It's Alive: The New Right Fusionism

Understanding the camp structure and intellectual foundations of Frankenstein's right-wingers

Last year Konstantin Kisin popularized the phrase “woke right” to describe a fringe type of activist who behaves like woke leftists started doing in the 2010s. They’re less interested in debating core ideas, more in insulting, trying to cancel, and even physically attacking their opponents. They define their own identity by the experience of being oppressed within a cruel society run by the oppressors. They see all the institutions and legalism of this society as just a front for corrupt deals and the suppression of dissident voices.

There are also major figures like Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan who have devolved into just-asking-questions simps for Nazi apologists. Where exactly do we draw a line between them and the fringe activists? It’s reminiscent of how, at the height of wokism, people like Ezra Klein and Jon Stewart were drinking the BLM kool-aid.

But these two movements—the woke left and this other thing on the right—have very different origins.

Postmodernism and Pragmatism

The evolution of a group of activists on the left into woke ideologues has been understood for a while now thanks to scholars like

Stephen R.C. Hicks

and

Helen Pluckrose

. Some academics in the 1960s fully broke away from the core ideas of Enlightenment philosophy and developed a new set of postmodern ideas, out of which grew a new kind of progressive ideology.

Postmodernism is deeply skeptical of the scientific and political institutions that flowed out of the Enlightenment, going back to early modern Europe and the American founding. These institutions claim to be guided by some form of objectivity in their decision-making. But postmodernism sees this as just a mask for the self-interest of the cultural establishment that set them up—an establishment whose real goal is to oppress and silence marginalized groups. The very concept of objective knowledge was viewed as a farce. It’s all just a struggle for power and social control.

By this logic, though, any kind of social organization will succumb to such forces, whatever principles it claims to stand for. It’s a dispiriting way to try to kick off a popular movement. So it all stayed pretty academic until the 1980’s when postmodernist thinkers started mutating their original ideas to become more effective within activist projects. Hence critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and queer theory. The key mutation was to roll back the prohibition against any claim of certainty about theoretical questions. A specific kind of certainty was now allowed—certainty about the fact of marginalized groups being oppressed, and about how evil that is.

Sure, be skeptical of what the cis white male power structures have been peddling for centuries. But questioning the lived experience of Black people is itself an act of white supremacy. Wokism, in short, is a left-wing activist mutation of postmodern philosophy, infused with some dogma about a status hierarchy of demographic groups.

The “woke right” was not just a separate spin-off of these same postmodern ideas. Its roots are more spindly. But there is a resemblance to woke ideas. This was clear from around the inception of these two things as popular movements, before the one even had a colloquial word like “wokism” to describe it, and when “alt-right” was still the term of art for the other one. You could see that both of them were built around an intellectual core that is not merely false but anti-rational. Even back then I had pointed out how their differences were in some sense cosmetic:

…both identitarianisms, far closer to each other than either cares to understand. The most obvious difference between them… is merely which groups are taken as the truly oppressed ones — intersectional hierarchies for the Pomo-Left, whites and men for the Alt-Right.

Hicks’ analysis showed that the roots of postmodernism itself were not inherently left-wing. A key connection between Foucault, Derrida, and other postmodernists was the influence of early 20th century German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who wound up becoming a literal Nazi. Another influential figure for Heidegger and the postmodernists was Nietzsche who, while not antisemitic himself, did a lot of intellectual groundwork for what became the ideology of Nazism.

Nietzsche’s thought was also a precursor to the philosophical movement of pragmatism, which solidified in the early 1900’s around the American thinkers William James and John Dewey. Pragmatism is an intellectual cousin of postmodernism, and its impact on contemporary ideologies has been underappreciated.

Pragmatists reject the correspondence theory of truth—the idea that truth has something to do with a correspondence between certain things in your mind and facts out there in reality. They don’t go so far as to reject the existence of an external reality. They just say that we don’t have any kind of direct, reliable access to it. All we have are views or interpretations that may wind up in line with that reality or may be totally out of line with it. There’s no way to know.

What we can know is that when an interpretation stands the test of time, and achieves some sort of consensus, that must be because it works. It is useful for us as humans trying to survive in this evolutionary environment we inhabit. Evolution doesn’t necessarily select for some impersonal, theoretical kind of truth that mirrors external reality. It selects for whatever ideas work.

Jordan Peterson twists himself into a pretzel trying to explain what it means to believe in God. His critics understandably take it as a strategy to avoid getting pinned down. But this is just what happens when you try to get a clear answer out of a pragmatist on a theoretical topic. For Peterson, whether you should believe in God is not about answering some cosmological question. It’s literally about whether the belief tends to produce better life outcomes—more contentment, healthier relationships, richer communities.

Pragmatism was actually a creature of the progressive movement in the early 1900’s. But fascists, starting with Mussolini himself, latched onto it as well. They too had no place for the tortuous, procedural logic demanded by the courts and legislatures of liberal democracy. They had big things to get done—now. And the justification they sought for these things wasn’t some institutional stamp of approval. It was the consensus—the will—of the people, whose vibrations a strong leader could tune into, without needing any kind of elaborate theory.

Peterson himself is no fascist. But authoritarianism, and even fascism, clearly had friends within the fringes of the 20th century American right. Mainstream conservatives had clamped down on those fringes in the post-war period, but something happened leading up to the Presidential election of 1980 that changed the course of the conservative movement.

Origins of the New Right

Ronald Reagan was himself more of a classical liberal. But he had a problem. Classical liberalism had been on the decline throughout the 20th century. To beat the ascendant left-liberals, he chose to join forces with a group that had previously shunned politics altogether: rural populists who tended to be evangelical or even fundamentalist Christians. But how might you map out a political movement that could include those types together with the classical liberals and mainstream businessmen who formed the base of the existing Republican Party?

Enlightenment rationality and religious fundamentalism just don’t go together. You needed a totally different kind of intellectual material, more elastic than either of these, to stretch into a big enough tent for everyone in Reagan’s new coalition. Enter pragmatism. If God works for you in your life—great, believe in Him. If you see the series of society-level failures that socialism has produced—great, then support classical-liberal economic policies that actually work.

This was the old fusionism, and it gave Reagan two landslide victories in 1980 and 1984. It worked great. But could it all hold together in the long run? Were the underlying ideas coherent with each other? It was hard for people on the right even to pose this question, because they only saw things in terms of concrete policy questions. At that level, what seemed to be fused together were three different legs of a conservative stool: religious traditionalists, foreign policy hawks, and libertarians.

In a rough sense, the real division was between traditionalists on one side, who were fundamentally opposed to the Enlightenment, and hawks and libertarians on the other side, who weren't opposed to it. But it’s not that simple, because there were plenty of people within each of these camps who would wind up playing against character.

Marco Rubio and Lindsay Graham, the perennial hawks, capitulated and threw their lot in with a Trump administration that is willfully blind to the nature of Putin and other such dictators. Then there are the Mormons, in the thick of the traditionalist camp. But many, like Mitt Romney and Jeff Flake, resisted MAGA’s attack on democratic institutions. And as the for the libertarians, the whole movement has been split right down the middle.

At a deeper level, what was brought together under the old fusionism was not just three policy camps but two clashing sets of ideas: classical liberalism and right-wing populism. Reagan’s outreach to the traditionalists destabilized what had been the pro-Enlightenment core of the right. And only more recently are the full effects of this emerging, as the intellectual chasm between pro-Enlightenment liberals and anti-Enlightenment populists becomes more apparent.

With the collapse of the last bridges between these two sides, a dwindling group of classical liberals like George Will and Jonah Goldberg find themselves stuck on an island, cut off from the MAGA-dominated mainland. Moreover, various 2015-vintage “classical liberals” like Dave Rubin turned out to be anything but.

The MAGA mainland is now fertile for all kinds of irrational growth. Much of it is superficial and troll-ish, but some more substantial roots can be found as well. A lot of them trace back to one man: the Austrian economist Murray Rothbard.

In its mature phase, the Austrian school of economics had two creative engines: the true classical liberals Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Their pioneering contributions to the “economic calculation” debate had a big impact on how economists understood the question of capitalism vs. socialism, with many knock-on effects within economics over the following decades.

Rothbard, on the other hand, produced no lasting contributions to the field. His impact was in the role of an activist, kicking off modern libertarianism as an organized movement. A student of Mises, Rothbard was also initially attracted to the philosophy of Ayn Rand as a foundation for libertarian politics. But a bitter falling out between them shifted his perspective.

He came to the idea that all different kinds of thinkers might converge on libertarianism, from pro-reason individualists like Rand, to Christian nationalists, to those who saw the slaveholding American South as misunderstood and wrongly maligned. And so Rothbard adopted, as his meta-political axiom, the idea that it doesn’t much matter what kind of theoretical foundation one might have for one’s libertarian views. What matters is being opposed to the state. And that became the libertarian credo.

This anti-theoretical turn within libertarianism parallels what the pragmatists did a few decades earlier within American philosophy. And it produced similar problems. When foundational questions are dismissed and declared irrelevant rather than analyzed forthrightly, what you tend to get is lax hygiene and the festering of intellectual sores. Rothbard’s own evolution exemplified this as he drifted first toward New Left counterculture in the 1960’s but later settled in with the nativist, conspiracy-theory mongers of the Paleo Right, like Pat Buchanan.

Within that crowd it was surprisingly easy for the pendulum to swing from Rothbard’s own anti-state, in fact anarchist, position to the outright monarchism of the two most influential Rothbardians alive today, Hans-Herman Hoppe and Curtis Yarvin. The “alt,” or now “dissident,” right does not have an especially coherent intellectual system behind it, but these two thinkers are perhaps the closest you can come to it.

That swing from anarchism to monarchism seems odd if you’re just thinking in terms of political theory and policy. But if you go one level deeper, you see how pragmatism can lead to this sort of thing. Pragmatists reject the Enlightenment core of classical liberalism. Without that core, concepts like “individual freedom” tend to fall apart. Despite their seeming opposition, the fundamental thing about both anarchism and monarchism is that they are both anti-liberal.

Liberalism, broadly construed, is a special kind of discovery made by Enlightenment theorists, but grounded in centuries of experience with English common law, and then honed through its implementation over the following centuries in North America, Europe, and elsewhere. Liberalism is like a Ferrari being put through its paces on a twisty Alpine road. There are all kinds of ways for this exquisitely engineered object to get wrecked. You can disconnect the breaks (authoritarianism). You can throw away the steering wheel (anarchism). You can paint over the windshield (socialism). But what all of them wind up with is a useless, twisted hunk of metal.

Right-wing populism arrived at its own set of approved ways to wreck liberalism, according to the particular lineage of ideas by which it was developed. Likewise for wokism, according to its own history. They are two distinct anti-liberal movements. And using the same word, “woke,” to describe them obscures this. We need to distinguish them from each other and from liberalism, including both left- and right-wing variations of the Enlightenment tradition.

But then what explains the emerging similarities between these two anti-liberal movements of the 21st century? This is where that intellectual genealogy is helpful.

Ask a pragmatist like Jordan Peterson why he can’t just answer the factual question of whether or not God exists. Belief may or may not improve life-satisfaction metrics, but surely the existence question means something apart from that. His response will be that you need to be more humble, epistemologically. There is no way to hold up our theories, compare them with reality itself, and get some kind of absolute verdict on them. Whether or not they work is the only test we have. Truth itself, if it’s something attainable by us humans, is simply that which works.

The pragmatists saw themselves as updating the field of philosophy with what we learned from the Darwinian revolution. But where they went with that—rejecting the correspondence theory of truth—was somewhere very close to the origin spot of postmodernism. Pragmatism is a proto-postmodern philosophy.

The core thing that pragmatism and postmodernism share is an animus toward the idea of objectivity, on which the institutions of liberal democracy are based. These institutions were designed as an adaptive mechanism by which society could make opposing views face off against each other. It's a process of negotiation and incremental improvement, which tends toward more objective decision-making over time, while always retaining the ability to correct past errors in light of new evidence or arguments.

But if there is no such thing as objectivity, either because of our evolutionary limitations or of our thirst for social control, then there is no end goal that any such institutional process could be aiming toward. Debating ideas at a theoretical level is thus pointless, and intellectual standards are just a charade. What matters is power. And either side might as well do whatever they can to seize it. From that belief flows all the anti-rational, authoritarian traits common to wokism and right-wing populism.

This creates a problem for principled remnants on the right who were playing around with the idea of a detente with Trump after his win in 2024, if he could tamp down the worst elements of his base. The pragmatist mentality—the fixation on short-term effects, the indifference to theoretical arguments, the deterioration of intellectual standards—is not coming from the bigoted fringes of the right. Trump himself is the godhead and the protector of it all.

Reagan and his right-liberal heirs had been committed to keeping the pragmatist monster chained up, as far as preserving the basic structure of the republic was concerned. They would unleash the monster every few years, only for electoral advantage. The danger was always that the it might break free. That’s what happened in 2016. And now it’s the monster who’s holding the chains.

Of course it’s hard to pin Trump down on any discrete system of ideas. His tweets don’t include citations. But if you were to do a genetic analysis on the intellectual miasma in his brain, pragmatism would be the closest match.

Consistency or theoretical soundness are meaningless to him. He cares about winning. What exactly does winning consist in? Whatever the will of the people demands. How does he know what it demands? The same way he approaches any complicated problem. Not by evidence or argument, by his gut.

Like the Democratic Party during the height of wokism, the Republican Party is now intellectually moribund. It exists as a vehicle for the desires of one man, chief among which is to establish himself, personally, as ruling over all three branches of government.

Trump outright rejects any constraint on his control over what are supposed to be independent federal agencies. Without any legal basis, he threatens to fire the chair of the Federal Reserve. He enacts broad-based tariffs that constitute a massive new tax on all Americans, distorting a much narrower authority granted to the President by prior legislation.

Through his side-kick Elon Musk, he seizes direct control of staffing and payments operations across federal agencies. The pretext of this was “government efficiency,” but the savings dwindle with each successive re-projection. In fact what Trump has done is to usurp Congress' constitutional power of the purse, enabling him to delete whichever appropriations he pleases.

He defies specific judicial rulings, shuttling legal, non-citizen residents into a gulag in El Salvador. And he does it without due process, raising the question of what would stop him from doing the same thing to citizens. His attack on the rule-of-law extends not only to judges but to the very ability of those he sees as his enemies to access private legal representation. This he achieves by threatening their counsels’ law firms with the termination of federal contracts of random other clients, who have nothing to do with any of his controversies.

The Trump administration is attacking the foundations of our constitutional order. The problem isn't just with some fringe “woke right” podcast guests. MAGA is an inherently radical movement.

How is it possible for this to be coming out of a party that claimed for decades to be defending constitutional principles from interference by leftist legislators and judges? That's exactly what pragmatism makes possible. Old principles, to the pragmatist, are just arbitrary constraints on the ability of his team to win right now.

This is not to say that pragmatism is the only philosophical current running through the right today. A lot of the intersectional-victimhood flavor of their rhetoric likely rubbed off from wokism itself. But there’s another, more cohesive set of ideas here coming from somewhere else.

New Left and New Right: Kindred Spirits

It’s instructive to ask who among Trump’s senior advisors is the most authentically Trump-like? Not those who, under a totally different scenario for Republican leadership, would have just snapped into the required neoconservative or driven-snow religious positions, but a true kindred spirit.

One very plausible answer is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. For decades, he has waged war against the facts of reality on behalf of conspiracy theories about vaccines, and cancers caused by Wi-Fi, and 9/11 as an inside job. This guy is not just trying on his post-2016 Trump wig, he’s a lifetime member. But “pragmatism” doesn’t really capture his approach to the world of ideas.

RFK Jr.’s history as a committed, ideological advocate for an array of leftist causes is well-known, whether you thought that ideology and those causes were heroic or were nuts. Other examples of this include journalist and nemesis of the US intelligence community Glenn Greenwald; “civil libertarian” Trump advisor Alan Dershowitz; canceled biology professor and anti-vaxx theorist Brett Weinstein; and media-skeptical writer Michael Shellenberger. All of their trajectories can be seen converging on MAGA orbits, of varying eccentricities.

It is hard to just include this faction, which I’ve been referring to as the “Rebels,” within right-wing populism itself. There is nothing particularly conservative about their politics. And they’re not generally populists either. If anything they tend toward the more academic end of Trump fandom. What unites them together, and with Trump, is the conspiracy-theory mindset, the idea that our political and corporate establishment has rigged public debate with a bunch of fake experts to cover up all its corruption and power-lust.

This sounds like the postmodern theory at the core of wokism, but there’s a big difference. The postmodern version drills down into the epistemological foundations of modernity. It says the drive for social control is so deep that science itself cannot achieve any sort of objective knowledge. But the skepticism of Rebels like RFK Jr. isn’t based on a radical theory of knowledge like this. As he sees it, the basic problem with our institutions is just the particular economic interests that happen to fund and control them today. It’s a capitalism problem, not an epistemology problem.

The source of the Rebels’ ideas is not postmodernism, or even pragmatism, but something more like Frankfurt School critical theory. This was a strand of Marxist thought that wanted to retain the core of Marx’s economic theory but had to grapple with the failure of his predictions about a workers’ revolution. To explain how that revolution was foiled, critical theorists like Herbert Marcuse pointed to mass media (movies, television, news outlets, etc.) as a means of pacifying workers and deceiving them about about their true interests.

Critical theory came up with a new strategy to reboot the revolution. It would still be a revolution on behalf of the workers of the world, but it would be fought within the institutions—the universities, the media organizations, the government bodies—at the apex of cultural power. And it would be led by them, the socialist intellectuals.

This was the impetus behind the New Left counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, in which the Rebels were reared. It had reverberating effects on society, but one thing it certainly didn’t do was follow through on Marx’s central prediction—that capitalism would be overthrown across the developed world. Ultimately, critical theory must be understood as another epicycle within the degenerating research program begun by classical Marxism. And failing to recognize this by the 1980s meant that whatever kind of scholarship you thought you were doing, the end result is pretty close to the zone of conspiracy theory.

Marcuse, the revolutionary intellectual, had degenerated into RFK Jr., the fanatic anti-vaxx campaigner. This whole lineage was quite capable of petering out into irrelevance, but for the rise of the New Right. Now it has a second wind. Today’s Republican Party is a new fusion of right-wing populism and this Rebel faction—pragmatist epistemology fused with a conspiracy-theory understanding of how the liberal order works. This is what going full pragmatist, with MAGA, opened the door to.

In retrospect, Murray Rothbard’s swing from the anti-liberal New Left to the anti-liberal Paleo Right was a clue about where things were headed. He was a kind of patient zero, for the fusion of pragmatism and conspiracy theory inside a single mind. Over time, this mentality began to metastasize within the right. The heirs of the Paleo Right have become the cool kids inside the MAGA movement.

So now all the disparate nonsense-makers—the paranoid anti-vaxxers, the Nazi-curious basement posters, the trade-deficit fundamentalists—are united and given shelter under the tent of one man. Trump, the norm destroyer, the gangster-in-chief, is the glue holding this new fusion together.

Glue, of course, has two uses: to hold together, and to seal shut. At this point, we are well into the sealing-shut phase of MAGA as it relates to, e.g., the lips of anyone in its vicinity who might have a basic understanding of economics. Trump’s cult of personality, his attempt to rule over all three branches of government, is an attack on the core of liberalism. But it did not just come out of nowhere. As with wokism, it is the culmination of ideas with decades of academic and activist groundwork behind them.