The Intellectual Right Goes to War (with Itself)
After ten years of mild skirmishes, the right’s many factions have opened fire on each other
When Charlie Kirk was assassinated roughly two months ago, I didn’t anticipate that one of its major consequences would be the outbreak of factional warfare on the American right. But that’s exactly what’s happened.
First, in the wake of the religiously charged memorial service for Kirk, the religious-right and secular-right factions in the MAGA orbit began to express irritation at each other. Then tensions over U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza intensified, with Tucker Carlson’s softball interview of flagrantly anti-Semitic neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes lighting a fire that’s spread ideological and generational warfare to the Heritage Foundation and other outposts on the right.
And then, this week, one of the right’s oldest educational institutions, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), was plunged into controversy when a former president and a former chairman of the organization banded together in accusing the current president (Johnny Burtka) of betraying its founding principles by (among other things) inviting postliberal political theorist Patrick Deneen and tech-bro monarchist Curtis Yarvin to appear on a new ISI podcast.
Now, as someone who reads and thinks about the right for a living, this is all very interesting—great fun, in fact. Though I do think people should resist the temptation to conclude the turbulence on the intellectual right is evidence of broader-based political weakness for Republican officeholders and -seekers. The number of people who know and care about these disputes is miniscule in the scheme of the country as a whole. This is mostly highly educated, highly informed people on the right fighting with each other. What happens in these elite disputes isn’t going to make a direct, measurable difference one way or another in elections.
Yet I still think it’s worth looking at what’s going on within these elite circles on the right—because it’s ultimately a fight about which ideas will be allowed and encouraged, and which will be marginalized and excluded, in powerful Republican-aligned organizations and institutions. If you want to get a sense for the probable future shape of the American right, you need to look at its history, but you also need to pay attention to which ideas are in and out, embraced and denounced, in the present.
The Four Core Factions
We don’t talk enough about how badly fractured the MAGA right is. One reason why we don’t notice it is that we’re accustomed to a right with various factions. The Reaganite New Right blended hawkish anti-Communists; economic libertarians who wanted to cut taxes and regulations as much as possible; and religious-right culture warriors out to ban abortion, reject gay rights, and restrict porn, while reviving prayer in public schools. Those people were usually happy to work together to win power, despite their differences and the tensions among them.
But things are much more splintered today. Laura Field’s excellent new book, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, is easily the best introduction to this terrain you’re likely to find. I hope you’ll buy and read it—or at least listen to her talk about it in one of her many podcast appearances, most recently with John Ganz.
Field divides the right into four main factions:
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