A Taxonomy of the New Right

Postliberal ideology is a multi-headed hydra. To defeat it, we must first understand it.

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There is an old saying that American politics is fought between the 40-yard lines. While European democracies had to contend with reactionaries and radicals on the right and left, America’s broad liberal tradition sustained moderate disagreements over how to apply shared principles. Both the American right and left have generally affirmed the basic principles of the liberal tradition: checks and balances, representative government, a private sphere, property rights, equality under the law, and a political order oriented toward liberty.

Although this assertion is often overstated—we have our own long history of authoritarian politics, most notably over issues of race—there is still some truth to it. Democracy in America was not won from aristocrats through bloody revolutions, nor did our nascent democracy struggle with the lingering effects of feudal inequality. Our founding documents assert the natural equality and liberty of all, and while Black Americans, women, Native Americans, and others have often been excluded from that promise, this ideal has allowed transformative social movements to assert that they are the true inheritors of our political tradition.

Illiberals in America have therefore always struggled from a position of ideological weakness even when they achieve temporary political dominance. They must either reinterpret or completely reject our national inheritance to lay claim to political legitimacy. This strategy has proven successful at times, but it is inherently fragile and discordant with our national identity. Illiberals on the political right have been especially vulnerable to a kind of ideological schizophrenia: conservatives maintain tradition, yet the American liberal tradition points toward an egalitarianism that reactionaries reject.

While the 1990s appeared to usher in the dawn of liberal democratic hegemony, the seeds for a resurgent illiberal politics were already planted. Pat Buchanan’s surprising showing in the 1992 Republican primary proved that there existed fertile ground for racist and nativist politics. The expansion of internet access also helped open new ways for illiberalism to grow, hidden from the moralizing gaze of the public square. In this new online frontier, anti-democratic ideas began to spread through blog posts and on forums, and a new illiberal generation built organized networks and articulated a radical vision for the future of American politics. The current MAGA movement, and its takeover of the Republican Party, is the culmination of two decades of ideological changes that have transformed the party of Lincoln into the greatest threat to American democracy since the Civil War.

To trace this realignment, we first must recognize that the illiberals who now dominate the political right are not ideologically homogeneous. While they typically share similar critiques of the liberal status quo, they have distinct origins and political goals. This should be unsurprising: reactionary and radical movements, born on the margins of an existing political order, often ally similarly dispossessed groups to achieve the common cause of breaking that order. There is a great deal of overlap and ideological cross-pollination between the different camps—but to understand this coalition, we must isolate its component parts.

There are at least four groups that compose the modern American illiberal right: the alt-right, integralists, tech authoritarian-libertarians, and national conservative populists.

The Alt-Right

The alt-right rose to national prominence in 2016 following media reports about a far-right conference in which its main speaker, Richard Spencer, proclaimed “Hail Trump” while giving a Nazi salute. Spencer originally coined the term “alt-right” in the late 2000s while working at The American Conservative, a magazine founded by, among others, Pat Buchanan.

During the 1990s and 2000s the old guard of paleoconservatives and white nationalists—Buchanan, Jared Taylor, Samuel Francis, Peter Brimelow, Paul Gottfried, and others—set up think tanks, magazines, and websites that were independent of the conservative mainstream. Modern conservatism, in their minds, had betrayed its mission by accepting or embracing the Civil Rights movement, globalization, multiculturalism, and legal immigration, and these new organizations cultivated a parallel right-wing intelligentsia that could articulate an alternative political right.

One aim was to disassociate this new reactionary movement from the white supremacists of old: the violent neo-Nazi skinheads, Ku Klux Klan, and neo-Confederates that had been delegitimized in the eyes of most Americans. Instead, this would take an intellectual and genteel approach to ethno-nationalism. They held academic conferences and cited philosophers, wrote think pieces and promoted pseudo-scientific research about purported racial differences in IQ. They were particularly influenced by identitarian movements in Europe, which originated in the 1960s but were beginning to see increasing political support.

It was in this intellectual mixture of paleoconservatism, white nationalism, and identitarianism that the alt-right formed. The alt-right asserted that ethno-states are the only viable political societies, and attempts to create a multiracial or multicultural social order are doomed to fail due to inevitable ethnic division and factionalism. In America, that ethnic identity takes the form of whiteness, with European ancestry serving as the basis for true American identity. As Spencer proclaimed, “America was, until this last generation, a white country, designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation and our inheritance, and it belongs to us.” Rather than focusing on illegal immigration, the alt-right believed the greater threat was mainstream support for high levels of legal immigration. They argued that immigrants from Latin America, Africa, and Asia would alter the demographic makeup of American society and diminish the dominant position held by white Americans.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, a new generation of reactionaries, including Spencer, Kevin DeAnna, Michael Cernovich, Gavin McInnes, and Stefan Molyneux, began to influence online reactionary discourse. Piggybacking off the Men’s Rights and Tea Party movements, as well as broader social discontent over the Iraq War and Great Recession, these figures discovered a disaffected audience hungry for an alternative to the conservative establishment. Social media and internet forums like 4chan helped spread their ideas, often characterized by the detached and ironic posturing common to online discourse, which allowed extremist views to be shrouded in a veil of rebellious comedy.

The alt-right saw a boost in its influence in the mid-2010s after Breitbart News amplified its message. Upon taking control of the news site in 2012, Steve Bannon pushed it further toward reactionary and populist extremes, while contributors like Milo Yiannopoulos wrote sympathetically about the alt-right and helped to popularize its ideas. Often called “alt-lite,” figures like Bannon and Yiannopoulos share many underlying beliefs with the alt-right and see it as a useful counter-establishment movement that could help radicalize the conservative base. Rather than explicitly framing the threat in racial or ethnic terms, the alt-lite focuses on cultural differences, arguing that large numbers of new immigrants cannot effectively assimilate into American society. Employing well-worn tropes, they claim that high levels of immigration only bolster left-wing politics by creating a welfare-seeking class. Open immigration is therefore depicted as a left-wing conspiracy intended to achieve demographic and political dominance.

From the mid-2010s to the early 2020s an even younger cadre of alt-right and alt-lite leaders, who cut their teeth online and were native speakers of its meme culture, gained notoriety for their inflammatory positions. Influencers like Lauren Southern, Nick Fuentes, and Andrew Tate served as a pipeline to radicalize their typically white and male audiences, exploiting economic and sexual anxieties to drive engagement. By this point, many of the ideas percolating online had bled into mainstream conservative consciousness and helped shift conservative priorities. While the most explicitly racist and fascist elements of the alt-right have mostly remained confined to online spaces, its depiction of an America under siege by foreign interlopers, aided and abetted by a treasonous liberal elite, has gone mainstream.

Integralism

The integralist website The Josias describes integralism as “a tradition of thought that, rejecting the liberal separation of politics with the end of human life, holds that political rule must order man to his final goal … And since man’s temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end, the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual.”

Until recently, this view was foreign to American politics. While religion has always played a prominent role in public life, the First Amendment and a history of religious pluralism established a strong tradition of relatively secular politics. Although we pledge allegiance “under God,” print “In God We Trust” on our national currency, and evangelical conservatives often push for laws rooted in their Christian faith, it is widely accepted that the state cannot impose any given religion on American citizens. As the Declaration of Independence asserted, our government claims “the powers of the earth”—not those of the heavens.

Historically, integralism has been far more prominent in Europe. There, the church and state were often intertwined: political power was used to further theological ends, while ecclesial authority grounded political legitimacy. But following the Enlightenment, the basis for sovereign authority slowly moved from the church to the people. European states began to secularize, sparking waves of backlash from the Christian establishment and its most ardent supporters. By the 20^th century Europe’s political-religious tumult gave way to a more sustained acceptance of secularism, liberalism, and democracy, especially after the Second World War.

In the 2010s a debate occurred on the religious right, especially among traditional Catholics. On one side were Catholic conservatives who believe liberal democracy and Catholicism are compatible, and even that Catholicism actively justifies a democratic constitutional order. Proponents of this view, including George Weigel, Robert P. George, and David French, agree that a more substantive account of the common good is needed and are critical of left-wing social policies, but believe that these problems can be addressed within a broadly liberal democratic regime. On the other side were those who argue Christianity and liberalism are irrevocably at odds with one another. They asserted liberalism produces a self-destructive amoral culture that valorizes individualism, undermines traditional authority, and breaks apart communities. Liberal regimes supposedly train their citizenry to operate as atomistic and hedonistic individuals, which corrupts any private attempts to habituate virtue or sustain faith. The liberal order is therefore antithetical to religion, and, over time, pulls people away from it. While this reading of liberalism is incorrect—Helena Rosenblatt’s The Lost History of Liberalism is instructive here—what’s more important are the conclusions they draw from it.

These illiberal Catholic intellectuals were divided amongst themselves over how to respond to the perceived cultural crisis. One camp, notably led by Rod Dreher (an Orthodox Christian rather than Catholic) promoted what has been called “the Benedict Option.” They argued that American public culture and institutions were so corrupt there was no saving them—traditional Christians should instead withdraw into their own communities amid this new dark age to preserve virtue and faith, which could operate as repositories for civilizational rebirth generations hence. Meanwhile, the other camp returned to the long-defunct philosophy of integralism, aiming to win the culture war and subordinate state institutions to religious dogma.

Following Trump’s election and victories by far-right populists around the globe, integralism expanded its influence. The demonization of transgender people and the “woke agenda” by the mainstream conservative media offered wedge issues that could be used to roll back victories for LGBTQ, minority, and women’s rights, and helped radicalize mainstream social conservatism. Even Dreher himself, the most prominent defender of the Benedict Option (in a book of the same name), has moved closer toward the integralist position after seeing the success of Viktor Orbán’s illiberal agenda—although he still rejects Catholic integralism as implausible (and, as an Orthodox Christian, theologically erroneous).

Integralism, or thinly veiled variations, has primarily been a philosophy espoused by Catholic academics and public intellectuals including Patrick Deneen, Gladden Pappin, Sohrab Ahmari, and Adrian Vermeule. Many now prefer the label “postliberal” to soften their theocratic edge, while Protestant forms of this approach, like that advocated by Stephen Wolfe, often prefer “Christian nationalism.”

The Constitution, being a product of the Enlightenment, may seem an impediment to integralism, but its proponents have arrived at a solution: “common good constitutionalism.” Vermuele is at the forefront of this new approach to constitutional interpretation, which purports to offer a more effective way of achieving conservative goals than the still-dominant originalism. Vermuele argues that judges should read moral purposes—although always conservative ones—into ambiguous provisions in the Constitution, allowing for the law to direct citizens and society more broadly toward a cohesive common good. Meanwhile, he advocates for conservatives to use the administrative state to impose their vision of the common good on society without the need to worry about legislative restraint. While common good constitutionalism is still a distinctly minority view in conservative circles, it is becoming increasingly influential. Related views have even made it to the Supreme Court, with Justice Samuel Alito recently citing Dreher’s book The Benedict Option in a majority opinion.

Tech Authoritarian-Libertarians

“Authoritarian-libertarianism” may at first glance appear to be an oxymoron. In popular political ideology tests, authoritarians and libertarians are placed on opposite sides of the spectrum.

Yet a union between political despotism and personal liberty is more common than one might initially think. Influential libertarian thinkers like Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe have argued that democracy and freedom are incompatible. In the United States, some strands of libertarianism have long been associated with neo-Confederates and Holocaust deniers, bringing with them the racist, authoritarian, and paranoid elements of those bedfellows. Rothbard—an ideological progenitor of the modern tech authoritarian-libertarians—saw Pat Buchanan’s paleoconservatism as a kindred ideological spirit and described the far-right populism of David Duke as a model for future political success.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, software engineer Curtis Yarvin developed a set of ideas he would call the “Dark Enlightenment.” Impacted by the failure of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan and the financial bailouts following the Great Recession, Yarvin started a blog to rail against the perceived faults and failures of democratic government. It was in that blog that he first employed the term “red pill”—appropriated from The Matrix movie—which has since become widely popularized in right-wing political discourse.

Yarvin argues that political power is concentrated in a class of elites in the media, popular culture, and universities referred to as “the Cathedral.” The Cathedral has taken the place of religious authority in modernity’s secularized world, preaching the gospel of progressivism to the masses. Its central article of faith is egalitarianism, a principle that undermines the natural hierarchies that sustain social order and diminishes the possibilities for human freedom and excellence. Given the dominance of the Cathedral in American public life, reform within the system is impossible. Instead, Yarvin argues for a full “reboot” to shatter the existing political order and allow a new form of politics to emerge. He envisions a future in which democracy is replaced by small sovereign corporations led by CEO-monarchs and managed by an aristocratic shareholding class. These corporations would compete for citizens, who have the right to “exit,” or to leave their corporate state for another, but who would lack “voice”—the ability to have a say in how any of these political bodies operate. Yarvin calls this the “Patchwork model,” with its sovereign corporations being referred to as “patches.”

Around the same time, an associate of Yarvin’s who went by the pseudonym Bronze Age Pervert—Politico identified him as the Romanian-American writer Costin Alamariu in 2023—also began building an online following. Adept at internet meme and troll culture, Alamariu criticized human equality, feminism, homosexuality, evolution, and any other perceived shibboleths of modernity. Like Yarvin, he envisioned a new class of men—men, specifically—who would, like the Nietzschean Übermensch, transcend the emasculating values of the modern world and affirm their own self-created amoral power. According to Alamariu, freedom demands hierarchy, as it is by mastering one’s “space”—which includes dominating others—that one fulfills one’s desires. And the most fundamental desire, “the secret desire” Alamariu writes, is “to be worshiped as a god!”

These perspectives are not new. They are in many ways reminiscent of the adolescent world envisioned in Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, in which the naturally exceptional are clearly visible as such, while the “looters” are entitled and weak, desperately propagating egalitarian values to unjustly benefit from the gifted. Yarvin and Alamariu, as well as others in the broader illiberal right, are also strongly influenced by the 20^th century Italian fascist Julius Evola. Evola, who characterized himself as a “superfascista,” described modernity as a new dark age, in which materialism and rationalism had detached humanity from tradition, hierarchy, and order. In this decadent period, however, aristocratic men will assert their natural right to rule and transcend conventional morality. Advocates of the Dark Enlightenment see themselves as accelerationists racing toward this end, undermining democratic norms and institutions while using new technology to destabilize the status quo.

It would be easy to dismiss the Dark Enlightenment given its moral immaturity and unrealistic political agenda, but it has had an outsized influence on our politics. In 2022, conservative writer Nate Hochman told the New York Times Magazine, “Every junior staffer in the Trump administration read Bronze Age Mindset,” while Steve Bannon has positively cited both Alamariu and Yarvin. Darren Beattie, the acting Undersecretary of State, was discovered following The Bronze Age Pervert on X (formerly Twitter)—as was the current Vice President of the United States. JD Vance also described Yarvin as a friend and referenced him in a 2021 podcast interview: “There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin who’s written about some of these things. One has to basically accept that the whole thing is going to fall in on itself.” Yarvin, meanwhile, has been interviewed by Tucker Carlson with all the delight and praise Carlson exclusively reserves for authoritarians, while Michael Anton—director of policy planning in the Trump administration—positively reviewed Alamariu’s book Bronze Age Mindset for The Claremont Review of Books and featured Yarvin on his podcast. The connections are, unfortunately, found everywhere.

Nowhere are the ideas of the Dark Enlightenment more prominent than in Silicon Valley, where tech billionaire Peter Thiel is a notable proponent of its philosophy. Like Yarvin, Thiel responded to the international and economic challenges of the 2000s by concluding that democracy and freedom were incompatible. In his 2009 blog post “The Education of a Libertarian,” Thiel wrote that capitalist democracy was “an oxymoron,” as democracy inevitably leads to an expansion of government largess—historically, this has been in part due to “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women” which are “two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians.” Thiel has close connections with Yarvin, having invested in his decentralized server platform system and invited Yarvin to his home to watch the 2016 presidential election results. Thiel is also intertwined with Vice President Vance’s professional and political success, serving a mentor to Vance in the early 2010s, employing him at his venture capital firm in 2016, and donating $15 million to his 2022 Ohio Senate race—the largest single donation to a U.S. Senate candidate in American history.

Yarvin and the Dark Enlightenment’s influence extends beyond Thiel, however. Silicon Valley tech developers and venture capitalists like Balaji Srinivasan, Ben Horowitz, and Marc Andreessen—all of whom actively support the Trump administration and influence its policy agenda—have been prominent acolytes. Srinivasan is perhaps the most explicit about his aims. In his book The Network State he envisions a future in which polities take the form of virtual communities supported by cryptocurrency, which function in a similar way as Yarvin’s patches.

What unites these figures is the belief that some people are naturally aristocratic, in the old meaning of the word—virtuous or excellent—and that they have the right to rule. Necessity compels them to seek political power, lest they are governed by the mass of unremarkables who will inevitably restrict their freedom. Technology serves a central role in this imagined aristocratic revolution due to the transformative political, economic, and social dislocations that will result from digital currency, virtual reality, space exploration, and artificial intelligence. This libertarian future is one where an ideology of natural aristocracy justifies massive disparities in wealth and power.

National Conservative Populism

Each of these right-wing factions has a relatively narrow base, despite their outsized influence. National conservatism, by contrast, has come to dominate the modern Republican party and gain widespread popular support. National conservatism is the populist wing of the illiberal right, and it integrates elements of each faction—the racism and xenophobia of the alt-right, the religious zealotry of the integralists, and the authoritarianism of the tech authoritarian-libertarians—while watering them down into something palatable for a wide swath of Americans. This should not cause us to overlook its similarly illiberal elements, however, or its penchant for tyranny when taken to its furthest extreme.

Populism, broadly speaking, can be understood as a species of democratic politics—although one that is highly destructive to democracy. Democratic legitimacy is premised on popular sovereignty—on the rule of the people—yet this presents us with a crucial question: Who are the people? Princeton University professor Jan-Werner Müller has persuasively argued that populism is one potential answer to democracy’s question of peoplehood. As he puts it, populism “is a particular moralistic imagination of politics, a way of perceiving the political world which opposes a morally pure and fully unified, but ultimately fictional, people to small minorities who are put outside the authentic people.” In other words, populism divides society between an authentic people, who supposedly share a common will that defines their common identity, and a perceived minority of the actual population who are inherently foreign to the people and advocate policies contrary to its will.

This image of the people causes populists to see all political disagreement as suspect at best and treasonous at worst. They are prone to conspiratorial thinking, believing that any opposition to their policies—and especially any electoral defeats—must be the result of secretive cabals that have corrupted or interfered with the homogenous will of the people. The procedures and deliberative processes so prized by liberals as a means of ensuring equal participation in a diverse society are denounced as a system for the elite to manipulate the population, often through handouts to and cultivating grievances among a poor minority. Better to instead concentrate political power in a charismatic leader who can intuit the authentic people’s will and directly express it, without affording opportunities for corruption. Populists are therefore inclined to colonize the state, taking over nonpartisan institutions to wrest them from perceived elite control.

If this sounds familiar, it should. National conservatism has been engaged in this form of politics since it took control of the Republican party in 2016. Its electoral strategy can be traced to Steve Sailer, an alt-right columnist for the white supremacist outlets Taki’s Magazine and VDARE. In 2000, Sailor argued that the future of the Republican party lay in ignoring appeals to minority voters and instead adopting economic protectionism, anti-immigration policies, and white identity politics. His approach was embraced by Steve Bannon, while figures like Michael Anton, Yoram Hazony, and R.R. Reno have helped define national conservatism’s ideological contours.

In 2016, Anton argued that Trump represented the last chance to save the United States from destruction by the political left. Either the “bipartisan junta” that pushed the country to the brink would allow it to fall off a cultural cliff, or a new form of conservatism, one that emphasized “secure borders, economic nationalism, and [an] America-first foreign policy” would seize the reins of power. By 2020, Anton suggested that a possible solution to our political crisis was through “Red Caesarism.” Caesarism, Anton writes, is “halfway, as it were, between monarchy and tyranny,” which arises when democratic institutions no longer function for the benefit of the people. If an elite class is too influential—controlling the distribution of information, education system, and popular culture—then the true interest of the people will be unable to manifest itself through democratic processes. Under such conditions, it may be that “authoritarian one-man rule” is required, which is “partially legitimized by necessity.” While Anton acknowledges that Caesarism can prove dangerous to liberty, he frames this possibility as a nuclear option to be employed if the fight with the political left appears unwinnable.

Contrary to its name, populism often retreats into this type of authoritarian rule. What matters is the expression of the authentic people’s will; the democratic process is merely a secondary consideration. Politics, Aristotle wrote, requires that equals learn how to both rule and be ruled in turn: we must be capable of experiencing and accepting loss. The populist cannot lose, however—or, more precisely, any electoral defeat is illegitimate, as it signals the corrupt influence of an elite class that has undermined the true will of the people. Populists are therefore prone to turning to authoritarian leaders who, through force of will, can overcome elite corruption and purge it from the body politic. The greatest threat populists pose to democracy is that by seeing politics as existential they make it existential. The normal ebb and flow between different ideological positions, the jockeying for political influence, is replaced by direct threats to the health of democratic institutions.

This helps to explain the cult of personality that has developed around President Donald Trump, as well as the obsession in conservative circles with conspiracy theories. President Trump is the avatar of the people, defending them against the corrupting influence of elites from above and the entitled demands of minorities and immigrants from below. The new “Golden Age” that has taken hold of the conservative imagination following President Trump’s reelection promises to herald a final victory of the people against the globalist class, functioning as a populist Manichaean eschatology. Meanwhile, any set-back or loss is rationalized as the result of election interference, rather than a political rejection of national conservative policy. The attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021 was just one expression of this wider political attitude, and, unfortunately for our country, it may only be a harbinger of things to come.

National conservatives are right that we stand on the edge of a political crisis. But it is a crisis of their own making. They, along with the other factions of the illiberal right, pose a direct threat to the survival of our liberal democracy. If we do not want the 2020s and 2030s to mirror the 1920s and 1930s, we must understand the illiberal right—and respond with a robust defense of our values and institutions.

Ramon Lopez is an assistant professor of political science at Seton Hill University.

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