Sorry to break it to you, kids — your parents’ conservatism is dead. Country clubs, good manners, a gentle life punctuated by regular church attendance: These are the hallmarks of a waning political identity, the adherents of which voted desperately for Jeb Bush, then Marco Rubio, then Ted Cruz, before glumly accepting that a billionaire playboy was to be their standard-bearer this November. In its place comes a force promising a disruption of the gentle arc of history and an escape for everybody from 4chan trolls to a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
Welcome to the new right. The people who powered Donald Trump through the primaries care little for fiscal conservatism, the free market and Christian values. Conservative pundits penned shocked column after shocked column as Trump mocked conservative orthodoxy — praising Planned Parenthood, arguing to increase the minimum wage, saying little about the rising national debt — and suffered no consequences in the polls. These pundits’ intellectual forebears — thinkers like Edmund Burke and Milton Friedman — bear scant relevance to the Trump voter.
So what does the new right look like? For one, Trump supporters are far more likely to live in declining communities. They are afflicted by the problems that Princeton economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case identified in a study of the white working class, which revealed rural towns pervaded by drug abuse and suicide. They are blue-collar voters fed up with business as usual, who need something to change. Such people might once have been Democrats, but the coalition of the modern progressive party — comprised of women, minorities and the highly-educated — has little room for them.
Intermingled with these material concerns is something darker: a strain of nasty chauvinism, which laments multiculturalism, the relaxation of traditional gender roles and the ascendancy of “PC culture.” It is encapsulated by the alt-right, an internet-based collective of nihilists, racists (believers in “human biodiversity,” if you ask them) and anti-feminists.
They grow up in a world that they perceive as sterile and coddling, the theatre for a new iteration of the culture wars. And I don’t mean the religious versus secular culture wars, the fights over school prayer, abortion rights, reproductive freedom. Those are all but over. I mean round two of the culture wars — political correctness versus free speech, feminism versus traditional masculinity, multiculturalism versus racialism.
And, boy, are they worried that they’ll lose. A deep insecurity underpins their concerns. Alt-righters joke and troll and behave like they’re untouchable online, but let’s remember that one element of the movement is the pickup artist community, misogynists desperate to attract the attention of women. These are men who need to reaffirm that they are the alphas that they have historically been. It’s clear in their language: Politicians who are insufficiently conservative are “cuckservatives,” and men who don’t meet the standards of traditional masculinity are “betas.”
While an indigent worker bemoaning the decline of his community and a racist troll come from disparate worlds, the psychology underlying their grievances binds them together. It’s what helps to explain the support of some of Trump’s unlikelier backers, too. Take Peter Thiel, for example, a tech entrepreneur who spoke at the Republican National Convention. He is a libertarian with little faith in democracy and an intolerance for political correctness, an ideological mix resembling that of some neoreactionaries, the intellectual cousins of the alt-right. As a Stanford Law School graduate, Thiel became pessimistic about the fate of capitalism in America.
This is where Trump and the new right come in. Picture Thiel as the Kafkaesque bourgeois: the affluent beneficiary of a system that, nonetheless, he cannot change. Along comes Trump, a living spanner in the works of the distended federal government. He offers an escape for Thiel, the disaffected worker and the disgruntled troll alike.
Trump isn’t the final destination of the new right; rather, he is an inflection point, the catalyst for the abandonment of bipartisan political truths in favor of virility, nationalism and strength. He promises an exit from the tyranny of an economic and cultural consensus that has embittered his supporters. Horrifying though it may be, he has grasped something powerful and enduring.
-Sam Wolfe ’20
Contact Sam Wolfe at swolfe2 ‘at’ stanford.edu.