A Journey Through the Authoritarian New Right

There’s a lot of talk about the authoritarian leanings of the modern Republican Party. Donald Trump commits to pardon the January 6 rioters who sought to steal him an election; his rank-and-file supporters cheer him on when he says he’ll be a “dictator on day one.” Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), Trump’s Vice Presidential pick, likes to muse that “universities are the enemy” and play with the idea of unleashing the DOJ on political opponents.

But like any political movement, there’s an ecosystem of thinkers and influencers that propel it. There is, in fact, a cacophony of voices, some going so far as to advocate for an end to democracy, others calling for like-minded right-wingers to form institutions and communities that somehow exist outside of American politics and culture. A lot of this group’s output is deliberately provocative; sometimes it is (intentionally or not) very funny.

There’s show business to it, coupled with the denigration of various minority groups and machismo: some of the figures on this segment of the right really do act as influencers, mixing the need to feed the content-hungry beast of their audience with musings on how to construct a society in which the influence of the left has been eradicated.

This loose-knit group of activists, aspiring philosophers and online personalities sometimes refers to itself as the “new right” (a term, confusingly, shared with other conservative movements in the 1970s and, earlier, in the 1950s). But in recent years, it has worked self-consciously to build a body of writing and art, unleashing deluges of social media posts that might appeal to the same people who also get excited about Trump, and lead them toward a more authoritarian future.

What distinguishes it from others on the right is a Manichean view of American society: that the country stands at a crossroads, and that only decisive, dramatic action in the immediate future can rescue it from irrevocably descending into a socialist abyss. What’s required, some of these figures suggest, is a different kind of figure running the country, one who is capable of taking that kind of decisive action.

Below is a non-exhaustive list of some popular figures in this world.

The extremely online

Bronze Age Pervert first appeared online in 2017, in the form of a Twitter account featuring a shirtless man gazing out at an oceanic horizon.

Over the next few years, the account built a following, using ironic caveman grammar to argue that efforts to achieve greater equality and respect for diversity has corrupted and weakened American society.

BAP, who some outlets have identified as a Romanian-American Yale Ph.D named Costin Alamariu, is emblematic of a certain type of extremely online right-wing influencer. His opinions range from the bizarre to the self-avowedly fascistic; it’s difficult to tell what’s real and what’s a wink to those in on the joke. He says he wants a military government, and posits that decadent elites have created generations of “bugmen;” weak and nihilistic people incapable of striving for higher values, waiting to be swept aside by those possessing a true Bronze Age Mindset.

BAP has gone far since 2017. Trump White House staffers reportedly passed around his 2018 manifesto; the influential, deeply conservative investor Peter Thiel referred to BAP in a recent interview as an example of a “right-wing Nietzschean” who rejects the idea that past historical wrongs impose obligations on the present. Claremont Institute fellow and former White House official Michael Anton praised BAP’s book in a lengthy review as speaking out about “imposed” equality that “publicly denies all difference while at the same time elevating and enriching a decadent, incompetent, and corrupt elite.”

The oddest thing about BAP may, however, be that there are more like him.

Take the similarly constructed persona Raw Egg Nationalist. Though there are fewer Nietzsche references, this Raw Egg has the same shirtless avatar, the same declaratory three-word name, the same ungrammatical appeal, and has landed on similar beachheads of influence: Tucker Carlson cited Raw Egg Nationalist in a documentary titled “End of Men,” both BAP and Raw Egg Nationalist earned X follows from vice presidential nominee Vance.

There’s a lot here that’s similar: the appeal to restoring a form of male dominance that they regard as lost; constant winks to white nationalists and neo-Nazis. But the focuses are different: where BAP has an interest in, perhaps, political thought, Raw Egg Nationalist spends more time on what you might call a mixture of nutrition and anti-immigrant demagoguery. He exhorts his readers to avoid factory and monoculture farming (“cook good”), while claiming that the same elites that drive negative nutrition are also conspiring to pull off the Great Replacement.

REN also runs a magazine called Man’s World, which features writing in the current issue from, among others, Noor bin Ladin, the pro-Trump activist who is also the niece of Osama bin Ladin. Man’s World is published by Passage Press, itself a project aimed at creating parallel, far-right cultural output. Separately, Passage Press published a collection of short fiction stories titled After the War: Stories From the Next Regime.

BAP, REN, and others, like Claremont’s Michael Anton, wrote for the collection. It’s a window into the mindset: Anton wrote a story called “Float 93” analogizing a sinking ship to the influx of undocumented immigrants; BAP wrote a story about a group of physically fit soldiers marooned on a tropical island after a nuclear war who ratify a “Constitution based on the American Anti-Federalist papers” after coming across a group of Amazons.

From there, the portal opens up to dozens more short story authors included in the anthology, with similar noms de plume: Endlessbonerz, Barbaric Disciple, Golgi Apparatus, on it goes.

The theorists

To make sense of it all, you may need to turn to another writer: Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug.

Yarvin, like the others, has been cited by prominent right-wingers including Vance and former Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters. He’s a blogger who has been writing since the late Bush years with an open disdain for democracy, stating at one point that what’s needed is the “right person” to manage the country as one would a corporation.

Yarvin’s larger analysis of where America went wrong seems to strike a chord with conservatives who regard their objective as changing the structural conditions of American politics to benefit them. He uses bizarre jargon to make his points, but it goes something like this:

• You might think America is a democracy, but that’s wrong. In fact, true power resides in the “cathedral,” representing the institutions that shape how people see the world and enforce guardrails on politics. This mainly refers to journalism and academia.
• Yarvin takes this metaphor further and enlists Lord of the Rings terminology: Republicans (hobbits) are battling elite residents of blue states (elves), with help from some blue staters like himself (dark elves) who stoke culture wars to subvert things from within.

It’s a caricatured version of the view — by no means fringe — that there’s no such thing as a politically neutral institution. Rather, the only question is which values prevail in society, and who is in control of the institutions that give structure to political life.

For Yarvin, the solution, then, is to ridicule and dismantle the so-called “cathedral” as part of a plan to establish centralized power, preferably under one manager.

The view that democracy has already failed and that the country needs significant structural change certainly dovetails with the views advanced by a handful of right-wing think thanks since Trump won the 2016 election.

Yarvin is often held up alongside another, older writer: French philosopher René Girard, a favorite of Peter Thiel’s in part for his theory of “mimetic rivalry.” Per that idea, people have certain desires in part because they’re imitating the desires of others.

It leads to a chain of mimetic desire, pumping the desired object with increased value. Eventually, it can led to conflict: competition, eventually resolved through violence. Ancient societies, Girard theorizes, found that the cycle of escalation can be interrupted if those competing for the desired object can find a scapegoat on which to unload their aggression.

There’s no clear political valence to Girard’s theorizing. But some on the new right cite his theories as having explanatory power for, among other things, social media, why the culture war has become so intense, and how the two parties react to each other. Those who are the victims of social media pile-ons, or even Trump himself, are, they claim, the scapegoats.

A 2020 essay from Vance, describing his discovery of Girard after hearing a talk by Thiel, shows the theory at work:

[I]n 2013, it captured so well the psychology of my generation, especially its most privileged inhabitants. Mired in the swamp of social media, we identified a scapegoat and digitally pounced. We were keyboard warriors, unloading on people via Facebook and Twitter, blind to our own problems. We fought over jobs we didn’t actually want while pretending we didn’t fight for them at all. And the end result for me, at least, was that I had lost the language of virtue.

The activists

Where does it all lead?

For some of the more grounded, somewhat less theoretic influencers, it’s dehumanization of the enemy.

Vance, for example, has earned a lot of criticism for blurbing the book Unhumans co-authored by Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec. The book is reportedly what it sounds like: a straightforward argument against political equality, holding that progressives are subhuman and deserve to be treated as such.

Here’s Vance’s blurb:

In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR [Human Resources], college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.

There isn’t a lot of room for democracy in this vision. One influencer who has, perhaps, gone the furthest in articulating what that post-democratic future might look like is Charles Haywood, an Indiana book reviewer who has written that the sale of his shampoo business made him “rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”

Haywood has pondered whether Elon Musk might be a “red caesar,” referring to a right-wing man of destiny that would take power and deal a final defeat to the left.

In a separate, 2022 column about what will happen when the long-awaited “caesar” arrives, Haywood mused that he would restore order, and punish leftists and liberals in various ways.

“But who cares about the Left’s fate? They’ve earned their reward,” Haywood wrote. “My question is how innocent, normal Americans will be affected by Caesar.”