The split on the Right has taken Republican Party leadership and the intellectuals of American conservatism by surprise. Perhaps, like Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, they prefer sports podcasts to reading the news. Perhaps they want to keep their hands clean and look away from the rising tide of lies and filth that now washes ankle-deep through the marble halls. Perhaps they have decided that if the children are into it, then this is the future. Others secretly like it.
The secrets are out. The civil war for control of conservatism’s brain and body, the Washington think tanks and the MAGA movement, is now in the open. As in all civil wars, a crisis of political order and ideological coherence has led to multiple factions, all competing and collaborating in shifting alliances on multiple fronts. The schism is generational, but also religious and racial. It is intellectual and ideological, but also identitarian. The outcome will shape the American Right for a generation or more — and also the fate of the nation.
The generational split is easiest to describe. Generation Z, those born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s, is attacking the boomers. The intervening cohort, Generation X, is split. The boomers may not still run all the big conservative institutions, but all the big institutions run on boomer donations. The institutions, like the donors, were shaped by the Reagan revival and victory in the Cold War. They promote the “fusionist” synthesis that, they believe, delivered those successes: libertarian economics and evangelical social conservatism at home, and “neocon” democracy promotion abroad.
Gen Z, or zoomers, got the bill: an underperforming and polarized post-2008 economy, accelerating moral and social chaos, and the failed war on terrorism. Add long-term trends of deindustrialization, affirmative action, and family break-up, and accelerate their effects with demoralization by the internet and a radicalized education system that teaches identity politics, and you have a perfect storm of grievance for young white men. Nick Fuentes and his “groyper” fans are identity politics for losers. They are political inverts, reversing the institutional consensus that has served them so poorly: racist instead of antiracist, ironic instead of earnest, Buchananite instead of Reaganite. They have one policy issue: Israel. They blame the Jews for everything.
Fuentes and his groypers achieved national prominence in late October after appearing on Tucker Carlson’s podcast. But they first moved into the real world in late 2019, by heckling Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA events. These guerrilla actions opened what Fuentes called the “Groyper Wars” against the establishment conservatism they called “Con Inc.”
It took Fuentes six years to float from the sewer to the mainstream. Along the way, a youth movement percolated into the conservative institutions. All this suggests that conservative leaders are indeed out of touch, and the zoomers are not the only ones to notice it. Enter the New Right intellectuals, the mostly Catholic post-liberals, who concentrate on domestic policy, and, with an emphasis on realist foreign policy, the National Conservatives, convened by the Israeli-American scholar Yoram Hazony.
The post-liberals’ exemplar is Patrick Deneen’s 2018 Why Liberalism Failed. Deneen’s title assumes that the failure of liberalism has already occurred. The hyperliberal pursuit of personal autonomy and a hyperliberal market ideology have produced anomie, social breakdown, and, to clear up the mess, an ever-expanding state. Deneen, a political philosopher at the University of Notre Dame, argues for retaining a strong state, but using its power for the “common good,” defined as reviving community life, supporting the family, and restoring Catholic morality to the public square.
The post-liberals are not groypers. The two dissident movements, one intellectual, the other popular, are parallel responses to the American crisis. But parallels can converge, especially when political power is the prize. It happened at the Heritage Foundation, where post-liberal conviction opened the door to a groyperish young cohort. It is also what happens when America’s most prominent post-liberal and Catholic convert is the author of a bestseller about white male alienation, a friend of Carlson, and the heir presumptive to the MAGA crown. It is not Vice President JD Vance‘s fault that these trends converge on him. It is his fate, and the challenge he has sought. The man of the hour must rise to it or become yesterday’s man.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.
