There's Nobody Coming

The New Right and the Conservative Revolution

George Scholz, Veteran’s Association, 1922

I realize this is something that John Ganz has already kind of written about—but as many of you know I’ve had a long-standing interest in Ernst Jünger and the broader Interwar Intellectual Right—and wanted to briefly write a bit about where I see the ideological core of the New Right going forward.

As many of you probably don’t know—I was actually at the first National Conservative Conference as a guest of some fellowship I was in years ago. It was a relatively subdued affair at that point, a 2/3 filled conference room in a mid-level DC hotel with speakers more concerned with wonkish debates about industrial policy than anything to do with a culture war. If memory serves right, I’m pretty sure John Bolton was actually a featured speaker, not exactly someone I associate with the modern New Right.

Given my interest in these movements, I’ve paid attention to them fairly closely over the years, and I think the closest approximation of the mood of the ideological tendency is much of what existed in the 1920s in Weimar Germany. It’s now filled with figures like Paul Gottfried and a coterie of Claremont Fellows posturing as the vanguard of reclaiming a more authentic “nation.”

Now Ganz has already written about the whole “national despair” thing, so for the sake of simplicity, I’ll just briefly say I agree with him.

What I’m more interested in—and a related tendency I see—is the notion that this is our only opportunity. It is a key component of fascist, or “conservative revolutionary” movements that there is an existential foe against which all politics must be organized around. You could fairly accurately approximate the entirety of Carl Schmitt’s political theory with this notion.

The core of their belief system is that there is nobody else coming. It is only up to us. Nobody will save us.

Now this isn’t to relitigate the whole “Is the New Right a fascist movement” debate thing, I think Ganz and Anton Jäger both make fairly decent points. This is more that I want to make a case that the sort of fever that has taken hold of the Right in terms of the culture wars isn’t going to break. It’s relatively immaterial to me how exactly we define this movement in an academic ideological sense.

Where I’m going with this is that I don’t really think this is an ideological movement capable of backing down. Now judging by the performance of the terminally online DeSantis campaign this stuff isn’t really that popular, and the number of ideologically committed Republicans in Congress is fairly small. This is fair enough considering hearing someone mumbling about how Vladimir Putin’s autocracy is necessary to combat LGBT people would send the average voter running to the hills.

It has for all intents and purposes won the battle for the minds of the conservative chattering class, however. Look across most major conservative publications from the National Review to the Daily Wire and you’ll see their most popular writers either identify as being openly authoritarian reactionaries or pushing for a form of conservative revolution. It’s no longer just Claremont and their screeds about needing to take back America from 70 million supposed internal “aliens.”

The intellectual wing of the conservative movement isn’t subject to the same electoral pressures as members of Congress, and can generally get away with being complete weirdos. More importantly, their ideology demands that they never give an inch. They’ve all taken on the mantra of the infamous Flight 93 Election essay, they all see themselves as now having to charge the cabin.

If you think your plane is going down, what reason do you have to let up? I say this because there’s still a delusion in a lot of corners that these guys would just come to the table if liberals and moderates reached out to them. If we just make a few compromises and accept some nebulous anxieties as being legitimate, they will deescalate their rhetoric!

Look you need to understand these people are all just basically groypers at this point. They all think that the ADL is a shadowy organization persecuting them. Every one of them sees the only way forward is for some form of authoritarian government to crush their ideological foes before all is lost forever. In their ideological system, they are the ones under siege.

This notion of being under assault with no way forward but to crush your foes is an essential element in terms of understanding the 1920s fascist and proto-fascist ideological tendencies. The various nationalist movements in Germany were truly convinced that everything and everyone was out to get them.

The very concept of industrial modernity—with the exception of Jünger who was an extremely idiosyncratic hypermodernist during this period—was often assigned the position of the grand conspirator seeking to destroy the German Soul. Heidegger essentially developed his entire metaphysics around this principle. One aspect (of many influences) of the antisemitism of the nationalists and eventual Nazis was the paranoia that Jewish people were the drivers of this new modernity and its accompanying social changes.

The form this takes now is much more nebulous but largely takes the same shape in the various complaints about “globalists” that are disintegrating the (largely imagined) organic communities that once formed the civic communities that the New Right fetishizes as the pinnacle of political organization. There is the same constant anxiety in these circles that if these influences aren’t stopped, everything will be lost forever.

It’s not really a tendency that has any grounding in rational discourse either. I can argue with a Bush-style conservative about policy, there’s no real arguing with a paranoia-as-politics-style New Right person. It’s a Sorelian movement built around mythmaking as a call to political action, and the Jack Posobiecs and Chris Rufos of the world have no obligation to the truth. After all, if you’re onboard Flight 93, does it matter if you tell the passengers a series of lies if it gets them to charge the cabin?

My point with all of this is that there’s really no “winning the argument” with them. The center-right crowd isn’t going to present them with a bunch of policy papers that somehow make them see the light. They’re just enemies like the rest.

This all begs the question of what exactly we do about all this. Well, I think the good news is that they really are all complete weirdos. Anytime someone on the New Right actually says or does something outside of the cloister of their conferences or internet circles—it usually ends with them losing their jobs.

They’re never going to actually take a majority outright in our legislature if candidates like Blake Masters are anything to go by. They might be able to have an audience, but the American people writ large are in their hearts are moral enough to not bring men like that into the Senate.

There’s also no real threat of a figure like Ernst Thälmann blowing apart our political system and giving them the wedge they need to get in. RFK Jr. might be a complete moron, but he’s hardly going to cause a split in the Democratic Party.

It’s not to say there’s no threat. They can continue to wreak havoc in Congress by generally causing an endless gridlock and certainly will inspire more people on the Right to adopt extreme viewpoints. If Republicans win the Presidency with Trump, his administration will be staffed up and down with the New Right.

Unfortunately, the only way to stave them off is all pretty unsatisfying.

First, you have to convince the center-right that there is a real non-trivial threat to Liberal Democracy from their right flank that cannot be negotiated with or brought into the broader conservative coalition. They have to accept at some level this will just cost them electoral power, and their centrist faction will have to make common cause with Democrats. They rolled over for the first Trump administration, so I don’t have much optimism though.

The other essential element is that the Democrats just need to win. Is it an ideal system when every election is an existential crisis? Well, no. But that’s just democracy, and we have to accept existential risk if we want to have one. The alternative after all is the autocratic system the New Right has been begging for us to implement this entire time.