de-escalated the rhetoric when she arrived on stage: she settled for sneering at Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and reciting his many failures (high price of gas, debacle in Afghanistan, no baby formula) against Trump’s many victories (low price of gas, victory over Isis, record low unemployment) while repeating the mantra: Trump was right.

In the morning Sorbo had made fun of Obama’s golfing skills; now the attacks on Biden, Big Tech and other bête noirs of the MAGA movement became relentless. I expected things to deteriorate further when Donald Trump Jr took to the stage. This scion of privilege, like his father before him, presents himself as a defender of the working class — with the energy and delivery of a stand-up comedian. Clearly revelling in his heretic status, he was willing to go much further than any of the previous speakers in terms of his selection of targets.

There had been little mention of Ukraine until this point, but Trump Jr attacked the senate for rushing through $40 billion worth of spending on a regime he described as second only to Russia in its corruption. Then he attacked Big Pharma, Big War, defence contractors and the Biden administration for doing nothing to stop the flow of fentanyl over the border from Mexico. The self-proclaimed “prince of MAGA” was leading the audience into territory that until very recently would have been the preserve of the Left. They followed him willingly, cheering at his comments.

And then, finally, eight and a half hours after the show had begun, the man himself took to the stage. Following the energetic and radical performance of the son, the father was content to perform a greatest hits routine — the wall, “fake news”, his successful renegotiations of NAFTA and the bill for Air Force 1, his victory over Isis. Yes, the election was stolen, but he didn’t bang on about it, and he didn’t mention January 6th at all. He was coy about his intentions for 2024, only saying that the audience would be very pleased.

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And the audience was pleased, on the whole. Trump put on a show, and those who saw it were entertained, even if some people got up and left before he was finished (he was an hour late) and so missed the comedy dance moves at the end. Trump was the main draw, required to bring the show together, but he was no longer the main source of energy or ideas. He was, however, “still sharp” — a canny performer who knew how to keep his audience excited enough that they would tune in for the next episode.

I wondered if he has a twist in mind for us. Many a businessmen will pass the family corporation onto his son, and Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, erstwhile dictator of Turkmenistan, recently passed on the presidency to his son Serdar. The order of the show kept it in the family: the top three headliners were Trump, his son, and his son’s girlfriend, whose main claim to fame otherwise is years spent as a second tier talking head on Fox News. Suddenly the thought of Don Jr signing his dad’s books no longer seemed absurd but rather one of the rituals through which a patriarch might anoint a successor.

As the Democrats complete their transformation into a party representing the interests and values of the professional-managerial class — and so prove themselves unable to learn from 2016 — it’s worth noting that Trump Jr’s appropriation of hitherto leftist critiques of power drew some of the loudest cheers from the audience. Despite his immense wealth, he has, like his father, the same ability to articulate the concerns of people infinitely poorer than himself. His isn’t “classical” Trumpism; it is a new, more radical mutation.

MAGA isn’t finished, but nor is it fixed, and though the American Freedom Tour wasn’t pointing towards a particular end point, it did prove that something else is being born. But there were still no protestors outside the stadium when I left.

Still, there are times when a refusal to engage in self-criticism can be a hindrance to your tribe — as both the American Right and Left are now discovering.

Since 2016, the American Left has desperately cut itself off from reality: its unwillingness to concede that Donald Trump won the election precluded the Democrats from being able to consider why their candidate lost. But the American Right is equally capable of deluding itself. In fact, with Biden in the White House, it is now as much a problem for the American Right as it was for the Left during the Trump years.

Absent any self-reflection, political tribes are condemned to return to the same question: what is it about their opponents that makes them so belligerently wrong? This is why Democrats and Republicans responded to the 2016 and 2020 elections in a similar fashion. What on earth was there to dislike about Hillary Clinton? What could possibly be said against the character of Donald Trump?

Sometimes, however, this lack of self-criticism is more profound. Towards the end of last year, I was invited to speak at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida. Being, as I told one of the organisers, only about two-thirds in agreement with the conference agenda, I didn’t feel it was my place to give a speech. So instead, I took part in an interesting panel discussion with Dave Rubin, Sohrab Ahmari and the conference’s convenor, Yoram Hazony.

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It was a rich discussion, but we passed over too lightly a subject which demands serious focus. At one point during the panel, Dave brought up the popular talk-show host Bill Maher. In recent years, Maher has singled himself out on the American Left for his willingness to criticise the excesses of his own political side, in particular “cancel culture” and the “cult of woke”. Dave suggested that, given how much Maher agrees with conservatives on these points, it is strange that he still identifies with the Left. In other words, why should he not come over and join the merry men of the Right?

There are a number of possible answers to this question. The first, which many conservatives would offer (while no doubt patting themselves on the back), is that Maher somehow lacks the bravery or courage needed to commit such an act of apostasy. He may have moved Rightwards, but he is not willing to concede as much.

The second answer, which I imagine Maher himself might offer, is that he hasn’t left the Left — the Left has left him. He has stayed precisely where he was, and remains as true to his principles as ever. There is, perhaps, some truth here. But this still fails to address the key question: why, in the face of the current Leftist orthodoxies, are so many on the traditional Left reluctant to admit they now have more in common with the Right?

After all, previous generations of American public figures had no problem with making a move from Left to Right and admitting as much. Both Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz flirted with Marxism before coming out for conservatism. British public life is also peppered with individuals who made similar journeys without any embarrassment: Malcolm Muggeridge, Paul Johnson and Kingsley Amis, to name but three.

Yet in America today, such apostasy is almost unheard of. There have been semi-regular defections from the Right, especially during the Trump era, when people such as Max Boot broke publicly with their own side to support a Democrat president. But there is a glaring absence of any movement in the opposite direction.

Bill Maher, Bari Weiss and a slew of other liberals who have fallen out with their own tribe have chosen not to identify as conservative. And that should be a cause for concern. Rather than ignoring this trend, conservatives need to ask themselves: what is it about the Right that is so unappealing that people who agree almost entirely with its views resile from joining its ranks?

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As it happens, I suspect the one of the answers to this question can be found in one of the speeches given at the National Conservatism conference. During his talk, the distinguished conservative scholar Patrick Deneen offered — and I do not say this to do him any injustice — a lament for the Fifties; for the change in people’s habits of dress, manners and sexual etiquette. I listened to all of this with great interest and considerable disagreement. But as I did so, I could not help thinking that here in a nutshell was the main reason why disenchanted liberals like Maher would never in a million years join the American Right.

All political and social movements have their own oddities and obsessions. Many of the obsessions of the American Right, however, are too illiberal to possibly win over anyone but that type of person who jumps political sides, boots and all, because they favour the political certainty of its all-encompassing ideological home. Why won’t thoughtful ex-liberals consider joining the Right? Well, perhaps it has something to do with the type of conservative they’d be associated with.

What liberal or former liberal would want to find themselves in an ideological movement in which opposition to the right to abortion, opposition to no-fault divorce, and a nostalgia for the era before the invention of the pill are commonplace? This isn’t to say that the conservative movement in America should not make these arguments. They can make them as much as they want. But they can hardly be surprised if others outside of their flock refuse to join them as a consequence.

At the heart of this lies a centuries-old tension in America between the worlds of politics and religion. It was always said that the genius of keeping religion in the background during the founding of America was that it allowed it to flourish in the foreground later on. By contrast, the centrality of the established church in England almost guarantees the obscurity of religion’s place in public life.

And yet in America, the desire on the Right to mix religion and politics remains a significant temptation. The National Conservatism conference was filled with a disproportionate amount of Catholic social doctrine, and it is not the first time I have observed this encroachment. Most gatherings of conservative intellectuals fracture along this same line. The Vanenburg meetings fell into this problem at the start of the last decade. And I was once at a meeting of conservatives on the continent where, on several occasions, an American participant gleefully referred to gay couples as being in “sodomitical relationships”. Should we be surprised that so many liberals instinctively revile conservatism?

All of which is to say that this overlap between politics and religion remains a special type of kryptonite to any separation-of-church-and-state liberal. And that would be a subject of niche interest were it not also for the fact that it is electorally disastrous for the American Right, however enjoyable it may be as a religious or intellectual enterprise.

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As many as three in ten American adults are now religiously non-affiliated; fewer than half of Americans belong to a religious congregation. In such a world, the idea that a conservative movement can succeed while being intrinsically tied to religion — let alone one particular denomination — is a steer into the political wilderness.

After all, why would people who share 95% of your political attitudes not wish to join you? More often than not, the answer is not because of any lack of fortitude, but because of that 5% of beliefs you had hoped they might overlook.

Perhaps that small portion of ideas is worth fighting for; perhaps even to the extent that it’s worth alienating would-be conservatives. But these are questions the Right needs to answer, rather than blaming liberals for pointing them out.

Obviously this is a fantasy, like most British political commentary. It is Britain’s political comment class alone who are so destructively enamoured of the political theatre of a distant foreign country that American news crowds out our own in the battle for attention. Yet this colonised mindset is only true of a specific shade of American politics: an identitarian left-liberal strand tailor-made for our mid-Atlantic Twitter class.

Londoners rioted in protest against policing in Minnesota, and our increasingly deranged discourse is directly cut-and-pasted from US models. But the twists and tangles of American conservative politics are more or less unknown territory in our own semi-digested imperial province.

A clear example of this dynamic can be found in the rise of what some term America’s New Right, well-documented in a critical but fair and accurate portrayal by the Left-wing New Republic’s Sam Adler-Bell. An uneasy alliance of state-capitalist National Conservatives, post-liberals and Catholic Integralists, the New Right “wants to see Republicans abandon their fealty to free-market dogmas, embrace traditional Christianity, and use the levers of state power to wage the culture war for keeps”.

Like younger conservatives in Britain, a young New Right writer quoted by Adler-Bell observes that “we have to think of ourselves as counter-revolutionaries or restorationists who are overthrowing the regime”, as the conservatism of their elders has simply failed in its essential task: “there’s not a lot left to conserve in the contemporary state of things. There are things that need to be destroyed and rebuilt.”

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The parallels with Britain are clear. In America, the conservative establishment has “ossified into a decadent, self-dealing oligarchy” that has adopted “the moral heresies of so-called wokeness and [clings] to the rotted corpse of the Reaganite consensus”. The conservative old guard “‘just want to run the greatest hits of 1984 over and over again”.

Surveying our own Conservative scene, we see the same dismal picture: the potential challengers to Boris’s rapidly waning authority include Rishi Sunak, a free marketeer crippled under the weight of his Treasury Brain, and Liz Truss, gleefully capering around in one of the Army’s remaining tanks in homage to Thatcher, keeping alive a Tory cargo cult that should have died decades ago. The Tories possess the single electoral benefit of not being the Labour Party: but they have no coherent vision of the good, and offer little to any forward-thinking conservative.

Why is this the case, given the total Americanisation of British politics? Why do the intellectual currents revolutionising the American Right here remain a mere object of curiosity to an idiosyncratic minority of conservative thinkers?

It is hard not to think that Thatcherism has played a major role in the intellectual debilitation of the British Right: the ideas that most animate the party faithful are the same ones put into practice, overwhelmingly disastrously, forty years ago. The free-market think tanks which cluster around CCHQ are still trying to realise the fever-dreams of fin-de-siècle Vienna intellectuals. The Tory party remains trapped in the long 20th century, weighed down by corporate boomers and their lobbyist hirelings. Indeed, the paucity of Conservative Party thought today is such that there is more value in adapting Marxist analysis to Tory ends than in reading anything excreted from the party ecosystem.

As a result, Conservative MPs whine about ‘wokeness’ on Twitter instead of using their parliamentary majority to repeal the raft of New Labour legislation that foisted a Blairite shadow government on the country; the dense web of state-funded quangos, NGOs and bureaucrats that sets the tone of British political discourse and frustrates Tory policy at every turn. No wonder Tories win elections and yet are amazed they can’t change Britain’s political culture: they waste their energy fighting the symptoms while subsidising the causes.

In Britain, the obvious target of an equivalent conservative counter-revolution would be against the destructive innovations of New Labour, whose zombie ideology, rejected by voters a decade ago, still commands the cultural heights. This is what the purported “culture war” means, at heart, which explains the horror expressed by every ageing broadsheet commentator who claims that revoking legislation brought in ten years ago is an assault on the venerable British Constitution comparable only to fascism.

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A swift path to victory is possible, not least by halting the overproduction of downwardly mobile elites New Labour embedded into British society like a retreating army laying delayed-action bombs. Even Blair himself, rising flowing of mane and leathery of skin from his political tomb once again, recognises the problem of his own deranged political children, without accepting any of the blame.

But the Tories ultimately don’t want to win the culture war. Instead, they’ll keep it grinding on until the last boomer dies in the last nursing home, as long as it keeps the shires blue for another decade. A ruthlessly efficient machine for winning and holding power, the Conservative Party simply has no idea what to do with power once it has it, and thrusts it at its enemies like a hot brick.

The fundamental problem facing the Conservatives is this: largely as a result of its own policies it will soon run out of voters. Younger voters, millennials and zoomers, are not aliens with strange and inexplicable desires: they want their own homes, secure jobs, good pay and the ability to form families.

The Labour Party, at its best, offers much of this. But it also offers much else that is terrible, including an unhinged identity politics repellent to ordinary voters even in the America of its birth, let alone in the very different cultural and demographic context of an Early Modern kingdom in northwestern Europe. Given the choice between boring, effective socialism and American-imported identity politics, it will always choose the latter. There is simply no way forward with the Labour Party that currently exists; its front bench is effectively a mindless golem swayed by the Twitter fads of the moment.

Much of the energy of the young New Right, like that of the millennial socialist Left, derives from online debate on social media, which has radicalised politics away from an ailing and effectively dead centre. For both factions, it is an intra-elite competition, aiming to seize control of sclerotic party structures to win the support of the masses for their respective revolutionary projects. Like millennial socialism, the New Right represents the political battlegrounds of the near future: both share revolutionary dissatisfaction with the status quo, and both share the desire to win the coming ideological battle. The Nineties Third Way is dead, and whatever replaces it will shape the coming decades.

Whatever the angst about it from ageing commentators, in Britain, as in America, all younger conservatives are shaped and influenced by the discourse of the online Right, just as younger Leftists are shaped by the internecine squabbles and identity fundamentalism of the online Left. In Britain, however, our ruling Conservatives seek to quash the only intellectually interesting expression of youthful conservative thought through their campaign against online anonymity: they may be incapable of preventing Islamists stabbing MPs to death, but they’ll pull out all the stops to stop you complaining about it online.

As in Britain, in America the proponents of the new conservatism of the common good are largely Catholic, though they less often display the convert’s zeal that characterises their more pugnacious American equivalents. In Britain, this tendency largely adheres to Blue Labour rather than the Conservative party — a situation I have previously argued is not tenable. Theoretically, the division between the American New Right’s China-inflected state capitalism and Blue Labour’s socialist heritage is a point in favour of the British variant: we have, after all, a viable and only-recently destroyed tradition of nationalised industry and utilities, still popular with voters, that Americans do not. But alas, our post-liberals lack the killer instinct, meekly submitting their tweed-encircled necks to the culture war knife, merrily quoting Chesterton all the way to the scaffold block.

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The Tories can save Blue Labour

By Aris Roussinos

But the ultimate downfall of any Tory counter-revolution is the absence of any infrastructure for nurturing a new wave of conservative thought. In the US, as Adler-Bell notes, a lavishly-funded constellation of goodies are offered to young conservatives, from think tanks that ‘“identify, educate, and credential” a new generation of staffers and bureaucrats to the fellowships that “have long played a role in shaping the next generation of right-wing elites.” In effect, as he jokes, “all this conservative foundation money slushing around functions as a ‘welfare state’ for lacklustre writers and scholars”.

In Britain, this conservative infrastructure to bring in new blood and new ideas simply does not exist; they’d send our equivalents to Prevent. Indeed, the only money sloshed around by the Conservative apparatus is for huckster resellers of PCR tests and for a cultural and NGO blob which hates conservatism in all its forms.

The Tories profess to believe in the magic wisdom of the free market while subsidising their political enemies, and affecting perplexity at the results: their vision of the glorious past extends no further than the early 1980s. The British political Right still views the state with fear and loathing, with Tory MPs happier snuffling around for crumbs from boardroom tables than exerting the executive power granted to them by the public. The American New Right, by contrast, aims to use the power of the state, the most powerful tool available to any politician, to effect a conservative counter-revolution.

Ultimately, the Conservative party shrinks from the vast power the British constitution affords the executive, which can radically reshape Britain for the better and cement Tory rule for another generation. For all its many faults, the Labour Party does not. And when it eventually returns to government it will surely use the state’s power to bury Toryism for good, just as Blair and Brown managed to allow Tories to keep winning elections yet to keep failing at delivering the basic governance demanded by their voters.

The American New Right may well warrant some scepticism: whatever its populist leanings, its electoral manifestations are largely a project of Silicon Valley donors, after all, and the disbelief of the American Left that the country’s Right can ever be swayed from corporate capitalism may well be accurate. Yet it is surely correct about one thing: the party that learns to use the state effectively will be able to reshape the nation in its image. Perhaps we should be paying attention to America after all.

It would be difficult to realistically dispute that contention, then or now. Though the “information disseminators” who populated the precincts of mainstream thought 30 years ago were perhaps less overtly activist-minded in their orientation than they are today, the basic proposition still holds.

Limbaugh’s fantastically successful show (reportedly 20 million daily listeners at its peak) mostly consisted of his uninterrupted extemporaneous riffs on the news of the day — with an impishly comedic tinge. His main source material was lightly-organised newspaper clippings and faxes. He seldom did interviews and took relatively few phone callers. In theory, he wasn’t doing anything particularly revolutionary — but simply by synthesising American politics through a vastly different lens from anything else which had been on offer for a mass commercial audience, he became one of the most important US political and media figures of all time.

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By Michael Tracey

Ronald Reagan wrote a reverential note to Limbaugh in late 1992 that illustrates why nearly the whole of the American Right is in extreme mourning upon Limbaugh’s death from lung cancer. Though Reagan’s mental acuity was in stark decline at that point, he got it together sufficiently to credit Limbaugh for having “become the Number One voice for conservatism in our Country” — supplanting Reagan’s own vice president, George HW Bush, who had just lost re-election to Bill Clinton. Earlier that year, Limbaugh had stayed in the coveted Lincoln Bedroom of the White House at the invitation of Bush — who even carried Limbaugh’s overnight bag for him, as he would later gleefully recall on-air.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that most of the self-identified conservatives I met growing up in the 2000s — the kind who would go out of their way to inform you that they were proud no-nonsense conservatives — attributed their political identity specifically to Limbaugh. Usually, the origin story was because he was the only midday in-car entertainment option for a motorist who wanted something other than music or sports. But it later developed into a full-scale, self-directed, ideological adventure, with Rush always there to serve as a trusted guide. A sprawling industry of liberal commentators likewise fashioned their own political identities in direct opposition to Limbaugh, alongside the legions of imitators he also spawned.

There will always be a market for media offerings which pride themselves on being unbound by the cloying primacy of liberal cultural hegemonic values. Especially as those values become ever-more monolithic in corporate America, enforced through the imperious dictates of Human Resources regimes. The excesses of oblivious dingbat celebrities and “woke” activists will provide endless fodder, if that’s what you are into.

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But the demise of Limbaugh raises the question of whether that broad anti-hegemonic sensibility necessarily begets any intrinsic attachment to the Republican Party. Limbaugh was so revered by elite DC conservatives — many of whom did not exactly care for his brash personality traits — because of his ability to connect the cultural dislocation of ordinary radio listeners with the imperatives of institutional movement conservatism.

Annoyed by the sanctimony of liberal Hollywood? That annoyance must also somehow translate into steadfast support for the lowering of corporate tax rates, per the formulations of Limbaugh. Tired of being lectured by obnoxious elites in New York and LA who think they know better than you how to run your own life? You are also somehow obliged to back whatever foreign military escapade Washington cooks up. And of course, always ultimately vote GOP in November, lest the nation crumble into irreversible decadence.

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How US journalism lost its spine

By Michael Tracey

Much of the coverage of Limbaugh’s death has focused on his lavishly affectionate relationship with Donald Trump, who awarded Limbaugh a presidential medal of freedom in the middle of the State of the Union address in 2020; Trump made his first post-presidency media appearance Wednesday in homage to his dearly departed golf buddy. As did Mike Pence, the former Vice President — a one time talk radio host himself, who earlier in his career beamed on the floor of the House of Representatives that it was the “literal truth… to say that I am in Congress today because of Rush Limbaugh”.

But more instructive perhaps as to the whole of the Limbaugh legacy was his equally voracious support for George W. Bush, who released a statement fondly remembering his “friend” Rush, and extolling how helpful he had been during his presidency.

Switch on the radio at any point in the early-to mid 2000s, and you’d hear extended Limbaugh soliloquies on the virtues of the Iraq War and the rock-solid trustworthiness of Bush’s leadership. Shortly before the invasion, Limbaugh heralded the profundity of Bush’s “monumental vision” in the arena of foreign policy, and praised Bush as having exactly the right temperament for the job because he ignored critics of his Iraq strategy. After all, opponents of the war were little more than delusional freaks who fundamentally hated America. On his way out of office in January 2009, Bush regaled Limbaugh at the White House for a private luncheon in honor of Limbaugh’s birthday, presenting him with a “little chocolate microphone”.

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By Ed West

The bitter feud which subsequently broke out between Trump and the Bush family dynasty would, on the surface, seem to have been a quandary for Rush. In one of the most astounding moments of the entire 2016 presidential cycle, Trump stood up at a Republican primary debate in South Carolina and accused George W. of lying the country into war. It was exactly the kind of rhetoric that Limbaugh would have spent probably three shows in a row mercilessly lambasting as emblematic of un-American left-wing zealotry.

Much has been made of the ideological meaning of the Bush-to-Trump evolution of the Republican Party, and there’s no doubt that segments of the coalition did genuinely undergo a transformation in thinking after the disaster of Iraq. But the seamless transition figures such as Limbaugh made from one to the other shows that there was always a market for commercialised partisan entertainment in support of whoever the Republican standard-bearer happened to be. Limbaugh was always candid that his primary motives were ultimately financial — and the money kept rolling in thanks to his service as the agitprop frontman of a movement conservative apparatus which brought him into the fold.

However, resisting the obnoxious encroachments of liberal pieties doesn’t necessarily require hardcore, partisan fidelity to the Republican Party, which Limbaugh exemplified for virtually his entire tenure in the public domain. Given the technological advancements since Limbaugh began syndicating his radio show, audiences have become more diffuse. There is plenty of appetite for a kind of counter-hegemonic synthesis that doesn’t ineluctably flow into unflinching partisan support for one of the two major political parties. This was clear long before Limbaugh’s death — but perhaps this week will hasten the realisation for Republicans that the constructs they’ve clung to since the Nineties can only last so long.