Today, Explained - Meet the New Right

Episode Date: August 10, 2022

The newest conservative dissidents want to radically reshape the Republican party and American democracy. Journalist James Pogue explains the confounding movement, which includes Senate candidates Blake Masters and J.D. Vance. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Efim Shapiro, and hosted by Noel King.Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A poll about Americans' attitudes toward our government came out a few weeks back. On first read, it's kind of hilarious. On second read, it's worrying. A majority of American voters, writes the New York Times, it was their poll, across nearly all demographics and ideologies, believe their system of government does not work. Some of them have coalesced into the new right. They're skeptical of democracy,

but want to use government to achieve their ends. It might be scarier than fascism. It might be a kind of union of tech billionaires and anti-democrats and people who believe in sort of human hierarchy

creating an absolute serfdom and dystopia that looks like nothing we've ever seen before. Coming up on Today Explained, is the new right the future of conservatism? Or are they the other F word? Fascists. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started.

It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. James Pogue is a contributing editor at Harper's. He's a long-form writer elsewhere. He wrote about the new right in Vanity Fair. And for that article, he spent a long time hanging out with and around new right figures, asking for their vision of the United States. James, how do you define the new right? The way I tend to define it, and there is no great definition, is that it's halfway an attempt to turn the Republican Party into something more nationalist, more, they often use the term localist, more something along the lines of a right-wing party in the mold of nationalist parties in Europe, like the party led by Marine Le Pen. On the flip side, there's also a very sort of online, younger, less directly political wing of this that people call the dissident right that would be more like a kind of emerging intellectual sphere that is a critique of liberal society at large, that is almost sort of looking past electoral politics towards what comes next after our society falls. The new right is an insurgency within the right. And a lot of the people who are kind of big names, big dogs on the new right are going to be very obscure to most people because this is still like a kind of, you could say, a wing of the American elite, a dissident, as they like you could say, a wing of the American elite,

a dissident, as they like to think of themselves, wing of the American elite. But the two that you're going to have heard most about are J.D. Vance running for Senate for my home state of Ohio. Now, my views are clearly on the table. I do not think that America's greatest and most powerful economy was built by socialism, but I also don't believe it was built by what folks often call neoliberalism or classical liberalism. But I believe America's wealth was built by an American system. Blake Masters, who is running for Senate in Arizona. In a recent interview, Masters blames gun violence on black people. His words. We do have a gun violence problem in this country, and it's gang violence.

People in Chicago, St. Louis, shooting each other. Very often, you know, Black people, frankly. Both of them were endorsed by Trump. Steve Bannon is kind of, let's say he's not new right, but he's kind of in the new right ferment. Let them call you racist. Wear it as a badge of honor. He's somebody who's definitely sort of trafficking in these ideas

and trying to figure out ways to get them into mainstream politics in such ways to make them successful. French National Front leader Marine Le Pen got support from former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon. And Tucker Carlson. The tech oligarchs joined forces to censor their political opponents. You may be one of them. Over time, Tucker has gotten much more bold about criticizing not just politicians, not just Joe Biden,

but like, he criticizes tech, he criticizes globalism, he criticizes the very foundations of sort of what makes our society what it is today. And so you can kind of look for traffic between politics, such as you're seeing it out in the world, and this kind of intellectual ferment through figures like that. You don't endorse a lot of candidates on the show or get even too close to politicians because honestly, most of them are really disappointing. They say they're going to do one thing, they do another, but occasionally run into somebody who could actually change things. That would be J.D. Vance.

Let's talk about the worldview we developed in the 90s. The Berlin Wall came down, and there's an idea that is democracy spread, so would free market spread, everyone would get richer, everyone would get freer. That idea seemed at the time to make sense. The new right is responding to that how? They would have a very long response to that. I'm going to try to do it quickly. They would say, first of all, that the process of globalization was sort of sold as a bill of goods that was going to make all of our lives better, and that largely speaking, it has enriched a very small, connected, kind of international, but sort of gravitating towards a certain set of elite

institutions, elite schools, elite NGOs. It has benefited a very small elite who kind of need that process to keep going forward because, you know, as we globalize, we're finding new and cheaper markets for our goods, we're finding new and cheaper markets for our goods, we're finding new and cheaper markets for our labor. This quote-unquote open borders, which is not a term I would personally use, but this sort of trend towards open borders is pushed forward in the name of progress and liberalism and a more open and fair society. But actually what it's doing is driving down wages and impoverishing people. And also importantly for these people, it's kind of turning the world culture into a global mishmash, right? And so one way I help people to understand this is that there's an old idea

in anthropology, not all anthropologists endorse this, but that culture is not all the stuff you accept. It's not like, oh, cool, my culture is I eat Thai food tonight, I eat Japanese food tomorrow. Culture is the ability to refuse things from the outer world. So you say, we do this, we live this way, we do not do polyamory, we are a culture of marriage and children, or whatever, right? And your ability to refuse is the place where you actually locate your own cultural values. I think a lot of these people are looking for ways to, quote unquote, preserve local cultures by pushing back against the global order and saying no. How do they define American culture?

What is the thing they want us to kind of build the wall around and keep? Well, so this is where I start to get lost in some of this stuff. Not so much in terms of confusion, but, you know, they're very into kind of the tradition of Western Christendom. Elizabethan England was an absolutely wonderful place. I think you can learn a lot from Napoleon. His military strategy was perhaps a little aggressive. But Napoleon is perhaps the monarch who's most reminiscent of like a 21st century Silicon Valley CEO. That is going to sound very creepy to a lot of people, but that is kind of where a lot of these people are coming from.

In terms of how you define American culture, the basic deal, I would say, is that someone said to me at the National Conservatives and Conference that he's just looking for a shred that preserves in the barest possible way a distinctly American way of life. And I think to some degree, he wouldn't have had a definition for American culture. It's kind of, you know, it's the old definition of porn. You know it when you see it. I think that they are feeling like they're not seeing it anymore. Let me ask you about something. A source recently told me that J.D. Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019. And I was really surprised. I looked it up and was like, oh, that's true. And then I realized that there is a certain type of sort of right-wing hipster that I am aware of, and they've been converting to Catholicism, too. The New York Times just ran an op-ed called New York's Hottest Club is the Catholic Church. And all of this didn't seem weird. To me, it seemed like sort of very natural.

Catholicism is a little bit kind of, it's a lot of work to convert, but it's also a little bit plug and play. Like, oh, wow. Like now I'm connected to 2000 years of Christian society. Like, oh, wow. Like now there's an answer to some of this. And so I have a lot of friends who are maybe not like, they wouldn't consider themselves ultra right-wing, but they also wouldn't necessarily fit in with acceptable NPR-style liberalism anymore, who have converted and who are very serious about it. The underlying desire there is something that I think our society ought to look at. The underlying desire is,

hey, I do want a deeper sense of meaning and connection and something beyond me. And so I think that there's been a very big cultural shift. If I were to say, James, close your eyes and just think about it for a minute. In 20 years, we'll be in 2042. Let's say the new right gets exactly what it wants. They win all of the elections. They get all of the elections. They get all of the power.

What does the U.S. look like in the year 2042? Okay, I'm going to try to do that based on what I can specifically recall from, let's say, Blake Masters' campaign plans. The first step is going to be likely some kind of national industrial policy, where you're kind of changing culture by changing political economy. You're bringing back an America that builds stuff. I come from Silicon Valley, and it was named Silicon Valley because that's where we invented computer chips. But we don't make computer chips there anymore because we took all that productive industrial capacity and we shipped it off to Southeast Asia to save a buck. It was a bad

decision. It was a policy decision. And we got to bring that stuff back. So they are trying to get back to a realer economy that they view as this thing that would kind of build pride, build a sense of ownership of America building stuff. But there's a cultural component. Because eventually, in that productive America, you're going to be able to, theoretically, raise a family on one income again. And so then that starts to get in this territory that a lot of liberals find very uncomfortable, where who's going to be that breadwinner in an America that's back to a one-income household? And people will say very openly, Blake Masters says very openly.

More women than men would choose to stay home and more men would go choose to be out in the workforce. And the left can't stand that. So you have a kind of very direct line from political economy to a reshaping of our culture. They talk a lot about family formation. They want Americans to have more babies. The rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and most evil thing that the left has done in this country. And for there to be a drastically slashed immigration pool, both of legal and illegal immigration. I've come to see it as like corporate welfare

for Google and Facebook at this point. Like, of course, they would rather import tens of thousands of people from India to do these software programming jobs for less money. One version of that is, hey, we have to take care of our own. One version of it feels like fascism. And then I think through these kind of, you know, political economy ideas that would, in theory, reshape our culture, they view us returning to an America that does sort of resemble the 50s, which, you know, is a kind of endearing image on one hand, and I think it's an image that would scare a lot of people at this day and age. Right, because the endearing image of the 1950s is Norman Rockwell, pastoral, white, straight, but it excluded a lot of people. Is The logic of new right politics is actually like, we have fallen so far that we have to build anew.

And so that I think is a little different than what a lot of people kind of tend to assume Republicans want. I don't think anybody on the new right, especially in the intellectual spheres of it, thinks that we're going back to anything. I think that what they are doing is they're going to build a new sort of national culture from basically what they view as a wasteland. Liberalism has come in and kind of sucked the value and turned everything into a commodity and kind of taken all the meaning and substance out

of all these cultural artifacts. And they're going to have to find a new political system, a new kind of national revitalization in order to build something new out of that. That's where I think a lot of people are going. I don't think they're trying to go back. Coming up, if they're not going back, where does the new right want to go? Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month.

And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained r a m p dot com slash explained cards issued by Sutton Bank member FDIC terms and conditions apply BetMGM authorized gaming partner of the NBA has your back all season long from tip off to the final buzzer you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas that's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM and no matter your team

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Don't blame me. I ain't the one. Where's my beat? Something. Yeah, that's right. Today Explained, we're back with James Pogue, who has written about the new right for Vanity Fair. And James, a lot of what we've been talking about is still in the realm of the theoretical, the philosophical. Let's talk about something with real political stakes and real implications.

The new right figures that you interviewed, where do they come down on Roe versus Wade being overturned? They're delighted. They're very delighted. And I think they're delighted in a way that some people in the more traditional right are actually not. The diagnosis that would be offered by a J.D. Vance or a Blake Masters is that, you know, this older right, the sort of corporate establishment of the Republican Party, J.D. Vance would say that those people have basically been mobilizing the sort of MAGA masses as we see them now. They've been mobilizing those people using cultural issues like abortion and then turning around and basically screwing them over by pushing these economic policies that we've been living under for the last long time. Some of these operatives who are worried that Roe being overturned is going to hurt Republicans in the

midterms, people on the new right are much less concerned about that. They're much less under the impression that electoral politics are the only way forward in this country, first of all. They're much less under the impression that this system is necessarily going to hold up for the next 20 years. And so they're delighted because this would seem to be a victory that is kind of the first time in a long time that you've had a major conservative victory in the cultural sphere. There are also things on which they don't agree. They're kind of incoherent in some ways. How does a bunch of people who

want different things become a coherent movement? So if you think about the United States at the time of the founding, or at least, you know, before, moments before the revolution, you had a lot of people who were coming together with different political economic critiques of their relationship with Great Britain, who all of a sudden found a political critique and an idea where you went from saying, hey, we need to defend our sacred liberty against Parliament. Parliament was the problem, but we still love the king. You went from saying that, from still being attached to the system, to suddenly King George is a tyrant in the space of, you know, basically weeks. The Declaration of Independence, nobody when all that started thought that there was ever going to be a declaration like that. And then once it gets rolling, things change very fast.

And that was in the space of, you know, where it took, you know, days to get a letter from New York to Vermont. Now ideas shift very quickly. And so, you know, any kind of critique of a system, once it becomes current, can become a kind of general source of uprising and challenge to a system much faster than I think a lot of people are aware of. And so, you know, again, this is speculative, but we are not that far off from something that might look like that. These people can be very, very compelling. They're skeptical of big tech. They're skeptical of unfettered capitalism. They want to make it easier to afford to raise a family. But then, as you write, one of their leading thinkers, Curtis Yarvin, has flirted with white nationalism.

And flirted might not be a strong enough word. They are, in your words, to Yarvin, has flirted with white nationalism. And flirted might not be a strong enough word. They are, in your words, to quote you, less convinced about electoral politics. When you look at all across human history, the absolute normal form of government is monarchy. They have expressed hostility to LGBT people. Now, every time you see people's profiles or Twitter accounts, it's LGBTIQ+, which I don't even know what the hell that means. They express hostility to immigrants. So all of this has led some people, their critics, to say, you know what this is? This is fascism. This is the same stuff we saw in the 1930s and 40s in Europe. And we should call it fascism because if we don't, we're going to end up in the same position Europe ended up in, which is we're going to see our democracy stolen from us by a bunch of extremists.

What do you think about the charge that this starts to, through a certain lens, look like a fascist movement? It's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. That's often a thing that sort of people who used to be on the left, now on the right, will often say. We get into these frames of thinking about threats to liberalism, such as we understood them back in the 20th century. Now we talk about anti-liberalism coming from the right as fascism. To me, that's not very descriptive because whether or not what these people are proposing is very, very scary and bad, it is likely not going to look like the fascism that we once knew. And so it's not going to be per se this kind of jackbooty thing.

It's going to be a much more kind of weird, like, amalgam of heterodox, strange ideas that doesn't look like the kind of streamlined force of nationally localized fascism, such as I've sort of understood it in my reading. It might be scarier than fascism, such as I've sort of understood it in my reading, it might be scarier than fascism. It might be a kind of union of tech billionaires and anti-democrats and people who believe in sort of human hierarchy, creating an absolute serfdom and dystopia that looks like nothing we've ever seen before. We have ended up in a system now that a lot, a lot, a lot of people are feeling like doesn't serve them. And that's not just on the right. And I

think that in terms of like thinking about whether this system is the right thing for us, I think we're going to have to get to that point because otherwise it's going to be very, very difficult to answer the critiques of people on this new right. And it's going to be very, very difficult to answer the critiques of people on this new right. And it's going to be very, very difficult to push back against some of the more dangerous ideas. There are people planning the future and thinking about the future in ways that I think a lot of people in our media and political class are not aware of and not really ready to combat because they're not thinking on those terms. They're thinking in terms of the next election

cycle. And I find that very scary. This new movement, if it wants to succeed, will need a couple of things. It will need people. It will need some amount of coherence, but it will also need money. It will also need financial support. Who or what is the money behind the new right? There's a lot of talk about Peter Thiel as kind of the godfather of this new right. Who helped fund Vance's long shot campaign? Meet Peter Thiel. Have you ever used PayPal to buy something on eBay? Did you ever use Venmo to send money? If so, you've put cash into the pocket of Thiel, who is thought to be worth several billion dollars. What he is doing

is he's making very calculated bets that have turned out to be smart on people like J.D. Vance, people like Blake Masters. Law school is where I met Peter Thiel. And I think that class sort of jostled me awake because it was the first time someone accomplished from the business world was coming in and not just saying a bunch of who are capable of taking these very strange ideas and holding them in their heads, but also translating them towards a kind of more publicly acceptable electoral politics. And so it's a funny game because, you know, Thiel has given Masters and Vance a ton of money. Thiel is very close with them. You know, they'll advertise stuff where you can pay to go

and have dinner with Blake Masters and Peter Thiel privately. I didn't follow this stuff, but I'm fairly certain that, you know, Peter Thiel was in touch with Trump about endorsing the two of them. Things like that. And I know for a fact that Trump is sort of very impressed by Thiel. It's not just I wrote you a check and you're off there. It's deeply coordinated. Tomorrow on the show, Peter Thiel.

He made billions of dollars as a venture capitalist, funding emerging companies. Now he's funding emerging systems of government. And yes, that is every bit as troubling as it sounds. Thiel's history of anti-democratic advocacy. Today's show was produced by Miles Bryan. It was edited by Matthew Collette. It was engineered by Afim Shapiro. And it was fact-checked by Laura Bullard.

I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. you