The so-called New Right, roughly the third wave of activists to use that short-sighted label over the past 60 years, have shown more interest in touting their masculinity than in sticking to any particular policies or principles, aside from whatever Trump is pushing at the moment and, always, opposition to immigration.
Machismo isn’t inherently evil and may sometimes be necessary, but it’s not a very fine-tuned guide to government (or anti-government) policy, and it can lead to downright barbaric choices and pseudo-moral claims at times. But what’s odder about the current New Right, which often touts the “natalist” imperative to have kids and the “trad wife” imperative to raise them in an old-fashioned way (possibly while wearing prairiecore outfits), is that for self-appointed guardians of traditional masculinity, the New Right adherents seem to get a lot of their favorite ideas from gay men.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. You’d just think that might give them more doubts about what exactly they’re fighting for and where they stand. If they were consistent live-and-let-live libertarians, which it is increasingly clear they’re not—and Trump is not—there’d be no appearance of hypocrisy or even irony. But they keep on veering toward fascism even as they draw from a very gay well for some of their favorite imagery and memes.
Take Fight Club. That novel, with its postmodernist blurring of the line between psychotherapy, secret cult membership, and manly bonding through bloody fistfights, was meant as something of a warning from gay author Chuck Palahniuk but seems to be treated as a model of the vibrant psyche by many on the far right. They like to remind the left that “1984 wasn’t meant to be an instruction manual,” but someone should warn them Fight Club wasn’t either.
If Palahniuk suggests that bourgeois capitalist society drives some people to dream of vicious, adrenaline-fueled avenues of escape, you aren’t really helping society by showing that you can be the most vicious and adrenaline-fueled of all. Aren’t you really affirming left-wing, anti-capitalist postmodernism?
I didn’t know people in the real, bourgeois world were self-destructive enough to form fight clubs until I unexpectedly witnessed one call itself to (dis)order at an otherwise civilized gathering of young right-wingers once—mostly millennials and thus the cohort who probably loved the movie adaptation of Fight Club in high school, when subtext was left for the dweebs and English teachers.
A sweaty, face-punching Brad Pitt probably did more to steer the often fatherless lads and awkward lasses of the nascent New Right toward pop-Nietzscheanism than actually reading, say, Nietzsche’s The Gay Science from just over a century earlier. That book, among other things, might’ve taught them to despise tribalism and nationalism as things that undermine individual integrity.
The same year that brought moviegoers Fight Club—and the underappreciated Election about how even the tiniest, high-school-sized political culture corrupts—brought 1999’s most overt revolution in the form of The Matrix. That seems to be young right-wingers’, especially young online right-wingers’, favorite piece of 20th-century culture, recent enough to be remembered and to crop up in their endless misspelled memes, even as they prove daily that they have no memory of larger points of 20th-century history, such as fascism killing millions before being defeated by a globalist democratic military coalition led by America, or communism collapsing due to its suppression of free markets, migration, and individual liberty.
If the right-leaning kids these days can’t be bothered to learn market economics or grasp that government-built giant walls prevent people from moving toward freedom, it’s nice, I suppose, that the idea of escaping surveillance, control grids, and illusions resonates with them. They often echo the choice between the “red pill” of reality and the “blue pill” of soothing illusions in The Matrix, but you’d think they’d be taken aback by the fact that the Wachowskis, the two writer/directors who gave us that film and the pills metaphor therein, are left-anarchist transsexuals who’ve devoted more screen time to defending lesbians and censored Muslims than to sticking up for old-fashioned American pride.
Perhaps the young right likes the Wachowskis’ depiction of the galaxy being run by a natural aristocracy in Jupiter Ascending, but that was the Wachowskis’ worst movie (and not the high point of Mila Kunis’ resume, either). It shouldn’t be a model for anything.
The New Right mind should be even more unsettled by the fact that the Wachowskis basically lifted the pills metaphor from a deranged beatnik with a fondness for drug culture and schizophrenics, namely Philip K. Dick. The right-wingers will be relieved to know they don’t even need to read a book for evidence of that: Watch the Dick adaptation Total Recall, with Arnold Schwarzenegger holding a gun to a villain’s head as the villain’s sweat beads and Arnold’s pressured to choose whether or not to take a reality-revealing pill.
I’d imagine, by the way, that the current crop of right-wingers agree with me that even Schwarzenegger didn’t turn out to be much of a conservative. They seem ready to say that about any right-wing figure who isn’t Trump, as if he is the Platonic ideal of conservatism, now and forevermore. Then again, they are so weirdly obsessed with weightlifting and bodybuilding, we may have reached the point where Arnold being huge matters more to young Republicans than does his abandonment of an initially bold deregulatory agenda when he was California governor. Different eras, different priorities, I guess.
The New Right/gay overlap manifests in numerous other ways, like pundit Milo Yiannopoulos calling the grotesque, authoritarian, hyper-masculine warrior culture of ancient Sparta his political ideal (Zack Snyder’s Sparta-idealizing 2006 film 300, based on the mildly fascistic comics of Frank Miller, combined so many Schwarzenegger-sized muscles and so much loud techno soundtrack music that critics likened it to a European disco). Milo also often called Trump “Daddy” prior to Milo’s purported Christian conversion therapy liberation from gay impulses.
I’ve long suspected that since the millennials who’ve driven much of this change on the right rarely read books, they’re getting a lot of their strange assumptions about history and psychology from movies or videogames, in particular from games that reward thinking like an ancient chieftain or warlord, which can easily lead to thinking you actually understand history, combat, or ruling other people. Our amnesiac culture may owe its politics as much to Halo as to Edmund Burke at this point.
The (gay) pundit named Bronze Age Pervert sounds like he wants to turn the clock back not to 1776 but to the decidedly un-American days when the pyramids were built. Nick Fuentes is now being mocked by Tucker Carlson as a gay kid posting from his basement. Racist Canadian—and one of many abusers of the once-useful term “anarcho-capitalist”—Stefan Molyneux sounds oddly like some of the young “incel” crowd in denouncing women not merely for pretending to be men, as conventional conservatives often complained in the past, but for conventionally feminine things like wearing makeup or being tempted to work in fashion.
This isn’t conventional straight-guy opposition to femininity-as-weakness (which could get stupid enough already) but some weirder, more misogynistic bitterness that risks undermining the whole fun heterosexual thing. Did it all start because divorce back in the 1970s and 1980s left a generation resenting Dad for leaving and poor Mom for staying? Was it augmented by older siblings disappearing in Afghanistan or Iraq because they were at first tougher than the younglings but then deader?
Even the turn to full-on fascism is a tad gay, if tales of the decadent Nazi high command are to be believed (though such things are often said of the enemy during wars). The harder you try to repress Weimar, a century later, the more people will talk.
But the right should instead stick to protecting property and leave the rest for psych sessions and informal chats with their troubled peers. The artificial urgency given to all cultural issues by the totalitarian mind is itself emotionally warping. Government shouldn’t be deciding such matters as aesthetics, cultural tone, or family size at all, and certainly not overnight. Bourgeois, libertarian society is in it for the long haul, not the duration of a short, ill-advised informal boxing match, no matter how much the latter turns you on.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey
