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--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: Coming up on Today Explained, is the new right the future of conservatism? Or are they the other F-word? Fascists. of a lifetime. Book a hospitality package at fifaworldcup.com slash hospitality.
--:-- Noelle King: Support for this show comes from strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place?
--:-- James Pogue: Let a career coach from strawberry.me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner. Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer.
--:-- Noelle King: 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 Pogue: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: The new right is an insurgency within the right. And a lot of the people who, you know, 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 to think of themselves, wing of the American elite.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: But occasionally you 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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 doing is driving down wages and impoverishing people
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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 value.
--:-- Noelle King: 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?
--:-- James Pogue: 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 in to kind of the tradition of Western Christendom. Elizabethan England was an absolutely wonderful place.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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 whole definition of porn. You know it when you see it. I think that they are feeling like they're not seeing it anymore.
--:-- James Pogue: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: And all of this seems a little weird to me. When the Catholicism, the young Catholic thing, started happening, To me, it didn't seem weird. To me, it seemed like sort of very natural.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: And so I have a lot of friends who are maybe not like they wouldn't consider themselves ultra right wing, but, you know, they also wouldn't necessarily fit in with acceptable NPR style liberalism anymore. Who have converted and who are very serious about it.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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 power.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: It was a bad decision. It was a policy decision. And we've 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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?
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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 in this day and age.
--:-- Noelle King: Right, because the endearing image of the 1950s is Norman Rockwell, pastoral, white, straight, but it excluded a lot of people. Is that what the new right wants to go back to?
--:-- James Pogue: Candidly, the logic of new right politics is not that, hey, we're going to try to go back to an America of Dwight Eisenhower. The logic of new right politics is actually like we have fallen so far that we have to build anew.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: Coming up, if they're not going back, where does the new right want to go? Support for today's show comes from Adio.
--:-- James Pogue: What is Adio? Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies.
--:-- Noelle King: They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model. According to Adio, Adio takes less than a minute to set up.
--:-- James Pogue: And within seconds, you will have your email and calendars synced. You'll see all your relationships in a fully fledged platform, they say, all enriched with that actionable data.
--:-- Noelle King: And they say you can build AI powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes to seize so that you can focus on what matters. building your company.
--:-- James Pogue: You can join industry leaders such as Flatfile, Replicate, Modal, and so much more. You can go to adio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year.
--:-- Noelle King: That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash todayexplained. Support for this show comes from Macy's.
--:-- James Pogue: It's almost fall, and that means it's time to cycle your wardrobe to the cold setting. Because while everyone loves a breezy summer outfit, let's be real, layering is even more fun.
--:-- Noelle King: That's why Macy's Fall Fashion Guide has everything you need to piece together the perfect look for you. It's your one-stop shop for fall's latest trends and must-haves, curated by their experts.
--:-- James Pogue: Add a statement shoe to your collection, like the calf hair loafers from Steve Madden. Or tap into your romantic side with flowy dresses from Cece and sheer pieces from INC.
--:-- Noelle King: You can even throw in some textural layers for contrast, like a faux fur bomber jacket from Karl Lagerfeld Paris.
--:-- James Pogue: Whether your old favorite sweater or coat is on its last threads, or you're just craving a new vibe to switch things up, Macy's has got you covered this season.
--:-- Noelle King: Find the perfect layering pieces for you by exploring the Macy's Fall Fashion Style Guide. Shop in-store or online at macy's.com.
--:-- Noelle King: And now, a brief selection from Blake Master's rap career. Here we go. How about we talk about the way I look? Everybody knows that's off the hook.
--:-- James Pogue: I've got the war paint on, as you can see. Who said what about cultural insensitivity? Nah, man, it's just having fun. Don't blame me. I ain't the one.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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?
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: Some of these operatives who are worried that, you know, Roe being overturned is going to hurt Republicans in the midterms, people on the new right are much less concerned about that.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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?
--:-- James Pogue: 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, a shaping idea that, hey, we're going to build a liberal, free society.
--:-- Noelle King: And this is something that I think we may be seeing the early parts of here in the United States, 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: And so you know again this is speculative but we are not that far off from something that might look like that.
--:-- James Pogue: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: They have expressed hostility to LGBT people. Now, every time you see people's profiles or Twitter accounts, it's LGBTIAQ+. I don't even know what the hell that means.
--:-- James Pogue: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: What do you think about the charge that this starts to, through a certain lens, look like a fascist movement?
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: We get into these frames of thinking about threats to 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.
--:-- Noelle King: And so it's not going to be per se this kind of jack booty 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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 thinking about whether this system is the right thing for us, I think we're going to have to get to that point.
--:-- James Pogue: 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 push back against some of the more dangerous ideas.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: They're thinking in terms of the next election cycle. And I find that very scary.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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?
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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 s**t. 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- James Pogue: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: And yes, that is every bit as troubling as it sounds. Thiel's history of anti-democratic advocacy.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: Support for the show comes from Charles Schwab. at schwab how you invest is your choice not theirs that's why when it comes to managing your wealth schwab gives you more choices you can invest and trade on your own plus get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs with award-winning service low costs and transparent advice you can manage your wealth your way at schwab visit schwab.com to learn more
