5-4 Presents: The Politics of Everything on "the New Right"

Hey folks, we've got something we think you might like.

It's the politics of everything from the New Republic.

In this episode, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Perrine are discussing the New Right with Sam Adler-Bell from Know Your Enemy.

If you have been listening to us for a while, you've probably heard us guest on their podcast.

The New Right is a group of young conservatives who hate the Republican establishment and love authoritarianism.

A lot of their politics derive from their tradcath beliefs, traditional Catholicism that's nostalgic for the imagined patriarchal family of the 1950s.

Gross.

So that's like what, like Archie Bunker shit, huh?

Yeah.

And that's what makes them dangerous.

Even within the right, they're a fanatic minority, but they're more than willing to use the levers of state power to impose their ideology on the majority.

So listen, and if you enjoy this episode, you can find the politics of everything wherever you get your podcasts.

These guys are on Twitter all day, every day.

From their perspective, when they look out onto the American scene, which is to say when they log onto Twitter every day or they read the New York Times or they watch Netflix, leftists are in charge everywhere they look.

They have a stranglehold on the American soul.

In everything from election results to highly publicized battles about political correctness on campus, it can seem sometimes like the entirety of American youth is left of center.

And that's actually more true than not.

There's a partisan age gap in American politics and it's likely never been wider.

Brookings Institute had a report last year that says, Millennials in Generation Z appear to be far more democratic leaning than their predecessors were at the same age.

But that doesn't mean there aren't any young conservatives.

Today we're talking with the writer Sam Adler-Bell about a group of young intellectuals and activists ready to enter and maybe eventually lead the conservative movement.

When an overwhelming majority of your generational cohort is liberal or left-wing, what issues, attitudes, and commitments drive a young person to the right?

What kind of young person actually finds conservatism appealing in an age of Trumpian populism?

Or maybe a better question is: what kind of young conservative intellectual does an age of Trumpian populism create?

I'm Alex Perrim.

And I'm Laura Marsh.

This is the politics of everything.

We're joined now by Sam Adler-Bell, a frequent contributor to The New Republic and co-host of the podcast Know Your Enemy.

Sam has a feature in the current issue of the magazine called The Radical Young Intellectuals Who Want to Take Over the American Right.

Sam, thank you so much for joining us.

Hey, thanks for having me.

So your piece for the New Republic is about a new breed of young conservatives, particularly a fairly radical group of them that are disgusted with the Republican Party establishment and basically believe that the conservative movement as it exists needs to be sort of destroyed and rebuilt.

You read about, in particular, two young men, Nate Hotchman and Jack Butler.

And before we get into what they believe, I'm curious how you encountered these guys.

Nate, it's an easy answer.

He was a fan of our podcast, Know Your Enemy.

Oh, yeah.

Give us a very brief description of what your podcast, who the enemy is.

I co-host a podcast about the American right with my friend, not my enemy, Matthew Sittman, who's an editor at the liberal Catholic magazine Commonwealth Matt's a former conservative.

I'm a sort of geek about conservative intellectual history.

So the enemy is conservatism, is American conservatism.

But Nate, a conservative, was a fan of the show?

Yeah, that's right.

We have sort of like relatively small subset of historically and intellectually minded young conservatives who like the show.

And figuring out exactly why that is is a little bit of a soul-searching thing for us.

But I think part of it is just that there's not that many places, even hosted by conservatives, where they go really deep into the history and sort of take the ideas undergirding American conservatism seriously, which we do.

From the beginning, when Nate first reached out to us, that's what he said.

Like, you know, I disagree with your conclusions, but I like the way you approach the subject matter.

So that the know-your enemy part of it for them is like knowing how the left thinks about their ideas.

Yeah, yeah.

And I mean, and I can imagine the appeal of that.

If there was a right-wing podcast that approached left-wing ideas with as much, I think, good faith and sophistication, I would definitely listen to it.

You know, it'd be fascinating.

That was the Glenn Beck program, don't you remember?

Oh, that's right.

What happened to that guy?

So Nate was a fan of the show, and then he works with Jack.

So Jack, the other main character in the story, he's one of the editors at National Review where Nate is a writer now.

So Jack is representative of someone who holds fairly familiar Republican beliefs, but Nate belongs to this other cohort that have been calling themselves the new right.

You describe them as radical young conservatives.

What defines their politics?

They're usually more pro-Trump than not, or at least see Trump as a good development in conservatism.

They are much more comfortable with state power.

They're much more critical of free markets.

They're isolationist for the most part, critical of the global war on terror.

They tend to be really skeptical of the sort of libertarian orthodoxy in conservatism.

The idea of just sort of liberty for its own sake is really concerning to them because really fundamentally they're culture warriors and they think that the right has not fought the culture war hard enough.

If you can imagine that.

But it's true.

At the risk of giving them a good slogan, if the cry of the internationalist left is no war but the class war, the new right's call is something like like no war but the culture war, which in their mythology is also itself a class war.

You describe them as culture warriors.

What are the issues in the US that get them really riled up?

They're super anti-choice.

They're really against transgender visibility and rights in every dimension.

They are really, really, really concerned about what they call wokeness, the whole kind of racial equity agenda.

They have a real nostalgia for a kind of post-war single-income, patriarchal, normative family.

Like, how do they feel about women in general?

Yeah, I mean, they basically, along with that, is a real hostility to the sexual revolution in general.

There are people in this milieu who will talk about the need for a sexual counter-revolution.

When I think about the culture wars, I think about all those big issues that you've named, but I think about them being fought.

Like the thing that makes it a culture war is that it's being fought over something patently ridiculous and unworthy unworthy of discussion.

A recent example is like the Mr.

Potato Head kerfuffle where conservatives were like really angry that there was now a like potato head person.

He doesn't come with a penis anymore.

Yeah.

And of course the whole thing was completely misrepresented and you can still buy a Mr.

Potato Head.

Are these guys the kind of people who would wade into that level of discussion or are they a bit more rarefied?

They're keeping their powder dry for something of more substance.

I think it varies by the personality.

These guys are on Twitter all day, every day.

So like they're not above a Mr.

Potato Head freak out, but they'll try to describe the problem of like the normalization of transgender ideology in a like a more intellectualize it a bit.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's true.

There is this sort of sense we all have that culture war means something that's a distraction or superfluous or is a way of not focusing on core economic issues, material issues that distinguish the ideological factions in America.

But a lot of people in the new right would say is that all issues are are culture war issues.

They think that economic issues are culture war issues.

If you create a political economy that encourages women to stay home with their children, encourages the formation of heterosexual families, you have to do that using economic policy.

But the outcome is the kind of culture that they want.

And so they will say things like, every issue is a culture war issue.

Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit funhouse mirror leftism there, isn't it?

Because instead of the argument that like at heart, all these things are material, is sort of a competing left-wing explanation for some of these issues totally yeah and so that what's interesting is as you say this is sort of the hip new young conservatism to a degree and all of them are also right-wing catholics

gosh yeah i mean for the most part i mean that's fascinating yeah i mean a lot of this is online these are like twitter personalities who also have perches at various right-wing magazines and so there's an online phenomenon that's called trad cath But Catholicism also has like a really long pedigree on the right.

Most of the founders of National Review were either cradle Catholics like Bill Buckley or Catholic converts like Brent Bozell, Wilmore Kendall.

Catholicism is really appealing to them because it's hierarchical, it sort of bestrides antiquity and modernity, it's patriarchal, and it has a very well-defined concept of sort of moral ends, which can't be reduced to liberal rationality, which is what they like about it.

One thing that's interesting, you mentioned the piece, is there's only one person in the piece who was born a Catholic.

Most of these people have converted to Catholicism.

Yeah, and that was true, like I said, of the early conservatives of the post-war era, too.

There's a sort of aspect of the zeal of the converted here.

These are people who become dissatisfied with liberal modernity for various reasons, and they go out looking for something that feels like a thicker, more demanding religious and political sense of obligation.

There's also in the background here the fact that Catholicism just has always played this role on the right.

And so a lot of young conservatives kind of convert because it's kind of the cool thing to do in right-wing elite circles.

It always has been.

In fact, it's something that Nate told me, which was that some of his concerns about taking the final step of being confirmed is that he feels like there's a lot of pressure to do it that isn't exactly motivated by like God or his theological commitments as much as it is his career.

Oh my God.

Wow.

Because Catholicism, it has such its hooks in the right-wing elite, if not really, you know, in America in the masses exactly, because Catholics are still split between the Democrats and the Republican Party.

So you've described their peeves, what they don't like about modern society, trans people, wokeness.

Outside of endless war, what is their problem with the Republican Party?

It seems to hate those things.

Well, like I said, I mean, they're a lot more sympathetic to embracing some kind of welfare state as long as it encourages certain kinds of family formation.

And they think that even though the conservative movement has sort of presented itself as the representative of religious Christians in America, that they haven't fought hard enough.

And they haven't been willing to use the levers of the state in particular to enforce some kind of moral orthodoxy in the public.

But the big thing is that the sort of fusionist bargain, which is sort of the operating assumptions of the American conservative movement since the 1950s, which is that politics is the place where you guarantee liberty and privately you want to foster traditionalism and Christian moral values, that that's been a really bad bargain for Christian conservatives.

Because actually, if you let liberalism just run amok in the public sphere, you lose it in the private sphere.

I was struck by their hostility to libertarianism because I remember when I briefly lived in Washington in the tail end of the Bush years, that was the only sort of successful and visible youth conservative movement.

They were all like Reason Magazine and Cato Institute.

That's where the energy was back then.

Ron Paul.

Yeah, and yeah, exactly.

Ron Paul had his own youth wing.

And it seems to have taken quite a shift to this sort of hierarchical Catholic-inspired culture war stuff.

Yeah, I mean, there's still that stuff out there.

There are still young libertarians and there are still sort of weirdos in the right-wing orbit who are libertarian, who would call themselves anarcho-capitalists or paleo-libertarians, who are basically just like libertarians but more racist.

But it is notable that the energy of this movement feels comparable to what you're describing amongst young libertarians back then.

The sort of outsiders of a younger generation at war with what they see as the mainstream of the party.

It is just kind of an irony and a contingent product of history that they take such different perspectives on the use of state power.

Do they have any heroes from the last 50 years in American politics?

Is there a figure, I guess not even just in America, like in American politics or somewhere else in the world that they think is doing things right?

A lot of them like Pat Buchanan.

So the sort of paleo-con strain and conservatism is more sympathetic to them because it could be more isolationist.

It was more nativist.

They're really hardcore nativists.

They want to stop illegal immigration, but they want to limit legal immigration significantly too, as did the Trump administration, at least in word.

So there's the paleo-constrain.

Some of them do look back to hardcore Christian corporatist governments in the 20th century, like there was Salazar.

So this is the long-lived dictatorship in Portugal.

Yes, there's Francoists amongst this group.

A lot of them share this kind of enthusiasm for Victor Orban's idea of illiberal democracy in Hungary.

So anywhere they perceive a sort of powerful state willing to impose a Christian moral orthodoxy on the public with a little bit more sympathy for welfarism to support certain kinds of families and certain kinds of workers, they like it.

That's so interesting because I think those examples really help when you're trying to imagine, like, oh, what would that be like?

And the answer is, Orban's hungry.

It's like.

Yeah, no, they're very explicit about that.

The whole kind of Christian Democrat tradition in Europe is something that they approve of.

So the sort of politicians and leaders that these people look up to basically gives away what they're after.

They're looking for illiberal authoritarianism.

But is anyone listening to that?

After a short break, we'll be back to talk about how much influence this group has.

How worried should we be?

Now that we've established what sort of regimes they admire, I feel like we should ask, why should we care about these guys?

You know, your subjects are a couple young people working at a magazine, right?

Yeah.

What's the case for caring about their wacky beliefs?

Yeah, it's a good question.

I mean, I think for me, the place that I came down is that we're familiar with this argument about the left, that people who graduate from elite universities have really like pretty extreme left-wing views compared to the median Democrat and certainly compared to the median voter.

The same thing is true of these negatively polarized right-wing, highly educated elites.

They're far to the right of the median Republican.

But all those signals sort of point to, we can't discount it just because it's a sort of phenomenon amongst these very strange elite intellectuals, because very strange elite intellectuals and very young, strange elite intellectuals have been in charge of the conservative movement forever.

It's just that the character of that movement is changing because their character is changing.

You talk about the sense of isolation this group of guys has.

Can you explain how that forms in college?

For a certain kind of, especially especially white man who came up in an elite university in the past 10 years, but maybe even more so in the past five, six, seven, there was a sense of, you know, like a suffocating liberal orthodoxy on their campus.

And if they have some other kind of ideological inputs pushing them in the direction of whether it's like misogyny or some nasty racial ideas or whatever, or just a kind of contrarian instinct, they may find themselves in a position where they they go, all of the people who are the authority around me on this campus are telling me to believe this set of often superficial, but nonetheless progressive things.

And I'm going to look for the people who are saying the bad thing, the thing you're not supposed to say.

And then they find each other.

I mean, some of them are so young, like Nate Hotchman.

He's only 23, just out of college.

Do they maintain a sense of isolation after college?

Because when you look around, elite conservative Catholics are pretty well represented.

Like, look at the Supreme Court.

Look who's on the Supreme Court.

For a minority, like a religious minority to be so well represented.

This is not the mainstream version of Christianity in the United States.

They actually have a huge amount of power.

So I'll say two things.

One is that from their perspective, the only place in American life where conservatives have any power is basically the courts and every once in a while, the federal government.

And they are very fixated on the fact that progressives and leftists control all the cultural hegemony.

And that's precisely why they think it's so important that when they periodically get power in the form of a Trump and when they have a supermajority on the court, that they absolutely need to use it to enforce in the private sphere their ideal morals.

Because otherwise, in every other way, every other input into American private morality, the morality that reigns kind of regardless of what the government does, liberals and progressives have control.

So that's their perspective.

It's also especially because they live in D.C., New York, and California, where they actually are surrounded by liberals.

These people aren't living in small communities that are conservative, where they could, but they're intellectual elites who want to work in the power centers.

So their perspective on what America is is totally skewed by the fact that they spend all their time on Twitter.

It's mediated and it's like vibes-based.

It's completely vibes-based.

Yeah.

Like you will never feel like you will win if you have won everything and then see that people still don't think the right way.

That seems like a flaw in their ideology.

Well, it's a flaw, but it's a dangerous and symptomatic flaw, which makes them attracted to more kinds of authoritarianism because that's how they imagine you're able to change the way people think.

Right.

The argument that Hollywood is overwhelmingly liberal and that the people who are conservative are kind of bombarded with liberal propaganda and they have liberal values rammed down their throats, as one you hear all the time.

But the right has its own very robust and incredibly well-funded media infrastructure.

I mean, you don't hear of small right-wing magazines just collapsing because there's no money with anything like the same frequency you hear about liberal magazines going under.

Going back to what you said about people being sort of radicalized and pushed towards the right in college, when they graduate from college, there are jobs for these people.

There are so many think tanks you can go and work for if you're a young conservative.

So many magazines where you can get associate editor jobs that don't exist in the liberal media.

What do you make of that and of that right-wing ecosystem?

So one of the things that Nate said to me in the piece is that he acknowledges that there is this sort of conservative welfare state for kind of unsophisticated but right-wing people who graduate from college and want to write takes.

And so he has encountered people who are not particularly smart in that world.

But also the thing is that there are a certain number of people like him who are really interested in ideas and are pretty good writers and do like to think hard about intellectual topics.

And for those people, it's like an embarrassment of riches.

And part of what's so attractive about it is not just that like you get a job, but you get let into this rarefied world that's like both really luxurious, but also rebellious.

And for intellectual conservatives that is just an intoxicating stew that keeps young people engaged in conservative bullshit for a long time what i find interesting is that if you're a young left-winger on campus there is no network that will invite you to retreats to drink scotch with rich people rich leftists like and if even if you're a normal progressive your entry into this world might be working for the world's worst boss at a nonprofit or being accused or being abused in a campaign, the lowest rung of a campaign, or freelance writing for no money.

I wonder if the right has this way of identifying their future talent, grooming it, and even sort of spoiling it in that way.

Why do they do it so differently?

Well, to take on the left side of it, I think one of the things is that the power centers of the Democratic Party are controlled by mainstream liberals.

Right.

They're not like scouring the campuses for like really spart Marxists to give internships to.

And like to be a mainstream liberal, it has much less of this kind of rebellious quality.

It's just kind of like being invited into the power elite in a sort of uncomplicated way.

Whereas right-wingers, even though we may think of this as delusional, they still think of themselves as a rebellious, insurgent troop of outsiders with dangerous ideas.

And therefore, they feel that they need to teach their new up-and-coming talent a sort of counter-tradition of American history and of political philosophy.

And in the left, there is no comparable thing.

I mean, I'd like it as a left-winger who likes reading books to get paid to live in like Pomona for a week and read like Polanyi.

That sounds good.

I would love a fellowship.

I would love for someone to just give me a fellowship of some kind.

Well, it's easier to offer someone the feeling of feeling like they've been chosen and they're entering this glamorous elite if your whole thing is hierarchy.

Yes.

Like the right sort of just has this built-in advantage there, which is like, this is what we believe and we're going to pull you up into it to be one of the

important people.

And the whole thing on the left is like, no, we want equality.

We want everyone to be treated the same and to have the same opportunities.

I want everyone to get fellowships.

That's what I want.

Yeah.

Everyone, every working American deserves a fellowship.

I believe this very strongly.

That's a really good point, though, Laura.

We have incompatible goals.

Like we don't want to create an elite elect elect who understands the true nature of society and then can direct it from on high.

Right.

I think it's the same with the funding too for these magazines, for these think tanks.

Like it's completely consistent with a right-wing view of the world that you are going to like make lots of money and then dump it into an organization so that you can control what people think.

That's not really what left-wing donors are trying to do.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that You can have this experience as a liberal.

Maybe not as like a revolutionary leftist.

Well, you can kind of of have this experience if you're the kind of liberal who is like, I'm going to come up with some healthcare plans that will minimize the amount of coverage we offer to people with stage four cancer.

Yeah, exactly.

That's the career drag.

Speaking of this whole ecosystem, Claremont is something that comes up in the piece.

Can you explain for the uninitiated what that is?

The Claremont Institute is a right-wing, a socially conservative think tank in California.

Claremont was one of the first places that came out and said, no, Trump, let's go for Trump, because it's populism, it's nationalism, it's way more aggressively patriotic.

Claremont has been punching way above its historic weight in the Trump era and since Trump, playing a role in trying to justify his coup, in effect, playing a role in kind of bringing more illiberal and scary strains into acceptable conservative discourse.

And a lot of the people who are these young new right figures move through its very robust programming and fellowships for young conservatives.

Just going back to the coup thing, so you actually mentioned that John Eastman, who wrote the memo on how Trump could try to stay in office despite losing the election, he is associated with Clammont.

Yeah, he's like a legal scholar, constitutional scholar associated with them.

He wrote the memo for the vice president telling him how he could constitutionally just make it so that Trump would stay in power, basically.

Some of the people you talk to, I think, are actually surprisingly realistic about the unlikelihood of their vision of society happening democratically.

But my question is, are they going to install a Catholic theocracy, though?

Like, regardless.

Like, are they going to do that?

I don't know.

I actually, I don't know if I have a great answer to this question.

There are internal to conservative debates and even internal to people who are sympathetic to new right goals, there's an acknowledgement that the public is really not with them, the conservative public even, that Trumpism doesn't represent some victory for like hardcore conservative, like Catholic, hierarchical authoritarians.

It's more like a victory for Jacksonian libertarian impulses.

Tanner Greer, this right-wing blogger who is quite smart, wrote this blog post about this discrepancy between the means of the new right and their ends.

His line is, pity the Whig who wishes to lead the Jacksonian masses.

That in effect that they're inheritors of the sort of like patrician, pietistic Northeastern tradition, puritanical tradition, which wants to impose all these orthodoxies, which is just not really what Trumpism represents.

So that being said, if these people are serious about trying to like impose this moral orthodoxy on America, then that's why they become more sympathetic to things like John Eastman telling Trump you can keep power no matter what, or people like Adrian Vermeule, who's a Harvard integralist who believes believes that basically you should use the administrative state, which used to be the thing that the conservatives hated more than anything, that you should use the levers of power and the administrative state basically to nudge the moral orthodoxy of America towards Catholic theology.

That you should use the unaccountable powers of the state, non-democratic powers, to achieve their ends.

And so the reason that there's this sympathy, I think, for counter-majoritarianism, for anti-democratic measures, for state power through the bureaucracy as opposed to through the legislature is that they know that their ideas are really not a majoritarian proposition well i'm alarmed now so

sam thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today yeah as you can see i could talk about this forever i feel like we very rarely end on a note of being alarmed yeah

we're like oh this thing we were talking about didn't actually exist that's fine

but so we don't have to be worried about the rats was that the takeaway from last time yeah this it's it's not a thing.

Okay.

No, I mean, no more worried than usual was our conclusion.

No more worried than usual.

So we're more concerned about Catholic theocracy than rats.

Than rats.

Yeah.

Havana syndrome, rats, or.

Or cops dying from seeing fentanyl.

Yes, right.

Without touching it or taking it.

All right.

It was really nice talking to you, Sam.

Great, you too.

Bye.

You can find Sam's piece, the radical young intellectuals who want to take over the American right at newrepublic.com.

Before we end the show, I have a correction.

On our recent episode about rats, I said that 311 doesn't have a rat response squad.

A listener from DC wrote in to say, that's actually wrong.

Many cities have a whole process for responding to rat complaints.

So we looked into this and the New York City Health Department says that after you call 311, quote, your complaint will be routed to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

The health department will inspect the property within two weeks of receiving the complaint, complaint, unless the property was recently inspected.

So, my apologies for getting that wrong.

And if you want to know more about the state of rats in New York, I can highly recommend checking out the rat information portal at nyc.gov/slash rats.

I'm sorry, I can't hear the phrase the state of rats in New York without my mind immediately going to Albany.

Well, do you have a URL recommendation?

I don't know.

Would there be a landing page for Cuomo's book?

The Politics of Everything is co-produced by Talk Talk House.

Emily Cook is our executive producer.

Melissa Kaplan is our audio editor.

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As always, thanks for listening.