None of it worked, and Trump returned to the Oval Office in January 2025 with a stronger mandate. Now, if the polls prove correct and Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives and perhaps the Senate, the question is whether they can finally achieve what they couldn’t pull off in those years. The answer is, likely, no: despite the unusually personal nature of his rule, Trump has, in fact, institutionalized his populist revolt.

An ambitious, energetic cadre of MAGA activists who’ve learned the ways of power stand between establishment Democrats and the dream of rolling back the revolution.

The desire for turning the clock back to 2014 is there, to be sure. Witness the recent remarks from Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.). Speaking earlier this month at the University of Chicago, the former CIA and Pentagon bureaucrat offered a revealing glimpse into the Democratic establishment’s plans for the remainder of Trump’s presidency. 

Asked how Democrats should use congressional power if they regain control after the midterms, Slotkin proposed pursuing a handful of high-profile investigations into Trump administration officials. The point, Slotkin explained, was not merely to hold officials accountable for alleged wrongdoing, but to send a stern message to the next generation of Trumpian staffers. She imagined a prospective staffer thinking to himself, as she put it, “Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that.” She concluded: “I want that deterrence message sent.”

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Following Republican backlash, Slotkin backtracked on her statement, insisting she meant investigations into corruption and illegal conduct. But her national-security background makes her explanation unconvincing. Deterrence has a specific meaning in her world. It involves convincing an adversary that the costs of an action outweigh its benefits. To operationalize this approach requires making painful examples of a handful of targets to influence a broader group. 

Slotkin’s comments ultimately underscored a growing sense of panic within the Democratic establishment, among its career politicians, unelected Washington bureaucrats, and networks of NGOs and corporate interests pushed out of power by the Trump administration. They fear that the MAGA revolution has the potential to become an enduring force in American politics that could outlast Trump himself. And, perhaps most sobering of all, Slotkin’s comments appear to indirectly acknowledge that establishment Democrats have no legitimate political means of stopping it.

And they aren’t wrong.

Trump and the MAGA movement represented a powerful rejection of the overgrowth and abuses associated with the postwar liberal order. The order’s large governing elite had grown increasingly detached from the American people as it consolidated more power across the federal bureaucracy, universities, media, and other major American institutions, using authority for purposes beyond the desires of the ordinary citizen. Undoing this order would require Trump to challenge the very institutions through which the center-Left, especially, had exercised power for decades. The center-Left establishment, in turn, understood the threat from the start of his first presidency.

Early on, Trump’s personality made it easy to cast him as a villain. Over the course of a decade, establishment forces built a powerful movement among Democratic voters, particularly older and college-educated female voters, centered on opposition to Trump’s crass and bombastic style. From this emerged a broader narrative portraying Trump as an authoritarian whose presidency threatened American democracy itself, increasingly conflating the establishment’s loss of political power with an attack on the nation’s democratic norms and institutions. 

To be sure, Trump at times went out of his way to vindicate this picture of him, most notably in his refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 election. Even so, the narrative failed to stop his movement. More importantly, the playbook is becoming increasingly unsuitable for a political struggle that must continue after he leaves office. 

With two years remaining in Trump’s presidency, establishment Democrats will need a new antagonist and a new pretext to continue clawing back institutional power. But the problem confronting them, as with much of the postwar Western liberal establishment, is twofold: they have lost their grasp on political reality, choosing instead to inhabit a powerful fiction of their own making; and consequently, they have become incapable of formulating a convincing strategy for returning to power through democratic means. The victories for Democrats expected in the upcoming midterms, after all, come not from the party’s establishment, but from insurgent forces in both its populist and radical Left. 

It is this dangerous combination of political desperation and an inability to accept her side’s dispossession by American voters that helps explain Slotkin’s apparent willingness to use the threat of investigations to intimidate and deter the next generation of conservatives from entering government.

Her desire to send a deterrence message may also reflect an understanding among Democrats that, unlike during his first administration, when Trump often found himself surrounded by officials who disagreed with his political goals, his second has brought into Washington a cohort of conservatives committed to translating MAGA’s ideological principles into government policy. Among them are Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, both of whom sharply criticized Trump during his first presidential campaign in 2016 but have since become leading figures in his administration and potential successors to his political movement. Their ambitions extend beyond serving the president. They are seeking to change how the federal government operates, who exercises authority within it, and how much power its agencies should possess. The significance of this development is not merely that Trump has found more loyal officials this time around, but that they are gaining the experience, building the networks, and developing the institutional knowledge necessary to continue the political project after he leaves office.

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Ultimately, what we are witnessing is not the crisis of American democracy feared by establishment Democrats, but the fading of the postwar liberal governing order and the administrative state that expanded under it for the better part of a century. Their unwillingness to recognize the distinction is perhaps understandable given how pervasive their authority became. For decades, the political and professional class operating within Washington’s institutions came to regard its own position as an essential feature of American government, rather than a temporary claim to political authority. The possibility that this arrangement might be challenged, or even permanently altered, is consequently difficult for them to separate from the idea of a constitutional or democratic crisis.

What makes their loss of power particularly painful for members of the establishment is that MAGA isn’t simply seeking to replace their class with another of equal size. Its ideological ambitions include reducing the federal bureaucracy, transferring authority away from administrative agencies back to the states, and concentrating greater federal decision-making power in the executive branch. 

The threat to the old establishment is therefore not simply another four or eight years out of power, but the possibility that many of the institutional mechanisms through which it exercised that power will no longer exist for it to reclaim. The Biden years offered a reminder of just how consequential control of that machinery could be. Having spent four years out of power, Democrats returned to Washington and pursued sweeping policies, from expansive Covid-era mandates and inflationary spending, to opening the southern border, and waging a proxy war against Russia through Ukraine. 

That same pattern appears to be repeating itself, with establishment Democrats showing an even greater urgency to return to power and a willingness to consider increasingly extraordinary measures to regain it. From Slotkin’s proposed “deterrence” campaign to calls to pack the Supreme Court and admit Puerto Rico as the 51st state, the lengths some Democrats are prepared to go to reclaim that authority are becoming increasingly apparent.

There is a final irony in the Democratic establishment’s predicament. It has become so consumed with recovering its former authority that it risks overlooking the socialist insurgency growing within its own party. The longer the old establishment goes on fighting for political order that is slipping further from its grasp, the more room it creates for a young generation of Democrats to remake the party in their own hard-Left image.

Yet the event didn’t bring the American Right together. Rather, it triggered infighting that persists to this day. To understand why, we have to be willing to honestly reassess the legacy left behind by the departed. We must even speak ill of the dead (for if we don’t, as Christopher Hitchens asked, who will?). The truth is, Charlie Kirk helped build up the culture of conspiracism that would come to haunt his own death.

Initially, Trump administration figures like Stephen Miller and JD Vance pledged vengeance against the hard-Left militancy that inspired the murder, as well as investigations into whether anyone else was behind the deed. Yet soon, a different narrative emerged on social media and in the podcast realm. The conspiracy theories suggested that perhaps Tyler Robinson, the young man accused of murdering Kirk over his political views, wasn’t the killer at all. Maybe it was the Israelis or the Egyptian security apparatus; or Kirk’s own organization, Turning Point USA; or Kirk’s widow, Erika, who in the eyes of her critics seemed a little too eager to seek the spotlight in the aftermath.

The divisions marred even Kirk’s memorial service, which brought a reported 90,000 attendees to the State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., and overflow venues in the area, on Sept. 21, 2025. Three speeches at the event captured a split that was already emerging on the Right.

First came Stephen Miller’s theme: vengeance. “You have no idea the dragon you have awakened,” the hard-line Trump consigliere thundered. “You have no idea how determined we will be to save this civilization.” Days later, Miller would vow to deploy all the resources of the federal government to go after the Left-wing networks he held responsible for Kirk’s death.

This was followed by the Christian message of forgiveness. Speaking through her tears, Erika announced that she forgave the young man who’d taken her husband’s life and left her children fatherless. It was a stirring piece of oratory, moving even to many nonbelievers and drawing a sharp contrast with Miller’s ferocious, almost-bloody rhetoric.

Finally, there was Tucker Carlson, who brought in the spirit of conspiracy. The former Fox News host eulogized Kirk by recounting the passion of Jesus. Carlson presented the biblical narrative as a story of powerful people in Jerusalem “sitting around eating hummus,” adding that “there’s always one guy with the bright idea, and I can just hear him say, ‘I’ve got an idea. Let me just kill him.’” 

While Carlson’s defenders tried to refute the notion that he was implying a Jewish hand in Kirk’s murder, even the arch-Groyper and unabashed Jew-hater Nick Fuentes was taken aback: “They say I’m the No. 1 antisemite. That was a little intense.” Carlson would, of course, go on to prove Fuentes correct and make a fool of his apologists, not for the first or last time.

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Over the following weeks and months, these three forces battled it out. Yet Miller’s promise to crack down on Left-wing activists was perhaps never realistic without evidence that Tyler Robinson had acted in concert with others — and no such evidence ever came to light. The only vengeance on offer was the firing of schoolteachers and grocery clerks for being disrespectful toward Kirk’s memory or insufficiently mournful over his death. As for forgiveness, it never really had a chance in today’s MAGA climate.

It was thus the conspiracy impulse that won the hearts and minds of Right-wing audiences. The day after Kirk’s memorial, podcast host Candace Owens opened her show by mocking Erika and declaring that her husband had been “betrayed” by some within TPUSA. Owens would soon release texts from Kirk complaining about pressure from Jewish donors. In February, Owens launched a docuseries titled Bride of Charlie, in which she questioned everything from Erika’s family background to her finances, and suggested she may have been involved in human trafficking. According to a Washington Examiner count, by April 2026, Owens had devoted no fewer than 84 podcast episodes to Kirk’s killing, weaving a web that included “‘German mystical Jews,’ the CIA and Mitt Romney, Egyptian planes, and, naturally, Jeffrey Epstein.”

Not to be outdone, Carlson declared in June that Kirk “was most likely murdered for his evolving views on Israel.” This came after months of Carlson’s platforming of people promoting similar ideas, including the anti-Semitic crank Ian Carroll.

Those who preferred vengeance came to express deep frustration about the turn toward conspiracy. In December, the conservative Media Research Center released a poll showing that only 24% of likely voters identified Kirk’s killer as Left-wing, a result attributable in part to public personalities like Owens and Carlson muddying the waters. 

Blake Neff, one of the current hosts of The Charlie Kirk Show, decried what was happening, charging figures like Owens with causing confusion about an issue that could have been a conservative slam-dunk. “They took something where a radical Leftist, for very legible, specific, Left-wing reasons, did something, and they have pivoted it to, ‘Actually, it was people in our own movement who did it, whom you should now distrust.’”

The far-Right writer and publisher Jonathan Keeperman, known online as l0m3z, had high hopes that something productive might come out of the tragedy of Kirk’s murder. On the day after the killing, Keeperman called for the creation of a Charlie Kirk National Park and a “Smithsonian exhibit on the Woke Era (2012–2024).” In addition to these symbolic steps, he demanded a legal crackdown against the political enemies of MAGA: “Laws will be written. Extremist organizations will be dismantled. Assets will be seized. Individuals and institutions that cultivated the conditions for this climate of violence will face criminal liability. These are necessary measures of statecraft that will in large part determine whether we get another Red reign of terror, or whether we emerge from this with our nation intact.”

The sweeping crackdown Keeperman envisioned never materialized, even though Trump did launch a federal initiative aimed at investigating and disrupting Left-wing networks and their funders. Keeperman lost the argument and later went on to vent anger at the Kirk truthers. In December, the conservative writer Scott Greer likewise lamented that Kirk’s death had “offered the promise of unifying the Right in a common cause against the Left” — an opportunity wasted by infighting over whether Tyler Robinson was actually responsible for the killing. 

Why did the conspiracists win? Sadly, Kirk himself, it must finally be said, contributed not a little to the atmosphere of epistemic madness and institutional mistrust that now suffocates rational thinking on the Right.

Tucker Carlson, after all, was a regular guest at TPUSA events. Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for TPUSA, relayed a hadith from the recently murdered Kirk: “Honestly, people telling me not to have Tucker makes me want to have Tucker” at the organization’s conferences. After Kirk’s death, Carlson guest-hosted an episode of the show alongside Neff and Kolvet, who would both later be hounded by conspiracy theorists. This was only two days before Carlson blamed “hummus eaters” for the assassination. Already at that point, Carlson had for years been pushing pro-Kremlin narratives and conspiracy theories like the claim that the Pentagon was operating secret bioweapons labs in Ukraine and the idea that Jan. 6 had been a false flag incited by federal agents.

Then, too, Kirk himself was a key promoter of the most significant political conspiracy theory of our generation: the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from President Trump. Unlike the conspiracy involving his own death, the #StoptheSteal nonsense Kirk promoted led to actual political violence and a coup attempt that could have proved catastrophic for US democracy had not a brave few — most notably, then-Vice President Mike Pence — acted against it.

In December 2020, Kirk condemned then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for congratulating Joe Biden on his victory, comparing it to congratulating someone who had just robbed a bank. In the topsy-turvy fantasy world Kirk had created for his followers, Biden had obviously stolen the 2020 election.

Two days before Jan. 6, Kirk announced that Turning Point Action was “honored” to be “sending 80-plus buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” This tweet was later deleted. He also told his audience at the time there was “an almost guaranteed way Donald Trump serves four more years.” All it would take was for Pence to refuse to certify the results in the swing states that Trump had lost. As for those who might object on constitutional grounds, Kirk’s answer was to “make them sue.” 

When called before the Jan. 6 committee to discuss his role in challenging the 2020 election results, Charlie Kirk invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. And it wasn’t simply election denial; under Kirk, TPUSA events and shows became gathering points for every kind of crank the Right produced, including anti-vaxxers like RFK Jr. In May 2021, TPUSA gave a show to Jack Posobiec, a man best known for having pushed Pizzagate — the theory that Hillary Clinton and her associates operated a child-sex-trafficking ring centered on a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant.

Kirk could at times be just as conspiratorial as Carlson or Owens, with the main difference being that his theories always had a reliable partisan tilt. He claimed that Biden had deliberately allowed the Afghan government to collapse in order to import more Democratic voters. He thus compressed the peaceful transition of power or the closing of a two-decade war into MAGA-friendly conspiracy theories. 

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Charlie Kirk spread election denial and other kinds of conspiracy theories for the same reasons that Owens and Carlson would later spread conspiracy theories about his death: money, relevance, and playing to the audience. It was only when his family and the remnants of TPUSA became the targets of the forces Kirk had helped unleash, that those left behind began denouncing others for taking advantage of the ignorant and the misinformed.

What are the broader lessons we can draw for the future of the conservative movement? The bad news is that the human-capital problem has gotten so serious, and the media environment so poisoned, that we can no longer expect a baseline of shared reality across the political spectrum. There will always be assassinations, wars, and shocking news events. And as with Covid, the 2020 election, the Ukraine war, and the death of Charlie Kirk, wide swaths of the Right — and, to be sure, some on the Left — will fall to conspiracism. 

But there is a silver lining. As figures like Greer and Keeperman have noticed, a more conspiratorial Right is a less effective one. Despite there never having been any evidence that Tyler Robinson was part of a wider network, there were demands from the moment of the shooting to indiscriminately round up Leftists, and there were certainly figures in the administration like Miller who seemed ready to implement such plans. Had the American Right remained united behind that project, the Kirk murder could have been the Trump administration’s opportunity to further turn the machinery of government against its enemies. Instead, the energy unleashed went into arguing about Egyptian planes flying around assassins. 

Still, the damage is extensive. For more than a decade, Kirk taught a young audience that institutions always lie, that the official story is a cover, and that anyone telling you to stop asking questions has something to hide — while making a special exception for Donald Trump. He was the filter between the leaders of MAGA and the movement’s raging id in cyberspace. Upon his death, the audience he had developed was still primed to suspect that it wasn’t being told the full truth, and hungry for a hidden explanation. 

The young activist’s very corpse became a prop that others in conservative media used in their fights to claim his audience. It’s a fitting postscript for the life of a man who helped make the Right safe for the very conspiracy theorists who would make a mockery of his death.

It was here that Pence resolved to cling to “tried-and-true” conservatism, he explains in What Conservatives Believe, his new book, published Tuesday. In doing so, he broke with his party’s leadership to vote against Bush’s flagship education reform, the No Child Left Behind Act. That moment would harden into a governing conviction: that Republican orthodoxy had been compromised, and that it was his calling to restore it.

In these benighted times, as the “siren song of populism” grows ever louder, the former vice president still dreams of that restoration: a nation that rises up and lives out the true meaning of its creed — low taxes, limited government, and unwavering support for Israel, America’s “most cherished ally.”

That this dream is shared by approximately 16 other Americans, the vast majority of whom constitute Pence’s extended family, hasn’t stopped him. This is an exaggeration, but only slightly. The truth is, that brand of conservatism — it used to be called fusionism, for combining free-market orthodoxy, free-policy hawkism, and “traditional values” — is quite literally dying along with the subscriber base of National Review.  

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What Conservatives Believe, Pence’s third book since leaving the White House in 2020, is yet another long-winded attempt at vindication. The book is framed as a statement of principles, rather than autobiography. It offers no insight into the internal machinations of the Trump White House, nor does it attempt a psychological portrait of the most powerful man in the country. It does not even advance a new or original critique of MAGA populism or progressivism — ostensibly the book’s central purpose. Instead, readers are treated to nostalgia politics and a catalog of policy prescriptions that would have seemed dated in the Bush era, let alone this one.

The new book does serve one important purpose, however. For all its denunciations of populism, Pence’s work is a powerful reminder of why Trump emerged in the first place. Before 2016, fusionism was the GOP’s governing philosophy. Its true believers — the likes of Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, and Kevin McCarthy — were seen as the future. Likewise, Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee, and John Kasich were all serious contenders for the presidency. It was hardly a golden age — and yet, this is the world that Pence seems to want to return to. 

Trump may be an (extremely) imperfect vessel for working-class America, but he at least recognized that something was rotten in the old order. Pence, by contrast, refuses to grapple with that failure. If What Conservatives Believe reveals anything, it is that Pence still mistakes the consensus that produced Trump for the one that can succeed him.

There is something almost endearing about Mike Pence. A conservative “proudly out of sync” with the times, he is one of the rare few who practice what they preach. A devout Christian married for 41 years, the lifelong Hoosier has lived such a scandal-free life that his biggest “controversy” was converting from Catholicism to evangelical Christianity as a college student. To this day, he never eats alone with a woman unless it’s his wife, and he refuses to attend events involving alcohol without her by his side. (In the post-#MeToo era, many other politicians might have wished they’d adopted a similar approach.)

This rigidity also extends to Pence’s politics. Despite growing up in a Democratic household in which John F. Kennedy (a fellow Irish Catholic) was the poster boy, Pence began flirting with the GOP during that same period, and the opinions he adopted early haven’t changed. In What Conservatives Believe, he describes Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator and proto-Reagan, as his intellectual hero. The young Pence found The Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater’s statement of principles, “stirring and compelling.”

“Stirring” and “compelling” are not words that immediately spring to mind when reading The Conscience of a Conservative. Its didactic style, however, is clearly something Pence seeks to emulate in his own writing. He writes that conservatives “must begin with moral clarity”; they “must find commonsense solutions”; “they must have faith”; and, most important, they “must never forsake our constitutional principles.” It’s the kind of message that might have had some purchase 50 years ago, but in the age of Trump’s “weave” and rambling Truth Social posts, it struggles to register.

Unlike most other anti-Trump books, Pence’s work is different in that he is willing to take on his own side, even if his attacks on the president remain restrained. 

In Pence’s telling, the specter haunting America is the unholy alliance of progressives and Right-wing populists. He argues that the latter peddle “progressivism in disguise,” warning that they are “fellow travelers on the road to ruin.” Both dream of a collapse in the America-led international order, and seek to enlarge the state to such a degree that it crushes the economic freedom of Americans. No one is spared from Pence’s withering attacks — not even Marco Rubio, whose “common-good capitalism” is dismissed as a “warmed-over version of big-government Republicanism.” 

For Pence, the only answer to the problems of capitalism is more capitalism. He shows little willingness to consider that the system itself may have helped create the very populism he condemns. Across 264 pages, Pence devotes just one paragraph to the causes of the populist revolt in 2016, while Barry Goldwater earns 36 mentions. Though he concedes that globalization “left behind” some regions of the country, he blames big government — rather than trade, deindustrialization, or immigration — as the source of America’s ills. Beyond that, readers are served a steady diet of folksy maxims about how “populism is like a gust of wind” and hollow aphorisms such as: “Populists follow urges, not principle.”

Perhaps we should not expect much more from a man who once described himself as Rush Limbaugh on decaf. Pence’s role during the first Trump administration was largely ceremonial; he was the inscrutable mute who nodded, smiled, and applauded on cue, but rarely spoke out of turn. Unlike JD Vance, who has carved out a far more visible role in foreign policy and other issues, Pence left office without a signature policy achievement to call his own. He surfed the populist wave all the way to the Number One Observatory Circle and never seemed quite sure what to do once he got there.

This is Pence in a nutshell. He was content to ride on Trump’s coattails, claiming the administration’s successes as his own, until the president turned on him on Jan. 6. Crucially, Pence mistook his elevated status in the White House for evidence that he represented a constituency that was loyal to him, rather than the president. In doing so, he misunderstood the movement itself: MAGA was never a coalition awaiting conservative stewardship, but a personal following organized around Trump alone. Pence’s failed presidential campaign in 2024, lasting fewer than five months, proved as much.

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If there is an heir to Trump, that person will not be a bible-thumping Christian who preaches a return to civility and fiscal conservatism. More likely, it will be a figure who best channels the values Trump claimed to represent: ending foreign wars, draining the swamp, and reviving America’s industrial heartlands. Trump may have failed in some of these promises, but he at least forced a reckoning on them. That his coalition grew, rather than shrunk, over three elections shows he had a far greater sense than Pence — or any Republican for that matter — of where the country was headed.

Pence, by contrast, believes the problems facing 21st-century America can be found in the 20th century, with the “provable” ideas of Ronald Reagan guiding the way. So how would the former vice president address the very modern problems of social atomization, the breakdown of communities, and the infiltration of technology into everyday life? Pence answers these thorny questions with grandfatherly wisdom: “social media often can feel like antisocial media,” “iPhones transform into what I call ‘iFOMOs’ because users suffer from a ‘fear of missing out,’” and the suggestion that the Founding Fathers might have prefaced the Tenth Amendment with “ICYMI.”

These sparkling insights may read more like a church newsletter than a political diagnosis, but they point to a broader truth. The world that produced Reagan — and the Republican consensus he embodied — has long since disappeared, replaced by economic dislocation, cultural fragmentation, and a crisis of institutional trust that Reaganite platitudes are poorly equipped to address. The tragedy of Pence is not merely that he was eclipsed by Trump, but that he still cannot see why Trump emerged in the first place. The world has moved on from Pence and his ideology; only Pence seems determined to remain behind.

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.

He has “reposted” or approvingly quoted posts claiming that South Africa is our future; that the United States is at risk of turning into a “Global Favela”; that the Left is “import[ing] a new voting block from the Third World”; that “all other [racial] groups show extreme in-group preference and particular hatred for white people”; and that New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani seeks to “eradicate white people”. 

The agents of collapse are unassimilated immigrants, aggrieved black Americans, and progressive elites who have inflamed resentment through years of identity-based moralizing. The implied endpoint is civil conflict, for which he wants whites to prepare themselves.

These claims would be alarming coming from anyone. From a man of Musk’s unparalleled resources and influence, they warrant loud and unambiguous rejection. The hundreds of thousands of likes and millions of impressions garnered by Musk’s posts suggest that his views are shared by more than a few others. Despite flashpoints over immigration and high crime in a handful of American cities, the conditions in the country are generally peaceful. The streets are generally safe. The crime spike we endured in 2020 has fallen off. So why has “the race war is coming” proven to be such an attractive rallying cry?

I thought I had an answer. In my inaugural essay for UnHerd, I offered a short genealogy of our present political moment. I argued that President Trump’s rise had been abetted by a backlash against progressive overreach, especially on matters of race, and I expressed concern that the reactionary energy unleashed in 2016 — and again more intensely in 2024 — would culminate in a repudiation not only of racial politics, but of blackness itself. 

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But the “backlash” frame, while not inaccurate, isn’t what is most important about the present moment. It captures the direction of political motion but misstates its mechanism.

Backlash suggests something like a political analogue to Newton’s third law of motion: progressive excess produces an equal and opposite reaction; grievance is answered by grievance; and if the reaction takes on a racial coloration, that is only because the initial action was racially tinged. In this view, Trump’s return appears as a kind of inevitability — an elastic band released after being stretched too far. But this way of thinking drains politics of agency. Human beings are not rubber bands. They choose, within limits, how to respond to strain. Those limits are shaped by politicians, institutions, and the culture at large. These organize raw dissatisfaction into strains of discourse, thought, and belief, with varying degrees of coherence. 

The Right’s response to progressive identity politics has not chiefly taken the form of repudiation. It has taken the form of adoption. A focus on racial identity remains the coin of the political realm. What we are witnessing is not merely a backlash. It’s a convergence.

For years, identity politics was treated — rightly — as a pathology of the Left. It displaced the individual as the bearer of moral and political claims, and instead proposed group membership, defined by race, gender, and sexuality, o as the proper grounds for justice. Classical liberals warned that once politics was organized around groups rather than persons, the state would become an arena of zero-sum contestation among identities, with predictable consequences for social cohesion. During the “racial reckoning” of the late 2010s and early 2020s, we saw enough of that dynamic to last a lifetime.

Yet in the months since Trump’s return to office, it has become clear that identity politics has not been defeated. It has just been rebranded. An insurgent movement on the Right has concluded,  quietly but unmistakably, that identity politics is not a moral error so much as it is a powerful political technology. As a democratic ideal, it is corrosive. As a tool of mobilization, it is extraordinarily effective. What I had previously described as backlash (against overly aggressive anti-racism) now looks more like a realization: the right has decided it can no longer afford to leave the weapon of race-identitarian politics unused. 

Enter Elon Musk. 

Before dismissing the Tesla and SpaceX boss’s vision of open racial conflict outright, it is worth steel-manning it — internet parlance for presenting the strongest version of an argument before proceeding to contest it. Musk’s framing resonates because it speaks to genuine disorder that many associate with race. Crime has risen in some cities. Immigration has strained administrative capacity. Progressive elites have often appeared more interested in moral signaling than in competent governance. Many citizens reasonably feel that institutions no longer enforce rules impartially or tell the truth about trade-offs. Against such a backdrop, warnings about social fragmentation do not sound like hysteria. They sound like realism.

But realism requires discrimination and discernment. Musk’s diagnosis leaps from institutional failure to demographic destiny, from policy breakdown to fighting in the streets. That leap is not evidence-based; it is interpretive. And it is here that thoughtful analysis must reassert itself.

As I see it, the imagery Musk deploys draws on two sources: conspiratorial narratives about demographic “replacement”, and his own reading of civilizational failures in post-apartheid South Africa. In one widely circulated episode, Musk endorsed a post claiming that if white men were to become a demographic minority, they would face slaughter, and that only white solidarity could ensure survival. The meaning was unmistakable. This was not a critique of identity politics; it was a remarkably disquieting embrace of it.

Not long ago, open calls for white solidarity from a figure of Musk’s stature would have been politically radioactive. Today, they are met with a mix of alarm, rationalization, and — in some quarters — approval. That shift itself is the real story. Musk did not invent white identity politics. But he legitimizes them. His importance lies less in the sincerity of his beliefs than in his role as a permission-granting figure. When ideas migrate from fringe spaces into elite discourse, they change character. Errors that might remain contained at the margins become dangerous when voiced by powerful actors. Such is the case here.

Musk’s central error is conceptual. He is importing a post-colonial model of race politics into Western multicultural societies where it does not apply. Post-apartheid South Africa was not renegotiating the status of racial groups within a stable constitutional order; it was adjudicating the inheritance of the state itself. Questions of sovereignty, land ownership, elite replacement, and historical authority were all in play at once, in a context of racial domination and dispossession and a setting in which institutions were weak and legitimacy was racially compromised. Under those conditions, identity became destiny — because in the end, there was no other dimension along which to mediate political conflict.

Today’s pluralistic Western societies are not in that position. However bitter, their race-related conflicts take place within settled, universalist constitutional frameworks with entrenched property regimes and comparatively high-capacity institutions. Their arguments are about distribution, recognition, and status, not the wholesale transfer of political power. To read these conflicts as incipient post-colonial struggles is simply a grave category mistake.

What makes this mistake so consequential is that it is structurally enabled by a political culture already organized around identity. Once politics is understood — on Left and Right alike — as a contest among morally freighted groups, the temptation to treat race as a civilizational variable becomes overwhelming. In that context, Musk’s rhetoric is weirdly logical. It mirrors the structure of progressive racialism while reversing its moral valence. History still marks groups, in this view. Power still reproduces itself through institutions. Racially disparate outcomes still function as moral evidence. Only the identities of the winners and the losers, the offenders and the victims, have changed.

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Whether Musk genuinely believes in white cultural superiority is beside the point. What matters is the effect on the discourse. Once race is treated as destiny, society reorganizes itself accordingly. Institutions, insofar as they operate according to the disavowed pluralist precepts, fade into irrelevance. Demography becomes fate. Politics become a struggle for survival among groups. Race war seems to be imminent.

Institutional realism provides the best alternative to this logic. A serious response to rising crime asks whether policing, prosecution, and punishment are functioning coherently. A serious response to immigration asks whether borders are enforced, asylum systems administered, and newcomers integrated through work and civic obligation. A serious response to inequality asks how education, housing, and labor markets actually operate, rather than how they are symbolically narrated. These are institutional questions. They admit of failure, reform, and learning. They do not require racial metaphysics or “civilization-or-barbarism” histrionics.

This is also, in part, a story about the evolution of the American Right. Identitarian, white racial paranoia on the Right has filled the vacuum created by an earlier ideological unraveling. After World War II, the so-called fusionism associated with William F. Buckley and his National Review magazine attempted to unite three distinct, occasionally contradictory strands of American conservatism into a single governing philosophy: economic libertarianism, a hawkish foreign-policy , and moral traditionalism. The viability of that alliance depended on general conditions of peace and prosperity in the United States, and a kind of gentleman’s agreement that adherents of each strand would mostly overlook their disputes with the others. They were stronger together than apart. And it helped that they were together in the trenches against a common foe: Soviet Communism and those who sought to expand its influence in the West.

But then Communism collapsed; the shared enemy went away. The forever wars and financial crises of the millennium’s early decades broke the accord, with neoconservatism discredited abroad, libertarianism discredited at home, and religious traditionalists left to pursue their own ends. The rise of Trumpian populism marked the definitive end of the fusionist project. But Trump’s distaste for consistency created an ideological vacuum, and a need for a coherent program to organize the resentments he brought to the surface. 

It would now appear that identity politics rushed in to occupy the space, because it is emotionally energizing and cognitively cheap. It offers a mirage of moral clarity without institutional analysis, and solidarity without responsibility. Racial fatalism on the Right thus functions as a substitute for a serious account of institutional decay.

The deeper tragedy is not that identity politics has migrated from Left to Right, but that it has become the shared grammar of political conflict itself. We now argue loudly about which identities deserve protection or priority, but we no longer argue about whether identity is the proper battlefield. That tacit agreement is more troubling than any particular tweet. For once that terrain is fixed, escalation becomes inevitable.

Liberalism’s achievement was never the denial of any group’s level of historical suffering, but discipline in managing the present. It sought to thin out identity enough that a sense of shared citizenship could survive our grievances and differences. That achievement is fragile, and it is now under open assault — from a Left that moralizes identity and a Right that weaponizes it.

If the most influential figures in our public life continue to teach citizens to read pluralistic democracies through the lens of post-colonial struggle, the consequences will not be confined to rhetoric. Today’s permission structures become tomorrow’s political programs. Ideas that begin as tweets harden into expectations. Right-wing advocates of identity politics promise a restoration of order. What they will more likely produce is the acceleration of distrust and a descent into chaos.

Zarathustra, coming a mere 24 years after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, is best known for its prophet’s declaration that “God is dead.” The main character’s moniker makes a mockery of the Christian deity — Zarathustra is the Germanized name of the Persian prophet who founded Zoroastrianism, a precursor to Christianity that may have later influenced it. With God dead, Zarathustra was to be a counter-gospel.

What was to replace God? Nietzsche explains: “I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?” He goes on: “All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.…”

Zarathustra speaks in parables grouped under various headings, often on themes dear to the hearts of reactionaries. “On Women” is a moving, and deeply un-PC, reflection on the animal passions that motivate relations between the sexes, with a bit of trolling thrown in. “Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one solution: that is pregnancy.” As Zarathustra is about to part from the old woman he is talking to, she promises him a “little truth”: “You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!”

Zarathustra occasionally hits on politics, and when he does, it is to denounce the rabble and peddlers of equality. The Christian and his spiritual descendant, the socialist, he says, preach egalitarianism as a cover for a desire to tear down what is strong, life-affirming, and healthy in man. 

If you think much of this sounds like Andrew Tate and other manosphere influencers, you are correct. But Nietzsche deserves full credit for getting there first. 

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While young reactionaries today look back at a simpler time, in which supposedly all normal people had a community, a partner, and a secure job, Nietzsche was already living a lonely, sexually frustrated existence in 19th-century Germany. He might have had sex once at a brothel — where he may or may not have contracted syphilis — but otherwise he either was rebuffed by women or kept them at a distance. The man who effusively praised conquerors like Napoleon and Alexander, and expressed contempt for Christian morality, was constantly sick, felt overwhelmed by social gatherings, and had trouble tolerating bright lights and loud noises. As the intellectual historian Peter Gay wrote in the introduction to The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, the philosopher’s “life was a dramatic one, but all his drama was interior.”

More than a century after Zarathustra was published, I became one of a countless number of young men who found solace in Nietzsche’s thought. A life-affirming philosophy compensated for not being very good at life. Wasn’t I smart enough to reject God, and strong enough not to need a supernatural crutch? Didn’t I see through both Christianity and Left-wing political ideas that denied the obvious truth that some human beings were more valuable than others? When Nietzsche discussed the Overman, I thought he meant me. Or at least, someone I might one day become. 

In truth, just about anyone else in the world would have been a better candidate. Like Nietzsche, I was smart and introverted, with poor social graces. I had ideas about the opposite sex and what women should or did want, but little practical experience with them. To understand Nietzsche as cope for losers, though, would be to miss out on his continuing relevance.

If many of us began thinking of ourselves as Übermenschen without much evidence, the fault was with us, rather than Nietzsche, whose real message was that although life was ultimately tragic, we were to find meaning in the struggle. He stressed resilience, self-assurance, and emotional and intellectual detachment from the mob. In the Nietzschean worldview, genetic determinism coexists alongside an obsession with individual and collective transformation. We are naturally unequal, but we can all become something better than we currently are. Nietzsche was, to some extent, a 19th-century self-help guru.

Much of the intoxication of reading him comes from his seductive combination of depth and lightness. With the death of God, this world is all we have left, and we must take it seriously. There is profound beauty in the journey toward becoming something better. At the same time, we have no choice but to remain self-aware enough to poke fun at ourselves. (“I no longer trust myself since I aspire to the height, and nobody trusts me any more; how did this happen? I change too fast: my today refutes my yesterday.”) Nietzsche uses humor not in the modern way that avoids judgment or responsibility; rather, his trolling works because the underlying point is deadly serious. He taught that there was hope, and even if you failed, you could get some laughs along the way, many of them at your own expense. What else to make of a man who published an autobiography with chapter titles such as “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” and “Why I Write Such Excellent Books”?

Nietzsche’s ideas today sometimes seem banal, but only because we have fully incorporated his worldview. I now take for granted that humans are often driven by resentment, and the desire to tear things down rather than any positive vision of the good. Also, people aren’t always honest about their motivations, even with themselves, and this is especially true on sensitive and emotional topics like politics, or what a person looks for in a romantic partner. Freud admired Nietzsche and hit on many of the same themes, as does some of the most up-to-date work in psychology and anthropology.

When people make Nietzschean points on X (formerly Twitter), we roll our eyes at the lack of originality. But Nietzsche showed remarkable foresight in understanding the motivations behind socialism in the late 19th century, before it would come to dominate large swaths of the world. The entire 20th century in a sense stands as a testament to his prescience, with one nation after another witnessing Left-wing revolutions descend into barbarism, despite their association with beautiful words and ideals. Echoes of these instincts can be found among wokes and degrowthers, and in the self-pitying rhetoric of the populist Right. Even many stock phrases in use today originate with Nietzsche: “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” and “he who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” 

The other great tragic force of the 20th century was German nationalism, particularly in its most virulent form, Nazism. Nietzsche’s ideas took off in his native country beginning around 1890, and were an inspiration to militarists up to 1945. Pocket editions of Zarathustra were distributed to soldiers on the front lines in World War I, and according to the historian Steven Aschheim, it was among the three most popular books taken into battle, along with Goethe’s Faust and the New Testament. His thought also became an inspiration for the Nazis — this, despite the fact that he opposed anti-Semitism, mocked German nationalism, and condemned conformity and obedience to the state.

As with many continental philosophers, it is often difficult to pin down exactly what Nietzsche believed, and if you start with the assumption that writers will see their work bastardized in the popular imagination, it is easy to understand how Nietzscheism in practice came to be co-opted by fascists. Praise for the salutary effects of war and contempt for weakness are staples of his books. Aschheim writes that although Hitler and his followers appropriated other figures from German history, “the particular Nazi emphasis on Nietzsche derived from his peculiar capacity to legitimate them.” It is no accident, then, that in addition to being praised and cited by Hitler, Nietzsche today has disciples that include race-obsessed far-Right intellectuals like Costin Alamariu, better known as “Bronze Age Pervert.”

Left-leaning adherents of Nietzsche blamed his sister’s appropriation of his legacy after his death for the way he was supposedly misread. Some German nationalists agreed. Ernst Krieck, a prominent Nazi theoretician, sarcastically remarked in 1937 that the only things keeping Nietzsche from being a National Socialist thinker were that he was not a nationalist, not a socialist, and rejected a racial worldview. Nonetheless, such critiques were ignored by Nazi dogma, which promoted the philosopher’s love of war and contempt for Christianity. The most charitable thing one can say about attempts to absolve Nietzsche for his impact on German nationalism is that if a thinker gets interpreted wrongly again and again, he surely deserves at least some of the blame. (Though admittedly, the idea of trying to cancel Nietzsche in his grave strikes me as amusing.)

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The truth is that it has been possible for individuals and movements with wildly contradictory views to embrace Nietzsche. There are postmodern Nietzscheans, nationalist and anti-nationalist Nietzscheans, and, in my heart at least, Nietzschean liberals. This last philosophy accepts his insights into human inequality and the psychology of resentment, while remaining skeptical of his attempts to assert a positive vision that can be imposed on society. Celebrating the idea of a heroic struggle, or one man’s will to overcome obstacles, can be useful in terms of self-improvement or even creating a cultural movement, but such impulses are likely to end in disaster if they are elevated to a governing philosophy.

We continue to see demonstrations of some of the same pitfalls of Nietzscheism today. Somewhere in Silicon Valley, there is a venture capitalist telling himself he is the Overman because he is investing in an app that more efficiently separates sports fans from their money. Nietzsche did not spell out the politics he supported, but he did provide an endless number of quotes that can be easily appropriated by those wanting to commit atrocities. And young people on X and TikTok, particularly those attracted to far-Right influencers, are often getting a bastardized version of Nietzsche, twisted to fit a political agenda. Better to go back to the original source. If you think the lesson of Nietzsche is that he agrees with your politics, it is more likely that you are a member of the rabble than a champion of individualism standing apart from it. 

Still, there are few books that I am certain changed the path of my life, and Zarathustra was one of them. I discovered Nietzsche in an era before iPhones and ubiquitous social media, when something closer to the kind of solitude Zarathustra experienced was still possible. If my feelings of superiority were at first unjustified, over the years, I did develop a genuine — and, I like to think, well-earned — understanding of myself as a lone hero willing to stare down the mob. Seeing myself through the eyes of Zarathustra stamped out any fears of social isolation and rejection, and has allowed me to withstand — and even enjoy — the frequent demands for my banishment from public life. 

If one day the world does reject me, I will return to the void I emerged from, and look back at the whole thing with a laugh. Nietzsche went mad, perhaps from syphilis, but the sense that life is a cosmic joke is so intensely apparent in his writing that I find it difficult to imagine him ever having truly suffered.

Now, as the Trumpians consolidate power, the MAGA-sphere is increasingly asserting cultural control; progressives, meanwhile, find themselves in a historically familiar position: that of the underdog. This resetting to an older pattern — the Right policing the culture, the Left in dissent — can be a gift to progressives. That is, provided they pick the right battles and wage them the correct way. 

Consider the Right-wing reaction to the NFL’s announcement that Bad Bunny, a massively popular Puerto Rican rapper, will be headlining the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show. “They [NFL officials] suck, and we’ll win, and God will bless us,” declared Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem with characteristic nuance in a podcast interview. The “X” (formerly Twitter) user known as the Redheaded Libertarian told her nearly 1 million followers that “Bad Bunny is a demonic Marxist who was been [sic] granted the largest stage with the greatest audience in the middle of a Christian revival.” The MAGA influencer Benny Johnson grumbled that the “NFL is self-destructing year after year.” The hard-Right pundit Jack Posobiec mused about staging an alternative halftime show headlined by the Christian rock band Creed.

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Info anarchy comes for the Left

By Dylan Partner

Americans who came of age in the post-9/11 era will recognize a replay of l’affaire Dixie Chicks. That was when, amid a different surge of evangelical-tinged jingoism, the country band faced a ferocious backlash, fanned by George W. Bush himself, after one of their number criticized the Iraq War on a London stage. It was an unceremonious cancellation before we had a name for cancel culture, with radio stations nationwide blacklisting the chicks’ music. And it formed part of a broader pattern of early-Aughts conservative repression (remember Attorney General John Ashcroft covering up two nude statues at the Department of Justice?). Such overreach was catnip to liberal comedians like Jon Stewart and fueled the dissent-is-patriotic Left that culminated in the Obama presidency.  

The Trumpians, in their overreach, are creating similar openings for the Left: from revoking green cards for pro-Palestinian students to placing entire academic departments under federal ideological supervision in the name of combating anti-Semitism, the second Trump administration is seemingly going out of its way to alienate many of the young people, especially young men, who rallied to it in backlash to the censoriousness of the Left. But the Bad Bunny episode threatens to take the trend to a much broader public.

Bad Bunny, whose birth name is Benito Ocasio, is an ample target for MAGA pitchforks. He has raised vocal opposition against the Trump administration, and in particular its immigration policies, going so far as to exclude the United States altogether from his upcoming tour due to concerns about ICE raids. Perhaps in retribution for these comments, Noem vowed that ICE would be “all over” his Super Bowl performance, which should only be attended by “law-abiding Americans who love this country.” (Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt walked back this overeager vow in a later news conference, noting that there is “no tangible plan” for an ICE raid at the Super Bowl.)

The ethnic and racial dimensions of the fracas are unmistakable. The easy response by many liberals has been to note that the MAGA haters don’t understand that Bad Bunny is himself American, since Puerto Rico has been part of the United States since the time of the Spanish-American War. Fox News host Tomi Lahren, for example, said that “he’s not an American artist.” 

It’s tempting for liberals to smugly take note of such ignorance. But the Left’s Puerto-Rico-Is-America correctives fail to address the actual reasons why conservatives are fuming. For many, it’s the fact that Ocasio is vocally anti-Trump. For others, it’s that he performs in Spanish. And some others simply don’t see him as American at all, no matter what the geography books say. 

Nativists in the United States have long faced a tough task of drawing the line between “real” and “fake” Americans, compared to nationalists in the rest of the West. Unlike many European countries that have only seen meaningful mass migration in the past few decades, immigration has fundamentally transformed the composition of the American ethnic stock for hundreds of years. The initial overwhelmingly English population was eclipsed — one might even say “replaced” — by successive waves of migrants, first from Ireland and Germany during the 19th century, then by “Ellis Islanders”: Italians, Jews, and other Eastern Europeans who came around the turn of the 20th. This makes it difficult to ascertain what, exactly, an ethnically ideal America would look like.

This is why the phrase “Heritage Americans” has gained ground among many on the online Right in recent months. Unsatisfied with merely drawing the line at the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which abolished the decades-old ethnic quota system and allowed the migration of a vastly greater number of Asians and Africans (mass migration from Latin America was largely driven by other factors, such as the abolition of the Bracero system for importing cheap agricultural labor), they have reached back further in American history to define their in-group and out-group. Ellis Islanders aren’t real Americans, they contend — only those descended from colonial-era stock have a valid claim to American identity. 

Someone like Bad Bunny, whether or not he identifies himself as American, falls outside of this and other definitions of “American” that have been raised in objection to the liberal notion of America as a “propositional nation” based on broadly defined civic commonalities. “America is not just an idea,” said JD Vance in his speech to the 2024 Republican National Convention. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.” While Vance’s conception of American identity includes “welcoming newcomers,” more hard-line proponents of “Heritage America” make no such concessions to immigration and demographic change. Yet neither is particularly hospitable to a figure like Ocasio.

Ocasio’s strong Puerto Rican and Latino identities conflict with a certain understanding of our national “shared history and common future,” at least in the eyes of MAGA influencers, who see his presence on perhaps the most quintessentially American stage of them all, the Super Bowl field, as not just a partisan offense, but a betrayal of the national identity. 

Some influential voices on the Left believe that this showdown could end up redounding to the advantage of Democrats and their more expansive conception of American identity. “The Democrats need to empower messengers that the establishment is scared of,” Molly Jong-Fast wrote in a New York Times op-ed, arguing that the party must take inspiration from Bad Bunny’s defiance of the Trump administration. “Democrats need to listen to the roar of the crowd.” 

Yet questions of identity, ethnicity, and belonging aren’t the most productive angle of attack here for the Left. Much more promising is focusing on the micromanagement of the country’s cultural life, which few Americans can tolerate in the long term, and many find contrary to their conception of freedom. 

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Save us from the crank Right

By Sohrab Ahmari

In the 2010s and 2020s, many Left-of-center institutions couldn’t grasp that they weren’t the underdogs. Progressive ideology is built around the defense of those perceived to be downtrodden, oppressed, and excluded from power — so their dominance of American culture created profound cognitive dissonance among the progressive cognoscenti. How could they have power if they were advocates of the powerless? How could they be cool if they were the establishment? How could they be rebels when the CIA ran recruitment ads in which an agency spy identified herself as “a cisgender millennial, who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.”

Deep down, many progressives continued to think of themselves as akin to the Dixie Chicks. But this self-conception wasn’t shared by many others, who saw them for what they were: hopelessly uncool and central to the “new dialect of power.” Jong-Fast and others believe the Trump administration’s harsh criticism of Bad Bunny will position his progressive politics as both popular and anti-establishment — or, to put it simply, cool. 

Maybe. But it will take more than just a Trumpian crackdown for the Left to restock its currency of cool dissent. After all, Bad Bunny is still performing at the behest of a massive capitalist organization. Any musical act hosted by the NFL can’t be all that subversive. The Trump administration, from another perspective, can present itself as fighting another establishment — just one that happens to be temporarily excluded from the White House. 

A Left that wants to capitalize on the Trumpians’ Bush-like overreach will have to embrace a much more raucous style, learn to think and speak more freely within its own ranks, drop carefully workshopped rhetoric, and leave behind the dour managerial style that came to define it over the past decade. It will have to get uncomfortable once more with corporate America and the surveillance state, as its predecessors of an earlier age were. 

Nearly a year into the second Trump administration, MAGA has fumbled the ball on culture. It remains to be seen if progressives are ready to drive it to the end zone. 

But such things are anathema to a dying Conservative party, until lately presenting itself as the guardian of Burkean tradition, with a patrician attitude to political contest so leisurely as to be indistinguishable from surrender. Yet if “Burkean” may not be the first adjective to strike the observer of Reform’s recent party conference, in all its Trumpian campness and glitzy bad taste, the shock defection of Danny Kruger, until last week one of the Conservative Party’s few serious thinkers, signals a new and counter-revolutionary mood on the British Right.

For all that Farage styles his party as “radical but not revolutionaries”, Kruger’s vow to undertake “change on a scale that the system has not seen since the modern civil service was created in the 19th century” is a pledge far beyond the Tory comfort zone. The Conservatives have, in recent decades, settled into an intellectual stupor of grouching against liberal innovations, while pledging fealty to supposedly Burkean values of only incremental reform, with a certain effete and cosmetic appeal to tradition unevidenced by their record in power. Yet, like reproaching Reform, now the default party of the British Right, for its “unconservativeness”, this may say more about how we misunderstand Burke, a figure more often invoked than read by conservatives, than it does anything about conservatism itself.

During the Cold War, Burke was reshaped primarily by American conservatives into what the Irish critic Seamus Deane later mocked as “the Disney versions” of his thought. He was reduced to a now hackneyed checklist of banal precepts — revolutions are bad, little platoons are good, timeworn customs are better than radical new innovations — which have functioned, as the great historian J.G.A. Pocock later observed, as a taboo against conservatives taking any concerted or radical course of action at all, ceding the ground for liberal hegemony.

Yet taking Reform, and now Kruger, at their word allows us to rescue Burke from the tweedy hesitancy of the latter-day Burkeans: for first we must recognize that he was less a conservative, voicing support for only slow and incremental reform, than he was an explicit counter-revolutionary, who in his Letters on a Regicide Peace excoriated Fox’s “New Whigs” for making peace with France’s revolutionary government, and instead urged the prosecution of what he correctly foresaw would be a long and bloody Continental war to overthrow the new regime.

For the Burke of Regicide Peace, and of Thoughts on French Affairs, the new order established by the French revolutionaries was “a general evil” brought about by a “cabal” of ambitious and ideological lawyers and journalists. These were “the creatures of the desk, and the creatures of favor”, who undertook to overthrow the time-worn social order and replace it with their “theoretick dogmas”. Their idealist doctrines worked against both custom and human nature, which bore “a much greater resemblance to those changes which have been made upon religious grounds, in which a spirit of proselytism makes an essential part”, than to politics as previously understood. As Burke declared, “All their new institutions, (and with them every thing is new) strike at the root of our social nature.” The central task of politics, for Burke, is not to draw a line in the sand against future revolution, but to overthrow in its entirety the new revolutionary order: for “He who does not stay the hand of suicide, is guilty of murder.” In the actual Burke of the late 18th century, and not the neutered Burke of the mid-20th, we see the aggrieved and combative conservative mindset of today.

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Is Nigel Farage a man of the people?

By Terry Eagleton

With this in mind, we may understand Reform better through considering the political thought of the party’s court historian, Sir David Starkey, than we do by mocking Dame Andrea Jenkyns’ sequined conference sing-along. As summarized by Nicholas Harris in the New Statesman: David Starkey at conference “lectured on the Blairite coup of 1997, which he compared to a ‘slow burn French Revolution’… condemning ‘the catastrophe of human rights’, the Supreme Court and the ECHR… while musing on historical analogies for the coming Reform takeover: the 1832 Reform Act, the Glorious Revolution, the Stuart Restoration”. This is not conservatism as we have come to understand it, but counter-revolution: a swift and total toppling, through packing the Lords with sympathetic new peers, and a bonfire of Blairite legislation, of New Labour’s unloved and malignant constitutional order, the “theoretick dogmas” of our own revolutionary lawyers.

Indeed, Burke’s thundering and apocalyptic discourse against the Révolutionnaires may be more accurately compared to the “divisive” rhetoric of today’s radical Right than to the empty platitudes of the Conservative wets. As Burke’s fellow Irish essayist Seamus Deane would later observe, Burke’s chosen enemy “belongs to no state, is beyond loyalties and affections. He is the first cosmopolitan”. This was an early evocation of a recognizable modern type, who in Burke’s words “broke the locality of public affections, and united descriptions of citizens more with strangers, than with their countrymen of different opinions”.

Deane encapsulates Burke’s view of his opponents: “Those who yearn for abstract principle are those who belong to no community; they live in a state of psychic anarchy and therefore seek justification for themselves in the promulgation of doctrines which would annihilate the very idea of historical community and continuity.” What is remarkable now is how current this discourse sounds, and not how time-worn and safe an expression of staid conservative principles. Burke’s cabal of lawyerly malcontents and insidious revolutionaries, upturning both age-old custom and the bonds of familial and national affection in pursuit of their new order, is little different, in terms of the rhetoric employed against it, to today’s Matrix Chambers set and its Grub Street hangers-on.

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The village that made Nigel Farage

By Tom McTague

And so, for Starkey as for Burke before him, “the New Labour government of 1997 right up to the present is effectively 25 years of quasi-Revolution which has effectively demolished and deliberately disintegrated the historic constitution of Britain as it was reformulated first in 1660 with the Restoration and again in 1689 with the Glorious Revolution”. The aspiration, for Starkey, “should be for a new Restoration, a second Restoration”.

In just the same way, in his book Covenant, Kruger proposes “a new Elizabethan (or indeed Restoration or Hanoverian)… settlement, a new version of that peculiarly English compromise that accommodates the defeated opponent and involves them in the task of creating the peace that follows” the coming dismantling of the legal architecture imposed by New Labour, which frustrates British governance and democracy alike. The enemy is to be allowed back into the political order only after his total defeat. These explicit calls for counter-revolution are, in their appeal to the age-old constitution, a directly Burkean framing, highlighting the ambiguities and ironies of conservative counter-revolution then as much as now.

For rather than a Tory — he abjured the term, not least for its Irish and Jacobite connotations — Burke was a Whig, whose fundamental loyalty was to the political order installed by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. How, then, could Burke condemn revolution when his own loyalty was to a mere century-old revolutionary regime? The answer lay in denying that the Glorious Revolution was any revolution at all, but was instead merely a course-correction back to England’s age-old constitutional order, bringing to an end an aberrant period of Continental-influenced despotism.

As Burke insisted in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, “the fundamental subversion of this ancient constitution… justified the Revolution”, a political coup justified “as the only means left for the recovery of that ancient constitution formed by the original contract of the British state, as well as for the future preservation of the same government”. The revolution was no revolution but merely a restoration to the natural order of things, a great reset in line with the country’s hard-won and ancient freedoms.

Just as Burke declared of England’s constitution that “it was formed and grew up among ourselves; that it is in every respect peculiar to this island; and that if the Roman or any foreign laws attempted to intrude into its composition, it has always had the vigor to shake them off, and return to the purity of its primitive constitution”, so can and will today’s conservative Reformists shake off the ECHR as a foreign imposition on parliamentary sovereignty. As Deane, cataloging Westminster’s quixotic ways, observes with Irish nationalist detachment, “All [Burke’s] citations of Magna Carta, Coke, Bracton, the men of 1688, are designed to convey an essential point about the English character — that the English have always chosen the appeal to precedent and to history over the appeal to abstract principle and universal rights.”

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Nigel Farage’s cynical pronatalism

By Sarah Ditum

There is no revolution that the English mind cannot derive from ancient precedent, justifying total political change as a reversion to the ancient, hallowed norm. Indeed, Pocock’s wry observation that “there was no reason why that realm’s history, and that of its Burkean capacity for self-reform, should not be traced back to the folkmoots of a Teutonic dawn” today finds uncanny echoes in Liz Truss’s recent claim that “The USA is arguably today the most unadulterated iteration of ancient British liberties that would still be recognized by our Saxon forefathers”, an appeal to America’s tradition of free speech perhaps more convincing a fortnight ago than today.

Whether Tacitus’s Germans, in their gloomy Nordic forests, would have recognized Trump, let alone Truss, as modern avatars of their rude democracy may be doubtful. Yet there is more than a hint here of an appeal to American intervention as a Glorious Revolution 2.0: America as the repository of age-old Anglo-Saxon freedoms, preserved by their own very English revolution, returning to the motherland in her hour of need. For what the Glorious Revolution was, in truth, was the dismantling of an unpopular government at the behest of Westminster political elites through the intervention of a foreign ruler. A revolution is, as Burke warns, “the very last resource of the thinking and the good”, for “Governments must be abused and deranged, indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past”.

What are we to make, then, of Farage’s repeated claims that Reform should plan to enter government in 2027, before the conclusion of Labour’s allotted term? It does not take a great prophet to foresee the already-struggling Labour government entering a period of terminal crisis before 2029: yet the mechanism through which Reform might enter power before then, the nature of the crisis that may supersede custom, is, for now, obscure.

And there are other, so far unasked questions to be raised about the coming, promised Restoration: if the Glorious Revolution was bloodless in England, it was not so in Ireland, as Burke knew well. In a less dramatic way, if the constitutional architecture of the Blair regime is to be overturned through the revival of Westminster’s sovereignty, what is to be done with devolution, in a context where a Reform government adopts the mantle of British Unionism against the peripheral nationalisms of Scotland and Wales? As Deane rightly observes, “Counter-revolution or national resistance could succeed in one sense against their enemy, but they could not reinstate the world that was lost; they could only pretend to do so, while actually inaugurating a new world.”

Reform’s coming Burkean counter-revolution may promise a return to Westminster’s ancient constitutional order, interrupted by the failed experiments of the revolutionaries: but what we will get is something entirely new, perhaps more American than European, and likely more English than British. “The revolutionary is in love with risk; the conservative is in love with precedent,” Deane notes. For now this principle has been inverted, as conservatives set themselves the task of a revolution that, as in 1688, does not quite dare speak its name.

Luckily, though, such reactions almost always concern matters about which your typical progressive is perfectly relaxed, and so a simple solution is at hand. To avoid the stress, why not simply shift your political stance to be more forward-thinking and chill out? Or, better yet, only freak out about real things: like Donald Trump being a fascist, or how white supremacy is being covertly propped up in British universities; or the rise of this dangerous new antifeminist influencer called a “femcel”. Granted, the sensations of anxiety and fury may be indistinguishable from earlier versions, but at least you will have the consolation of knowing that they spring from encounters with fearlessly honest, trustworthy reporting.

It is now more than 50 years since the academic Stanley Cohen popularised the phrase “moral panic” to describe scandalised media and public reactions to Mods and Rockers fighting on South Coast beaches, and the concept is as popular as ever. A branch of sociology — “moral panic studies” — is devoted to it. And there are disciplines where the mere mention of one in the title of your paper would seem to guarantee publication: moral panics about pornography, trans-identified males in sport, immigration rates, predatory academic publishing outfits, knife crime or whatever it is that great minds currently want you to think is Completely Fine, Actually.

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The truth about the Woke Right

By Kathleen Stock

The classic features of a moral panic, according to those professionally invested in their existence, would include the exhibition of widespread hostility towards a particular kind of person: someone who counts as an outsider in relation to the status quo. There must also be “volatility”, in that public sentiment against such people must seem to have arisen relatively suddenly, probably as a result of Right-wing media exaggerations. And it is important that the hostility displayed be “disproportionate” relative to the threat posed; a feature with the pleasing side effect of allowing dorky lecturers to feel like urbane sophisticates as they sneer at Outraged-of-Tunbridge-Wells or Belligerent-of-Blackpool, assuming them to be in the grip of narrow-minded bigotry and quite possibly Victorian levels of sexual repression too.

But some things have changed in the moral panic discourse over the years. Cohen’s original formulation of an accompanying “folk devil” for every moral panic — a scapegoat for hidebound reactionaries and emotionally labile plebs to fixate upon — seems to have since been loosened, so that moral panics are now detected in reactions to impersonal things such as smartphone use and vaping, as well as in responses to particular kinds of people. And some of the traditional subjects of panics of yesteryear, once smirked at by hippies who considered themselves too cool for such uptight judgements, are now badged by progressives as genuinely problematic after all: the risks posed by alcohol, for instance, or the dangers posed by white working-class men.

There have been other changes too. In the Seventies and Eighties, a moral panic tended to be construed by its principal theorists as inevitably a bad thing, demonising the underdog in order to consolidate hegemonic Establishment power. Or, as one set of scholars puts it, introducing a journal issue on the topic: “Moral panic theorists have long recognised … moral panics as attempts to hold together a collective order that is permanently proclaiming its own demise in the face of the ‘barbarians at the gates’.” But equally, over the years, eagle-eyed theorists began noticing that progressive and Left-wing interest groups could be prone to the odd bit of volatile, widespread, and disproportionate fear-mongering too.

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True to self-interested form, though, this observation didn’t lead to scepticism about the whole idea, but to a new stream of journal articles, ponderously discussing whether there could be “good” panics as well as bad. Cohen thought that the ends sometimes justified the means, writing in the introduction to the Third Edition of his book that his own “cultural politics” meant positively “encouraging something like moral panics about mass atrocities and political suffering” in order to raise awareness. He went on: “Perhaps we could purposely recreate the conditions that made the Mods and Rockers panic so successful… and thereby overcome the barriers of denial, passivity and indifference that prevent a full acknowledgement of human cruelty and suffering.” It is almost as if he were setting out a truth-indifferent, histrionic template for progressive media, that many outlets have followed to the letter ever since.

A more accurate conclusion would have been that, whether or not it started out that way, the theoretical apparatus surrounding the concept of a moral panic soon became skewed towards protecting an aggressively individualistic variety of Left-liberalism, typically beloved of university academics but hated by those who have to live with its material effects on the ground. In practice, the concept has often been used to attack entities and social structures that stand in the way of these vested interests: close-knit communities (cue sneering at “moral panics” about unchecked immigration or crime rates); stable family relationships (see the casual dismissal of concerns about pornography; surrogacy; prostitution; absent fathers; divorce rates); and a conception of childhood and adolescence as desirably free from market-friendly adultification (marvel as they ridicule fears about the premature sexualisation of minors; medical procedures on trans-identified teenagers; child safety online). Supposedly detached observers may well characterise public resentment of these things as “volatile”, arising suddenly out of “nowhere” as a result of being whipped up by conservative media sources, but this only further underlines their relative cluelessness about how the other half is living.

In truth, whenever some newspaper or journal article contains the dreaded two words in its title, there is a strong chance that some fairly obvious and credible concern is being brushed aside; and that anyone who might have that particular concern is being atrociously caricatured pour encourager les autres. And another condescending aspect of the moral panic discourse is that the adjective “moral” is effectively treated as an intensifier of the pejorative “panic”: you might think panics are bad, but wait till you see a moral one! Once again, we make contact with an essentially adolescent attitude to taking a moral stand, as if the cool people wouldn’t be caught dead doing so.

But actually, identifying something as a moral panic inevitably involves getting into the weeds of moral judgement yourself, however you might pretend otherwise; for what else could you be saying than that some perceived problem is not in fact as important as it seems to others, and that their negative emotional responses to it are disproportionate and harmful? Every step of this involves ethical deliberation, evaluation, and ranking.

Of course, the detector of so-called moral panics might well be wrong in his assessments about significance and proportionately; maybe, in fact, he is not panicking enough about some state of affairs, letting major harms slide, to which he ought to be attending. Yet the thought doesn’t seem to enter the heads of those who like to wield the concept very often. One sign of this is that theorists of moral panics rarely offer extended arguments for their implicit judgements on the supposedly benign nature of whatever-it-is they are dismissing, relying instead on the assumption that their readers, similarly steeped in all the biases of a university education, will share them.

No one group, be it populist or technocratic, should be treated as infallible or impartial  in their assessments of social harms; and both Left- and Right-wing media platforms can distort, exaggerate, and monetise partisan outrage to awful effect. But contrary to their reputation, moral panics are not the exclusive domain of the Right; nor are they always — or even often — thoroughly misdirected. And nor do they especially bolster elite and Establishment interests; though the contemptuous progressive discourse about them just might.

In recent days, commentator James Lindsay has been on various podcasts, claiming that the radical Right has been nicking the master’s tools — or at least, their make-up brushes. In his words, the Right has gone “woke”: cancelling their enemies, obsessed with identity politics, and conjuring hidden structural forces responsible for oppressing them. Attempting to prove the point, he has also revealed that last month he duped conservative Christian website “American Reformer” into publishing an amended section from Marx’s Communist Manifesto; an apparent counterpart to the hoaxes on progressive academic journals he co-authored with Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian in 2018.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of this has riled denizens of the internet with chiselled jaws and flinty conservative opinions, outraged at the very idea of Volk-gone-woke. As any playground brawler knows, when an insult is hurled at them, the first line of defence is the “no, you are” reverse attack. Accusations that self-styled classical liberals like Lindsay are the real woke offenders have duly followed.

But is he right? The hoaxing of “American Reformer” shows little, since the amendments Lindsay made to Marx’s original text are so heavy — and in any case, the fact that both radical Right and Left hate many aspects of bourgeois liberalism is hardly breaking news. Those already familiar with Lindsay’s intellectual hammer-wielding with respect to postmodernism and critical theory might suspect that to him, everything looks like a nail. He is, after all, someone who can smell “neo-Marxism” in capitalism-friendly identitarian posturing of the most superficial kind, and who traces the alleged roots of irrational wokeism as far back as that famous “Counter-Enlightenment” figure, Immanuel Kant (albeit that he helpfully adds “This point is complex”).

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Stonewall and the search for meaning

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The book he co-authored with Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories, although instructive about the way academics steeped in race and gender studies manipulate language in order to make various political power-grabs, is sloppy on some of the details. And it also posits a naïve dichotomy between, on the one hand, postmodernism and the idea that truth is relative, constructed through language (bad); and on the other, classical liberalism and the idea that truth is objective, accessed through free speech and debate (good). What seems to go unacknowledged is that, even in a perfectly liberal society, there would be many debates about reality that no amount of reason and evidence could ever definitively settle: most obviously, about the nature of moral and political reality itself. Background values are going to be relevant here, and there will be no simple rational adjudication between them.

True to form, on closer scrutiny, the positive arguments offered by Lindsay for the existence of the Woke Right also turn out to provide scant justification. There are two prongs to these: behavioural and ideological. The first says that members of the radical Right act like woke social justice warriors at their worst. Just like their Left-wing counterparts, they brim resentfully with a sense of grievance and victimhood, banging on about how straight white conservative males suffer under the status quo. They, too, favour free speech for friends not enemies, and “react to disagreement with name-calling, ostracism and bullying” as pundit Konstantin Kisin — also a fan of the Woke Right theory — puts it.

All of this perhaps sits as oddly with Nietzschean virtues of honour and nobility as the behaviour of feral Left-wingers does with their championing of kindness and empathy. But, still, such behaviour scarcely distinguishes the Right from any ill-disciplined online tribe who feels it is on a losing side. From Scottish Nationalists to feminists to Taylor Swift fans, the problem here is less likely to be substantive political allegiances than human nature and the dynamics of social media, bound to drive most people insane sooner or later.

Indeed, no better evidence could be offered here than the existence of the part-time internet troll James Lindsay, a man apparently obsessed with the idea of having sexual relations with the mother of every one of his intellectual foes. And as has been pointed out this week, classical liberals tend to get partisan when it comes to the free suppression of political enemies, most notably on the pro-Palestinian Left.

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Your awokening isn't special

By Geoff Shullenberger

The ideological story Lindsay offers us is scarcely more compelling. Essentially this says that, like the Woke Left, the Right believes in the existence of hegemonic power structures, hidden to most people, resulting in the systematic oppression of particular groups. The paranoid structure of choice, according to Lindsay, is the “post-war liberal consensus”, introduced with the sort of elaborate scare quotes and ironic tone he formerly reserved for the existence of things like “the patriarchy” and “systemic racism”. Right-wingers think that the function of this concealed power structure has been to marginalise true conservative thought, plus the groups that conservatives tend to stand up for. It is therefore attempting to raise “critical consciousness about the way the world is organised” — an activity otherwise known as red-pilling on the Right, and awokening on the Left — in order to overturn liberal and Left-wing structures and regain power for themselves.

It is not as if all of this is obviously false as a broad-brush summary of some Right-wing thinking, though Lindsay’s treatment of the idea that there is a post-war liberal consensus as theory about a deliberate and sinister conspiracy against the Right seems forced for the sake of a neat comparison with the Left. The bigger problem is that it is hard to imagine a modern political worldview anywhere on the ideological spectrum that does not contain the supposedly “woke” elements to which he alludes.

Described abstractly, these are: a vision of society as systematically distributed into winning and losing groups along some dimension of value, in a way perhaps “hidden” to the naked normie eye; the production of conflict and resentment as a result; the telling of some background narrative, perhaps with added historical elements, to explain how the winning groups came to win and the losers lose; and attempts to rectify the situation in favour of the losers.

Put this skeletally, the schema applies as much to Ba’athism as to Blairism. And it also applies fairly easily to Lindsay’s own framing of Anglophone society in recent times: divided into university-educated “neo-Marxists” with hegemonic cultural power, and everybody else; and with a whole background story supplied about the nefarious means by which the former got that power, and what sinister ideas sustained it. As a good classical liberal squeamish about the idea of group rights, Lindsay may be too fastidious to focus on the groups that lost out during this period — working-class people being an obvious candidate — but it doesn’t mean there aren’t any.

If every possible political outlook ends up counting as “woke” according to a given definition of the term, the definition was faulty in the first place. But it doesn’t follow that there must be some objectively true definition we should look for instead. The real truth about wokeness is that rationality and debate alone can never conclusively determine its real nature.

As with other political concepts that imply value or disvalue in the mouths of those who use them — such as “social justice”, “the Left”, “the Right”, and indeed, “liberalism” itself — “wokeness” is what philosopher W.B. Gallie called an “essentially contested concept”. Though there are applications of a concept like “woke” which are obviously wrong and do not hit the target, equally, there is no single objectively “right” definition. Rather, an inherently contestable concept like “woke” is permanently open to the possibility of new interpretations, partly in light of speakers’ background value commitments and the uses to which the concept is being put. And in this sort of case, there is no rational way of deciding an outright winner. To argue this way is not particularly “postmodern” — there are red-blooded analytic philosophers with a great respect for scientific truth and a perfect horror of modern French philosophy who would readily agree that noticing some bits of reality partly depends on prior value judgements, making the truth about them relative rather than objective.

Personally, I like Eric Kaufmann’s definition of “woke”, understood as “the sacralisation of historically disadvantaged race, gender and sexual identity groups”. You will have your own preferred version, and both of us might be equally “right”. The meaning of wokeness will be intractably tussled over by adversaries for as long as there is a need for the word, each participant likely wishing the concept to explain somewhat different things.

And it’s worth noticing that Lindsay’s own definition of “woke” has changed significantly over time too. Formerly confined explicitly to Leftist thinking and activism, in adapting an existing conceptual tool to aim it derisively towards rivals on the Right, he is apparently aiming for the subjugation of whole new territories. When you think about it, it’s almost like someone is manipulating language in order to execute a political power grab.

Liberals, eh? Dontcha just hate ‘em? Or should I say ‘so-called’ liberals, who aren’t really liberal at all because they want to silence their opponents. And whatever happened to John Stuart Mill? He’s been taken off the curriculum of course — because he’s a Dead White Male and the Cultural Marxists who control the universities don’t think their snowflake students will be able to read him without bursting into tears…Want to hear more? Sign up to my YouTube channel…

Of course, I don’t really have a YouTube channel, but a lot of people do. And this sort of Right-wing dissent from liberal orthodoxy proliferating on social media and video-sharing websites these days.

The raucous and antagonistic online culture has sprung up as traditional media’s gatekeeper role has diminished. And such are the financial incentives — rewarding controversy and gotchas rather than reasoned debate — that decent money can now be made from stoking the Right-wing id with jeremiads about millennial snowflakes and Cultural Marxism and post-modernist wreckers. It’s a problem.

The circuit of this alternative media is now pretty well established: mostly YouTube-based discussion programmes, broadly opposed to the progressive cultural consensus. There are different styles. For example, the Triggernometry podcast is presented by two very funny comedians and has a fairly informal approach, full of jokes and occasionally quite profane, whereas Conversations, hosted by former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia John Anderson, is more polished and old-fashioned. Nevertheless, the programmes have the same kind of guests, who tend to make the same kind of points, in the same kind of way. 

There are two topics that arise time and time again. First, cultural decline, i.e. the gradual loss of knowledge and understanding of the great art, the great literature, the great achievements of Western civilisation. This is usually ascribed to the dominance of the academy by highly politicised Left-wing academics with a bad case of what Sir Roger Scruton called “oikophobia”, that is a strong feeling of dislike and repugnance towards their own cultural and religious inheritance. 

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The second subject is the increasing censoriousness of culturally dominant progressives, who are keen to silence and delegitimise critics of the Current Year social consensus. A stern and humourless progressive piety reigns in the citadels of the British cultural establishment, empowered and encouraged by the dynamics of social media. 

These are important subjects. However, they cannot be the only topic of conversation. Clearly there’s a problem. What about the solutions? 

When I worked for a pro-life organisation, we used to grumble about media bias, how big broadcasters stacked the deck against pro-lifers in interviews and debates, and how the print media gave endless column inches to outright liars and propagandists. Such complaints were all rather futile. We should, instead, have been asking: “Given the media landscape, what are we actually going to do?” It’s hard to fight a battle on a field you didn’t choose, but you do still have to fight.

In his thoughtful piece for UnHerd after the death of Sir Roger Scruton, Ben Sixsmith noted, correctly, the lack of intellectual heft within British conservatism. The problem isn’t just in the academy; it’s in virtually every field of cultural endeavour. Where are the conservative painters and poets and sculptors and TV writers? Perhaps more importantly, where is the institutional infrastructure to support conservatives in the arts?  

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If conservatives genuinely want to challenge the progressive hegemony, they need to get serious and they need to get organised. They can’t afford to get bogged down in cultivating resentments. Resentment, as Scruton himself often noted, is a corrosive and dangerous dead end. 

Of course, tweaking the nose of the po-faced consensus, with its bizarre, ever-changing shibboleths and bureaucratic vindictiveness, is great fun. There is a glorious heritage in Britain of robust opposition to hectoring officialdom. People who stand at the back and hurl tomatoes at the stage will always be needed. But conservatism can’t be just about that. 

Sure, it might feel good to say the unsayable and to get hundreds of RTs for a devastating put-down of Polly Toynbee or some withering remarks about the suffocating piety of BBC drama. But, generally speaking, the juggernaut rolls on regardless. The task is not to make the drivers of the juggernaut feel embarrassed or angry, but to actually stop the juggernaut. This is one reason to be concerned by the preponderance of comedians among the heroes of the anti-woke counterculture; while comedy can advance dissident goals to some extent by breaking progressive taboos, it is ultimately a destructive force, not a constructive one.

Maybe conservatives should take a step back from the day-to-day combat of the culture war. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not one of those conservatives who retires to the fainting couch with a glass of sherry when the culture war is mentioned. 

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In Western countries in the modern era, it is entirely natural and reasonable for there to be culture war, i.e. a rigorous, ongoing debate about the attitudes, expectations and moral imperatives that should govern public and private life — especially in areas such as education, entertainment and the media. The alternative is so-called Tory pragmatism, the school of thought whose main principle seems to be “whatever the Guardian editorial page says, but four years after the editorial appears rather than 18 months”.  

The point is not that the culture war shouldn’t be fought; rather, conservatives need to fight smart, and remember the culture bit as well as the war bit. This means thinking about strategy and not just tactics. One tendency in the world of Right-wing podcasters and YouTubers is to seek out the latest person to fall foul of the dreaded libs and thrust a microphone in front of them. 

The problem is that those people don’t always have anything very interesting to add, and that giving them more publicity simply feeds into a reactive and antagonistic atmosphere of snark and counter-snark. It also contributes to a climate where grifters can flourish; it is very easy to carve out a niche for yourself as The Person Who Says What They Don’t Want You To Say, without contributing much of value to conservative thought and action. 

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Which brings us to another difficulty. There are really (at least) two factions on the Right-wing side of the culture war: classical liberals or libertarians, and traditional conservatives. They have overlapping concerns and shared enemies, but fundamentally they have quite different aims and so want to fight different battles in different ways. 

Traditional conservatism, my own part of the political forest, is not simply concerned with removing restraints on speech and clearing obstructions from the public square. It has a vision of the true and the beautiful, a particular understanding of what a good and orderly society should look like. For adherents to this philosophy, the future cannot simply lie in joining forces with the libertarian loudmouths and provocateurs. 

Imagine a podcast or YouTube video series that wasn’t content to condemn the decline of Western civilisation or the absurd censorship attempted by academic liberals, but actually sought out conservative artists to interview them about their work. Imagine a new media show that was not a lament about how X university won’t teach Dante or Plato or Shakespeare, but instead gave a voice to a young poet seeking to write within the great tradition, or an up-and-coming architect seeking to build beautifully and creatively, or a painter rejecting the sterile conceptualism of establishment art.

It won’t be enough on its own — not without the impressive and enviable institutional support available for conservative artists in, say, the USA — but it would be a big step in the right direction.

For many years, he relished his role as Britain’s Islamist troll-in-chief, inflaming the public with statements about how when Sharia law was implemented in the UK it would spell the definitive end of democracy, pubs, bookies and the national lottery, and put the Queen in a niqab.

He praised those who carried out the 9/11 attacks in the US and refused to condemn the 2005 London tube bombings. For the most part Choudary, a former solicitor, was ingenious in treading the fine line between offensive speech and criminal offence. His prison sentence, in 2016 – a five and a half year term, of which he has served half – finally came about because he was found to have voiced explicit support for Islamic State.

Choudary’s role was much more significant, however, than simply that of a self-appointed provocateur: such was his radicalising influence that Choudary has been linked to 15 terrorist plots since 2000. His followers included Khuram Butt, who was part of the attack on London Bridge that killed eight people last year, and Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, the killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby.

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He can lay claim to a leading role, too, in radicalising a small proportion of the English white working class. The English Defence League (EDL) was founded in 2009 – by Tommy Robinson, among others – in response to the presence of the Islamist group Aluus Sunnah wal Jamaah in Luton. Anjem Choudary, predictably enough, was present at the launch of Aluus Sunnah wal Jamaah, which campaigned for holy war and in 2009 took part in a protest against homecoming British troops returning from Afghanistan – the very event that first invigorated the EDL.

The EDL directed its main ire at Islam: it made much of backing a multi-racial but not a multi-cultural society, in which Hindus, Sikhs and black members were officially welcome. Some members didn’t get the full memo, it seems, and Tommy Robinson left the EDL in 2013, reportedly because of concerns over far Right extremists within its ranks. At the time, Robinson denounced the far Right, and publicly apologised for generalised language that may have made British Muslims feel afraid.

Yet while Choudary has been in prison, Robinson has experienced a fresh rush of celebrity among the alt-right in the US, for whom he has recently become something of a cause celebre. After Robinson was tried and convicted of contempt of court in May (he already had a conviction for the same offence from 2017) Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former advisor, later called him a “solid guy” and “the backbone of this country”. Bannon recently described Robinson “a movement in and of himself now. He represents the working class and channels a lot of the frustration of everyday, blue-collar Britons.” For Robinson’s defenders, his brushes with the law are explained away by an excess of passion in opposition to Islam – although Robinson often shifts his criticism, without apparent distinction, between Islamism, Islam and Muslims in general.

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Robinson’s second conviction for contempt of court was deemed procedurally flawed by the Court of Appeal, and his case will be reheard. In his first conviction, in May 2017, he was deemed to have potentially endangered a sex abuse trial involving British Muslim men and a young female victim. It unfurled against a wider background of costly, complex sex abuse cases involving mainly British Pakistani men and mainly (but not exclusively) white teenage girls in towns such as Rotherham and Rochdale, long-term abuse which was prolonged by appalling inaction on the part of the authorities.

The goal of those who worked courageously to bring such abusers to justice – people such as the journalist Andrew Norfolk and the former crown prosecutor Nazir Afzal – would naturally be a series of criminal trials. For Robinson, however, the smooth operation of such trials appears secondary to his desire to publicise his own outrage: a telling priority.

If the intricacies of the UK justice system don’t much concern Robinson, the same goes for his US supporters, who include not just Bannon but Donald Trump Jr. Beyond Robinson and his anti-Islam stunts and rhetoric, too, there is an ominous rise in far Right terrorist activity: Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, said last July that “the threat from extreme Right-wing terrorism is growing” with four extreme Right-wing plots disrupted since May 2017. The tiny but deeply nasty neo-Nazi organisation National Action has now been proscribed in the UK.

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Choudary, therefore, will emerge from prison into a Britain in which Islamist extremism remains a threat, and Right-wing extremism is expanding – a combination that will suit his agenda very well. It is doubtful that he will have converted to reticence during his time behind bars. And he will be energised by the noisy and vitriolic hard-Right opposition, from which he will hope to gain converts to his cause. When rival extremisms begin to take root, there is a kind of pinball effect, whereby those – often young men – who are repelled by one are bounced more forcefully towards the other.

Islamism and the hard Right, however, are not the only pinball flippers in town. The third is the hard Left, which is now in charge of the British Labour Party and has united around the cult of Jeremy Corbyn, a party leader who has, in the past, sympathised with both the IRA and Hamas, and recently been accused of anti-semitism by Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi.

Although Corbyn’s rhetoric invokes championing the working class, the direction of the Labour party itself under his stewardship suggests otherwise. As The Economist pointed out in July, 77% of Labour party members now hail from middle-class, or ABC1, social groups. Only 3% of its MPs have any history of manual work (in 1979, it was 16%). The article argued that the most notable rise in party involvement was among “ethnic minorities, particularly Muslims; public-sector professionals; and frustrated millennials, most of them the university-educated children of the salaried middle class who can’t get their feet on the property ladder”.

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In the wider ideology of the hard Left, which swirls around Corbyn, a version of ‘identity politics’ has taken hold which speaks not of a shared struggle understood in class terms, as was old-style socialism, but of a hierarchy of victimhood which places all ‘white men’ in the most despised position, as the greatest inheritors of ‘privilege’.

By framing a ‘progressive’ movement in a way that largely ignores class to concentrate on gender and race, the new hard Left offers white men a role to play mainly in the perpetual utterance of a performative mea culpa. This vision is likely to be particularly unpopular with white working-class men with very little economic or educational privilege, who would once themselves have been natural Labour voters – and some may be flipped elsewhere, including towards ‘movements’ such as Tommy Robinson’s which offer up an alternative ‘identity politics’, with its own set of vociferous grievances.

Islamism, the hard Right and the hard Left are each distinct ideologies, operating in separate and often complex ways: even within each of those categories, there are manifold fractures and contradictions. It would be misleading to pretend that all three offer the same level of threat to wider UK society, certainly when one looks at the record of UK terrorist attacks in the last few years, the bulk of which were Islamist in origin.

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But it would also be foolish to dismiss the possibility of intensifying violence at the extremes of the hard Right and the hard Left. In 2016, Thomas Mair, who was motivated by far-Right views, murdered Jo Cox, a Labour MP. Last June, a former spokesperson for the neo-Nazi group National Action, Jack Renshaw – who left the EDL early on, dissatisfied because it was not anti-semitic, racist or homophobic enough – admitted buying a replica sword with the intention of killing the Labour MP Rosie Cooper.

Nothing has reached that pitch yet from the hard Left, but the atmosphere remains highly and unpleasantly charged. The Labour MP Luciana Berger, who is Jewish, felt the need to attend this year’s party conference with a police escort. The group Labour Against Anti-Semitism said: “The atmosphere of bullying and intimidation towards Labour Jewish MPs is not coming from the far-Right but from a hard-Left membership.”

There are, however, certain similarities between the three groups that I have talked about. They are all active on social media, using it energetically in a way that prioritises fast reaction and emotion above reason, and are explicitly contemptuous of ‘mainstream media’ or MSM, while using it to garner more publicity. The slow and intricate processes of the judicial and legislative system do not interest them greatly.

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They hunger for dramatic action that moves beyond talking and voting. While one naturally associates Choudary and Robinson with street protests, such events also excite the current Labour leadership: when feelings were running high over the Grenfell fire last year, John McDonnell memorably called for a million people to come out on the streets to protest against the Government (they didn’t).

Their style of speech is angry, declamatory, and persistently claiming the moral high ground while conceding none to others. On certain policies, the hard Right and hard Left unite, such as in their admiration for Assad and Putin. And the anti-semitic conspiracy theories that flow from banned Right-wing groups such as National Action, for example, uncannily mirror those of Al-Muhijaroun.

Where will the intensifying game of ‘British pinball’ take us? Its frame is being constructed in a Britain where the political system is in open disarray, and the population is already fractured by the national argument over Brexit. Those of us who grew up in Northern Ireland will know how quickly the Troubles grew out of a peaceful situation that was nonetheless riven with grievances.

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I would hope that England would be insulated from such horrors by the absence of a long sectarian history, the activity of the intelligence services and by the innate mistrust of political extremes that has long seemed hardwired into wider English society – but we should never forget the grim possibility that extremist movements can start to interact violently, nor what ensues thereafter. Quite apart from any such scenario, even the non-violent interaction of Islamist fundamentalism, the hard Right and the hard Left is starting to damage the nature of our national conversation.

The tone of public debate is now one of permanent rancour: as it grows fiercer and more vituperative, many reasonable people are shrinking from open participation. It becomes harder, not easier, for British Muslims publicly to criticise aspects of Islamic fundamentalism, or for British Jews to criticise Israeli government policy – although they may do so privately – when those communities increasingly feel under broader attack from the Right or the Left. In such circumstances, voicing reservations about wrongs within the community is often seen as siding with the outsiders who are insulting the community: that is precisely what occurred over so many decades in Northern Ireland, with courageous exceptions.

This process could be clearly seen in action during the row over Boris Johnson’s article about the burqa. The Muslim journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who has long publicly opposed the wearing of the veil, described how, when Boris Johnson made his remarks about “bank robbers” or “letterboxes” in reference to the burqa, a young Muslim student said to her: “So, are you for Boris or for the burqa? You can’t sit on the fence.”

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Johnson’s essential view on the burqa was not the main point: many Muslim women also take the view that it is a ridiculous and unlikeable garment, and dislike it even more vociferously than he does. But Johnson’s mockery came as he was praised by Trump and Bannon – both of whom have made sweeping statements about Muslims – and in that heated atmosphere was interpreted by many as encouraging ridicule or worse of veiled Muslim women. Non-Muslim liberals who, ten years earlier, would themselves have attacked the burqa as a garment designed to oppress and erase women, now attacked Johnson for being ‘racist’ for mocking it.

Yet the fundamental point had not changed: only the climate of its reception had, to one clouded by emotion, hurt, suspicion and anger. To counteract the growing danger of political pinball, it will be a job to re-establish a new way of talking to each other. But this is the Britain that Choudary will re-enter. Wish us luck.

They simplify and summarise, stripping out the detail – but that’s what makes them so valuable. They provide us with a common frame of reference, a way of gauging where we stand in relation to one another. 

Democracy, too, needs directions. For all the details of policy making, all the nuances of ideology, we, as voters, need a straightforward way of lining up the options and making our choices. By reducing the complexities to a single dimension, that’s exactly what the Left-Right spectrum does for us.

It may be crude, it may be simplistic – but in the democratic era, it has untangled the mess, sorting politicians into parties, and parties into coalitions. 

It also puts the focus on the issues that matter most. The central proposition of modern politics is the state. How big should it be? How much should it spend, tax, redistribute, regulate? The details are complex, but the fundamental choice is not: do you want a bigger state or a smaller one? Go left for the former; right for the latter. 

But what if that’s not how it works anymore? What if politics has become about something else? 

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From Brexit to Trump to the populist triumph in Italy, the established order is under attack. There is talk of political realignment. But realignment along what axis? If it’s no longer Left-versus-Right, then what are the defining directions of the new spectrum?

This deep dive is an attempt to find answers. It comes in three parts:

• First, where did Left and Right come from? How did they end up defining our politics? And why are they now losing their grip?
• Second, what are the alternatives to Left-versus-Right? Why has ‘open-versus-closed’ emerged as the front runner? And who’s pushing the idea?
• Third, what is the true meaning of Open and Closed? What is it doing to democracy? And are the advocates of ‘Open’ really as open as they think they are?

For more on these new directions, read on. 

The origin of left and right

Let’s begin at the beginning. Or what is supposed to be the beginning.

In the English language, the first reference to Left and Right as political categories is in Thomas Carlyle’s 1837 history of the French Revolution. It comes from his description of the National Constituent Assembly – the first ‘parliament’ of revolutionary France, where supporters of the king and supporters of the revolution sat on opposite sides of the chamber:[1. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History, 1837, Book VI, Chapter 2]

“…if we glance into that Assembly Hall of theirs, it will be found, as is natural, ‘most irregular.’ As many as ‘a hundred members are on their feet at once;’ no rule in making motions, or only commencements of a rule; Spectators’ Gallery allowed to applaud, and even to hiss… Nevertheless, as in all human Assemblages, like does begin arranging itself to like… Rudiments of Methods disclose themselves; rudiments of Parties. There is a Right Side (Cote Droit), a Left Side (Cote Gauche); sitting on M. le President’s right hand, or on his left: the Cote Droit conservative; the Cote Gauche destructive.”

The Assembly, formed in 1789, was soon for the chop (as indeed were many of its members). However, the symbolism of its seating arrangement would persist in the various bodies that succeeded it – those most attached to the established order on the right, those keenest on radical change on the left, and those between the extremes in the centre. 

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Over the next two hundred years, these labels would attach themselves to the politics of other nations – whether or not their legislative bodies followed the same physical layout.

So, is that all there is to it – just an accident of history? The legacy of a seating arrangement that might just as easily have gone the other way? Absolutely not. The symbolic meaning of left and right is much older the French Revolution. In fact, it pre-dates history itself.

Most human beings are right-handed. Our right hands are typically stronger and more dextrous than the left. It is a physical bias strong enough to shape language. For instance, the English word ‘dexterity’ is derived from the Latin for right-handed; whereas the word ‘left‘ has Germanic origins meaning weak or foolish.

The word ‘right‘ goes all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European root word *reg from which we also get words like ‘regular’, ‘straight’, ‘correct’, ‘adroit’, ‘royal’ and ‘rule’.

Both literally and symbolically, ‘right’ embodies normality, ability and thus the natural order of things. The left embodies the opposite.

In fact, from a leftie perspective it gets worse. Because most people use their right hand to eat with, many cultures have made a point of using the left hand to perform tasks that include contact with dirt and excrement.[2. For instance, the Chinese character for right-handed is composed of the symbols for hand and mouth, while the character for left-handed is features symbols for hand and work] Across the Middle East, and many other parts of the world, touching food with the left hand is a cultural taboo.

The unsavoury associations of the left hand are perhaps compounded by an element of fear. In contests of physical prowess, whether on the battlefield or the sporting arena, the left-hander presents the right-hander with an unfamiliar opponent – one capable of delivering blows from an unaccustomed direction.

This left-handedness isn’t just unusual, it’s also subversive – if not downright sinister.

We see the symbolism of left and right in religion too. In the New Testament, Christ, as the Good Shepherd, separates the sheep (i.e. the righteous) from the goats (i.e. the fallen), placing the former on his right side and the latter on his left.[3. Matthew 25: 31-46] Comparable metaphors can be found in non-Abrahamic faiths too. For intance, Hindu traditions distinguish between the concepts of daksinachara (the ‘right-hand path’ of orthodox, virtuous spiritual practice) and vamacara (the ‘left-hand path’ of heterodox, transgressive spiritual practice).

Left and right in politics

The political association of the right with the established order and the left with challenges to that order is therefore no accident. It is deeply encoded within culture, language and religion – and thus applying the same symbols to politics came naturally. But why did it take so long for politics to acquire its ‘wings’?

It wasn’t until the Enlightenment period that internal division along ideological lines came to be seen as anything other than a mortal threat to the integrity of the realm. Before that the only alternative to a unified, if hierarchical, society was assumed to be bloody chaos – which is why the established order (and the shared religious assumptions that underpinned it) was ferociously defended.

The Reformation would, of course, shatter the religious unity of western Christendom, but within each state it was generally expected that the people would follow the same religion as their rulers: the principle of cuius regio, eius religio (whose realm, his religion).

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In the Enlightenment period, the old certainties and structures would be loosened. In some states, such as England, the process was evolutionary; in others, like France, it was revolutionary. The English approach allowed for the gradual accommodation of a widening range of religious and economic interests within a continuing, though not immutable, constitutional framework. However, in France, where the ancien régime was unaccommodating, change could only come about through the repudiation of established sources of authority. What was once regarded as right was right no longer.

In one form or another, the struggle to break with the pre-modern past would go on to define the politics of the West in the 19th century. However, the bourgeois revolt against the aristocratic order was just the beginning.

As a different kind of revolution – the Industrial Revolution – gathered pace, it created the conditions for the rise (and, in many places, the revolt) of an urban working class. Moreover, the Industrial Age was also a ‘Bureaucratic Age‘, with transport and communication technologies enabling the centralisation of political and economic power. For the first time, state ownership of the means of production, the wholesale redistribution of wealth and the creation of a modern welfare state – i.e. socialism – became a viable proposition with a powerful political constituency.

As a result, the bourgeois revolutionaries found themselves outflanked on the left by socialist revolutionaries. Indeed, left and right were redefined. Instead of corresponding to the enemies and the defenders of the aristocratic order, the labels became attached to the enemies and defenders of the capitalist order. [4. In Russia, where a bourgeois revolution (or evolution) hadn’t happened, revolution, when it did occur, brought down the aristocracy and capitalism at the same time]

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By Nigel Cameron

Parties that had been thought of as being on the left, but opposed socialism, found themselves moving to the right. One of the best examples of this realignment comes from Denmark, where the main party of the centre-right is called Venstre. This confuses outsiders because venstre is the Danish word for ‘left’. There is, however, a logical explanation: In the 19th century, Venstre really was a party of the left – as the term was then understood; but when socialism emerged as an electoral force, the political spectrum was redefined and Venstre along with it.

We can therefore think in terms of a ’19th-century Left’ and a ’20th-century Left’. To this day, support for, or opposition to, the ideas of the latter defines the Left-Right political spectrum.

That said, it’s worth noting that while the ’19th-century Left’ triumphed over the aristocratic order; there was, in the West, no clear victory for the ’20th-century Left’ over its enemy – the capitalist order. At best, it forced a compromise: the so-called ‘mixed economy’ of publicly and privately-owned industries. By the final decades of the 20th century not even that could be maintained. The mixed economy gave way to the weaker compromise of ‘neoliberalism‘ – i.e. in which the welfare state continued, but nationalised industry was privatised. Furthermore, the fall of the Soviet Bloc and the transmutation of communism in China cleared the way for the globalisation of the capitalist order.

The global financial crisis of 2007-08, followed by the Great Recession, could have marked another turning point – this time in favour of the Left. But while the flaws of neoliberalism were painfully exposed, and are yet to be adequately reformed, the contemporary Left has failed to provide a coherent economic alternative. And that’s not even the Left’s biggest problem.

Though the dominance of neoliberalism can be seen as a success for the Right, the Left still had a powerful role to play as the most enthusiastic redistributor of the proceeds of growth. [5. The era of ‘high neoliberalism’ – from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of Lehman Brothers – was defined by centre-left leaders like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder.] But in the decade of austerity since the crash, neoliberalism has not provided much in the way of proceeds for the Left to redistribute from; and, as mentioned, the Left has not provided a replacement for neoliberalism. This leaves the Left without a purpose and, increasingly, without power.

Further reading

The centre-left will never defeat European populism if it fails to first understand it

By Henry Olsen

Across Europe, social democrats are in crisis. Once dominant parties of government are haemorrhaging votes and in many cases (e.g. France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, Greece) dwindling away to minor party status. In part, this is due to the electoral rise of the radical and alternative Left. However, parties of protest are a poor substitute for parties of government. To date, the only one of the left-wing populist parties to gain power is SYRIZA in Greece – and its fate has been to implement a savage programme of cuts on behalf of the Eurozone authorities.

An end to Left and Right?

The decline of the mainstream Left isn’t just an issue for one side of the political divide. A Left incapable of making a difference to economic policy calls into question the relevance of the entire Left-Right spectrum.

A clear sign that old distinctions are collapsing is the growing ease with which parties of the mainstream Left and Right now find themselves in government together. For instance, three of the last four German governments have been ‘grand coalitions’ between the centre-right Christian Democrats and the centre-left Social Democrats. Since 2010, Left-Right coalitions have been formed in a number of other European countries including Italy, the Netherlands and Austria. One could argue that Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! movement is also a Left-Right coalition – albeit in the form of a new party designed for the purpose.

The old model of centre-left and centre-right alternating in government and opposition can no longer be taken for granted. Parties and politicians that were once rivals for power are increasingly likely to find themselves as partners.

There is a parallel here with the political realignment that took place at the beginning of the 20th century. A clear sign that the liberal parties of the ’19th-century Left’ had ceased to be the actual left was when they joined forces with their old enemies on the Right – against the rising influence of socialism.

But how exact is the parallel between what happened to ’19th-century Left’ and what might be happening now to the ‘20th-century Left’?  

Is there, for instance, an emerging ‘21st-century Left’, capable of (a) redefining Left and Right as completely as the socialists did a hundred years ago; and (b) displacing the previous incarnation of the Left at the ballot box ?

Further reading

How the Left failed flyover Spain

By James Bloodworth

There is, but only up to a point.

Ideologically, left-wing populist movements are good at saying what they are against (neoliberalism, etc), but not so good at articulating what they are for. There is no new ‘big idea’ whose impact is even remotely comparable to that of socialism in the 20th century. 

The closest it gets are the ‘post-work’ ideas[6. See, for instance, Andy Beckett, ‘Post-work: the radical idea of a world without jobs’, Guardian, 19 January 2018] of the accelerationists and others. However, ‘post-workism’ is a response to economic conditions that don’t exist yet i.e. a super-productive economy in which human workers are largely replaced by robots. The socialism of the late 19th was able to flourish in the 20th because it was a response to economic conditions that most people experienced in their daily lives. Furthermore, the socialist parties of the era – whether communist, democratic socialist or social democrat – offered not just a protest against those conditions, but also a means of changing them.

Further reading

Accelerationism, Blue Labour and the future of work

By Peter Franklin

Protest can still make an impact at the ballot box, of course. In countries across Europe, there’s no doubt that the populist Left has taken votes away from the mainstream left.

And yet the radical Left is not the only, or even the biggest, threat to the mainstream Left. In many countries, the most shattering blow to the latter’s voter base has come from populists who don’t belong to any kind of Left: a far from exhaustive list includes UKIP in the UK, the National Front in France, the AfD in Germany, the Five Star Movement and the League in Italy, the Sweden Democrats in Sweden, the Danish People’s Party in Denmark, the Party of Freedom in the Netherlands, the Freedom Party in Austria and, of course, the ‘alt-right’ and the wider Trump phenomenon in America.

With the exception of Five Star, these movements are usually classified as ‘right-wing populists’. 

They are certainly populist in the sense of being anti-establishment, but in what what sense are they right-wing? In terms of the economic issues that are most definitive of the conventional left-right political spectrum, parties of the ‘populist Right’ are generally to the Left of the mainstream Right and often to the left of the mainstream Left too.

Most of these movements don’t define themselves by conventional categories of Left and Right anyway. The degree of state involvement in the economy is, for them, a secondary issue. Indeed, their mission is to polarise politics along an entirely different axis. As their support increases, they are succeeding – sometimes pushing the mainstream left and right into unholy alliance, sometimes pushing one or both out of power altogether.

The Left-Right spectrum is falling to bits; what might replace it is the subject of part two of this series.

After that came an era of compromise – not least with the continuing dependency of every developed democratic nation on a large-scale, redistributive state.

Nevertheless, some New Right old believers still cling-on to ancient certainties. For instance, in an article about transport policy for ConservativeHome, John Redwood opens up with the most New Right thing anyone has ever said about anything:

“Traffic lights are so un-Conservative. They are part of the top-down, government knows best model of bossing us about.”

Those three-eyed totalitarian monsters! How dare they tell us not to proceed into the path of an on-coming stream of traffic!

I would argue that traffic lights are not just conservative, but symbolic of conservatism. Indeed, they enact the quintessentially conservative balance between freedom and order.

Even more importantly, they are reflective of the dignity of the individual. They enable a frail old lady to stop a ten ton truck at a road crossing – because her right to do so does not depend on her physical strength or her economic value, but on her infinite worth as a human being. (I wonder if Ayn Rand ever contemplated the meaning of the traffic light).

Further reading

What's so monstrous about Ayn Rand?

By Peter Franklin

If anything is “un-conservative” it’s not traffic lights, but traffic. As I’ve written about before, cars, while greatly enhancing the freedom of some individuals, are also deeply destructive of community. It’s no wonder that the Amish, one of the few groups in society that consciously think through the impact of technology on their lives, reject the car.

The rest of us just have traffic lights, and the freedom they give us to momentarily reclaim the streets. That, however, could be about to change in a major way.

If, like John Redwood, you see traffic lights as a tool of statist control, then just you wait for the era of the driverless car! The term ‘autonomous vehicle’ may turn out to be deeply misleading – because any technology capable of allowing a car to do without a (human) driver would allow such vehicles to be networked and remotely controlled by the authorities.

Writing for The Conversation, Neil McBride is alarmed:

“For more than 130 years, cars have represented the ultimate in autonomy, individuality and democratic freedom. Our car trips are private and anonymous. We can go where we like and when we like. We don’t have to tell anybody. And we retain responsibility for whether we obey the law. Driverless cars will bring that to an end.”

It’s not just the individual vehicle that will be automated, but the overall pattern of traffic flows across an entire road network:

“Smart motorways will manage flows of traffic, slowing down driverless cars as part of a stream of communication between the car and the road. In smart cities, traffic lights will reroute cars into detours according to calculations and predictions about traffic jams, road works, or state requirements.”

McBride sees the potential for oppression – and it would be foolish to deny the danger:

“In the dictatorial state, the authorities can stop you going to a demonstration, or stop you going to church.”

Further reading

We're going to ban human-operated cars. Yes, all of them.

By Peter Franklin

However, there’s also the potential for liberation. The new technology doesn’t have to result in greater centralisation. Indeed, it could allow the radical localisation of traffic management, with the residents of each neighbourhood reaching their own judgements as to the balance between mobility and other claims on shared spaces.

Subject to the whims and (in)competence of the motorist, we’ve lived our whole lives in terror of the motorised vehicle, teaching that fear to little children as if things could be no other way.

Now, as computers begin to take the wheel, new possibilities present themselves – new choices and, therefore, new freedoms.

Further reading

The Amish: America's most sophisticated users of technology

By Peter Franklin