What is the New Right’s narrative, and why does it appeal to some on the left?

The “New Right” is having a moment. That cannot be denied. Neoconservatives - with their Christian moralising about The Simpsons or Desperate Housewives, love of globalisation and outsourcing, and desire to throw around American military might - are out of fashion on the right. Now the right is all about defending Western culture, economic and political nationalism, and fighting culture wars at home, not military wars overseas.

The “New Right” is not a political party or movement or philosophy. It’s not a group of people who think one thing or even share the same values beyond the broad description of being conservative. A few things can be said for certain about them: they are on the right, they are opposed to the left, they are most numerous in America (but have counterparts in the UK and the rest of the Western world) and, most importantly, they’re strongly against the establishment of liberals and big business. In other words, their main enemy is the Third Way of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.

This new movement is best described in this article by James Pogue in Vanity Fair. To find out more about this movement read that article. It’s full of detailed reporting from years of studying the American right. What I want to talk about is the narrative that bands the diverse bits of New Right into this uneasy alliance. Their shared worldview. Most of my analysis draws heavily on Pogue’s article and I wouldn’t be able to write this if it wasn’t for his excellent reporting. 

The Cathedral

The narrative that (broadly) unites the New Right is called “the Cathedral”, which is a term to describe the liberal (both small and big “L”) institutions in democratic society. The Cathedral was coined by blogger Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) who is a known “intellect” popular with the New Right. The Cathedral narrative is difficult to define exactly, but it loosely describes a series of political, cultural and civil society institutions that create the cultural and political power nexus at the heart of America. The Cathedral extends from universities to the White House, via newspapers and business board rooms. It has power and protects its hold on power. The New Right are against The Cathedral. 

The New Right’s war against The Cathedral is mainly a culture war. The political theories behind the idea of The Cathedral are complex (although, at times, they’re conspiratorial and outright terrifying) however, on the surface the New Right are engaging in the standard anti-liberal, anti-woke, culture war that has gripped the right globally. At first appearance, it’s all very normal. They are opposed to left-wing institutions, like universities, and support right-wing institutions, like the police. However, there is something else going on here.

The New Right take the culture war to extreme ends. J. D Vance - author of Hillbilly Elegy, the Republican Party nominee in the 2022 Senate election in Ohio and member of the New Right - said to Pogue in the Vanity Fair piece linked above: “I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.” Banning everyone considered “woke” from government and cultural institutions is extreme, even by the standard of grumpy online conservatives, but what makes this different enough from the rest of the right to earn the moniker “New Right”?

Young, energetic and cool 

What makes the New Right different is that they have a cool edge that people like Piers Morgan and Nigel Farage can only dream of. They might be fighting the same culture war, but the above mentioned perpetually peeved press provocateurs aren’t the vanguard of a new culture, they're the reactionary end of an old, dying one.

The New Right has a punk edge to it. I have been kicked in the head at punk shows more times than I can count, and I’ll say that these suit-wearing nationalists are not punk, but they have, consciously or unconsciously, appropriated the aura of punk. They’re not standing up for the poor and marginalised as bands from The Clash to Dream Nails have done. They’re also not the shout of pain from a downtrodden underclass like the Sex Pistols were. However, they do have the youthful rebelliousness of punk

What they also have is the claim they are fighting a dominant, puritanical culture and that they are smashing up the neatly ordered world of the establishment by not giving a fuck. This cool edge means the scene has on its fringes trendy figures like podcaster, actress, filmmaker, model and Instagram personality Dasha Nekrasova, mentioned in Pogue’s piece, who most people know for playing Comfrey in Succession.

The New Right and the disaffected left

The presence of people like Nekrasova indicates that the New Right is a countercultural scene with youth and energy behind it. It also highlights how many disaffected members of the left are flirting with this scene. Nekrasova and her co-host, Anna Khachiyan, talk on their podcast Red Scare about how they supported Bernie Sanders and Nekrasova has been described as Sailor Socialism, after a clip of her being questioned by an InfoWars reporter dressed as a an anime character went viral. Yes, I know. Internet.

Recently, Nekrasova has been photographed with Alex Jones and has shared memes on Instagram with statements along the lines of “the far-left and the far-right should unite to destroy capitalism”. It’s all very horse-shoe politics.

As these are New York scenesters we’re talking about, all of this is laced in about ten levels of irony, making it impossible to know how much of this is genuine and how much is for the lols. Has the cool thing for it-girl New Yorkers to do switched from socialism to nationalism? Maybe. I’m not cool enough to know.

Cool world 

Nekrasova is not the only instance of someone who used to be on the left being in the New Right. Notably Lydia Laurenson, Yarvin’s fiancé, who describes herself in Pogue’s article as having “a background in social justice”, is part of the scene. Pogue writes that Laurenson “was ‘horrified’ by ‘how the mainstream media covered the [2020 BLM] riots.… It was just such a violation of all of my values.’”

Tellingly Pogue adds: “She’d had a strange realization after she and Yarvin started dating, discovering that some of her friends had been reading him for years. ‘I found out that all these people had been reading NRx stuff just like me. They just never told anyone about it,’ she said. ‘It has been very striking to me,’ she said, ‘how cool this world is becoming.’”

There seems to be a mix of disaffected left-wing people in amongst the right-wing culture warriors. There is likely to be a mix of reasons for this. Some are people who may think the left has become too extreme. Some are people who supported Bernie and his plans for radical change, and now that this has failed, they’re looking for another radical programme that might succeed in bringing down corporate America. Some people just want to see stuff burn. Some have always been drawn to fringe ideas that are common to the left and the right. 

Families and meaningful work 

The fact that the New Right has picked up some support from disaffected members on the left isn’t surprising. The New Right is opposed to Reaganomics and the Third Way, neither of which is loved by the left. Pogue wrote: “They share a the [sic] basic worldview: that individualist liberal ideology, increasingly bureaucratic governments, and big tech are all combining into a world that is at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning.” This is something most people on the left can largely agree with.

At one point Pogue asks Blake Masters - a venture capitalist, a Republican nominee for the Senate in Arizona, close associate Peter Thiel and one of the most public figures in the New Right - what victory would look like to him, and he said: “It’s just families and meaningful work.” He added: “So that you can raise your kids and worship and pursue your hobbies and figure out what the meaning of it all is.” 

Pogue writes that “pretty much anyone could agree with this” and certainly lots of people on the left do. You would struggle to find someone who doesn’t believe in families and meaningful work on the left. What the left and the New Right have in common is that they believe that our current economic system - created through years of Reaganomics, globalisation, Third Way politics and neo-liberal economics - actively prevents this. 

Culture war grand standing on Fox News

The narrative of the New Right includes elements of left-wing politics, which is why it appeals to disaffected people on the left. The cool edginess of the scene, and the fact that it might have a tangible impact, also attracts people who are dissatisfied with the current system.

It’s interesting to note that when figures from the New Right are in private talking one-on-one to Pogue, they say things that could, at least, be sympathetic to left-wing arguments. When they are on TV, they resort to banging the culture war drum and liberal/leftie bashing.

There is more to the narrative and political project of the New Right than just culture war grand standing on Fox News. Even when they are doing culture war bits, they aren’t doing standard right-wing culture war talking points. Yes, they are socially conservative and opposed to social justice, but the New Right is big enough to include people from the so-called manosphere who give tips on how men can pick up women for casual sex. The New Right isn’t down with Christian moralising, they claim to be more accepting than the totalitarian and puritan liberals/left.

Like British nationalists

It’s hard to get to the bottom of exactly what the political philosophy behind the New Right narrative is, or what these people believe. Partly because it’s a large scene with lots of different people in it. What links them together is a narrative about society, where it’s gone wrong and what needs to be done to fix it.

As this is an anti-free market right-wing narrative, British readers will assume this movement is like the BNP and other British nationalist parties, who are also known for their right-wing social policies and opposition to globalisation. (Mainly the immigration side, but they have a side order of class war and protect the NHS from privatisation to go with it.) 

Late Republican period

There is something to this comparison. The New Right’s flirtation with conspiracy theories and their love of authoritarianism is certainly something they have in common with British nationalists. Vance talks in Pogue’s article about America being in a “late republican period”; referring to when Julius Caesar seized power from the Roman Republic. For a candidate for public office in November’s election, Vance is terrifyingly relaxed about the idea of a military strongman sweeping away democracy. 

Mentioning Caesar an Ancient Rome makes the whole thing sound classy. If Vance talked about Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome or Adolf Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch it would make him sound more frightening, but it’s probably closer to what the New Right has in mind when people throw around phrases like late republican period.

This is an intellectualised Trumpism. It takes blustering about elections being stolen and turns it into a narrative that encompasses ideas about how the state works, how culture is controlled and how political consensus is made (and broken). This may be an intellectual movement, but it can’t be overstated how anti-democratic this scene is. One particular exchange with Vance from Pogue’s article is worth quoting at length:

“I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” he said. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say—“he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

”This is a description, essentially, of a coup.”

An elected Emperor

Most alarmingly, the New Right is opposed to liberal democracy or the checks on absolute power that have been slowly built up from the English Civil war onwards. America elects a president not an Emperor, which is what you would have if the checks of the liberal democratic system were removed.

The New Right appears to argue that winning an election gives you absolute power. Maybe they think electing someone to absolute power is a truer form of democracy than a system that has a legislature and courts to check the use of the leader’s power. If someone wins power in an election then they should wield it, they seem to say. The main, but not the only, problem with this is that people from Caesar’s days onwards have known that if someone is given absolute power, after winning an election or otherwise, before long you don’t have elections anymore. 

Warnings from women, LGBTQ+ and people of colour

Another thing worth pointing out about the New Right and their narrative is how many women, LGBTQ+ and people of colour are really scared by this predominantly male, white and heterosexual scene. Women, LGBTQ+ and people of colour are the ones who have had to fight for rights and protection under the current liberal (both small and big “L”) democratic system that the New Right rallies against. 

There are a lot of problems with liberal democracy; between the abolition of Roe vs Wade and police violence against people of colour, it's hard to argue that American liberal democracy provides equality and protection under the law. However, once this system is torn down by the New Right, the people who will be most vulnerable will be women, LGBTQ+ and people of colour who will have lost the (at least theoretical) protection offered by liberal democracy.

Pogue asked Yarvin why so many people were afraid of his movement and Yarvin’s argument is not convincing. He said that opposition to the New Right “is fundamentally in service of something that is far worse than anything, in your wildest nightmares”. In their words: you shouldn’t be worried about what we want to do with absolute power because the current system is worse. This is misdirection and deliberately avoiding the question. 

The price of getting attention 

One of the most telling parts of Pogue’s article is when he follows Masters on the campaign trail. Masters attends a gathering of non-city dwelling retirees, i.e. the principal Republican party members and voters, who aren’t particularly moved by his ideas on how we regulate tech companies and create more meaningful work. When the Q&A comes around, the Boomers only want to ask about how the Democrats stole the 2020 election from Trump, which Masters doesn’t deny. He then indulges their delusional fantasies further (if he doesn’t believe them himself). 

Whatever the New Right’s views on how the hegemony of Liberal culture, globalisation and big tech are sucking the meaning out of work and life, what’s cutting through is when they spread dangerous conspiracy theories about a stolen election and vaccines. Spreading these narratives is the price of getting attention in conservative America and the New Right are more than happy to pay it. The simple narrative of the Big Lie (Trump’s stolen election) drowns out any more nuanced or complex discussion.

In this way, the New Right is helping Trump and other much more thuggish authoritarians. If the New Right gets their American Empire (or whatever comes after the late republican period) I wonder how much the knuckle dragging authoritarians and Trump supporters will tolerate right-wing intellectuals. I am reminded of Winston Smith’s colleague at the Ministry of Truth, in 1984, who loves Big Brother too much and will likely get purged faster than someone who makes a minor slip up. Authoritarians want glum acceptance, not zealots.

Philosophically well-read useful idiots

The New Right has a well developed and complex narrative, which is also really scary when you look closely at their disdain for liberal democracy. They might be against globalisation, Reaganomics and the runaway power of big tech, and picking up support from disaffected lefties, but this makes them a better-read BNP and not a movement that will improve the world. 

What is most significant is that their narrative is spreading in American conservative circles and may well replace the Reagan era neo-liberal narrative as the dominant one on the right. Those of us on the left should be wary of this and be aware of how dangerous these people are in their quest for absolute power.

Despite their well developed and complex narrative, their professional appearance, air of cool and philosophical insight, they are often useful idiots for Trump and his simple right-wing conspiracy theories about stolen elections. They indulge this and other culture war bullshit to get attention. Ultimately it may destroy them, but they may destroy liberal democracy first.

Donald Trump picture taken by Gage Skidmore and used under creative commons.