(2022-04-21) Read Four Questions About The New Right

Max Read: Four questions about the "New Right". There's been a spate of recent articles about an emerging (or evolving) alliance between tech billionaires, right-wing politicians, Substackers, podcasters, and New York art kids...variously known as “dissidents,” “neo-reactionaries,” “post-leftists,” or the “heterodox” fringe—though they’re all often grouped for convenience under the heading of America’s New Right.

Which is to say that this New Right is not a part of the conservative movement as most people in America would understand it. It’s better described as a tangled set of frameworks for critiquing the systems of power and propaganda that most people reading this probably think of as “the way the world is.”

Pogue valiantly attempts to outline the ideological basics of such a diverse group... but I think his reporting shows that the New Right is bound together less by a sturdy, deeply penetrating ideology than it is by its relationship to two men: Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin.

Yarvin—himself funded and elevated by Thiel—provides the intellectual gloss that allows everyone from indifferent libertarians to Catholic integralists, from boomer novelists to zoomer heiresses, to imagine themselves as a (in the words of Walter Kirn) "fractious family of dissenters." Yarvin's particular contribution here is his idea of "the Cathedral,"

“The mystery of the Cathedral,” Yarvin writes, “is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.” (aka Deep State, Blue Church?)

"The Cathedral" is a flexible and all-encompassing (and aesthetically engaging) theory of politics that coheres the diverse recipients of Thiel backing through a common enemy. It can describe any person or industry or institution a given "dissident" might feel pissed off about

(J.D. Vance uses "the regime" in the same way.)

My point here is to suggest that the New Right is probably better thought of as a Thielian network, as described by Moira Weigel in her review of Max Chafkin's Thiel biography, than it is as a coherent ideological tendency

I think anything that gets written around this scene going forward could stand to orient itself around a handful of key questions that I’m not sure have yet been satisfyingly answered:

How "new" is the New Right?

The "Alt-Right," which served as the big liberal boogeyman of the years around Trump's election, never comes up in Pogue's piece, which seems strange

I don't think this "New Right" is identical to the Alt-Right of 2016, but I think figuring out the genealogy of the network (and identifying the key differences between it and its predecessors) would be revealing

What's its relationship to Trumpism?

The dek to the Vanity Fair piece reads "They’re not MAGA." But … aren't they?

If not even New Righties themselves can identify the distinction between themselves and Donald Trump, why should we trust that one exists? And if it does exist, does it even matter?

How big or powerful is this network, really?

The Alt-Right was very good at convincing liberals and journalists that it was an important and powerful movement, but most of the sympathizers who found their way into the White House in 2017 were quickly booted out. (Unlike, say, Steve Mnuchin, who lasted the full term.)

Also, aren’t these guys just fascists?

I mean, come on. Right?