None of this is untrue, exactly. There’s a growing infrastructure laundering fringe anti-democratic ideas and piping them into the heart of the Republican Party. But this is where most accounts of the new intellectual Right leave off. The clue to a fuller account is in the name: the new, dissident, postliberal Right are only united by what they claim to be opposing and superseding. This doesn’t get noticed much outside the online Right itself; everyone seems to think their own political faction is hopelessly divided, while their enemies are creepily unanimous. But when the liberal world order inevitably collapses and a bold new ideology rises from the ashes, what will that actually look like? Depends who you ask.

There’s a faction in the online Right that wants to build a Nordic-style social democracy, with strong labor unions, state control of industry, and a robust welfare state. (As Succession put it, “Medicare for All, abortions for none.”) So far, their plan to get there mostly seems to consist of writing long essays on Foucault. The monarchists, meanwhile, want a stratified, techno-feudal society of cyber-aristocrats and forelock-tugging digi-serfs. Some prefer Donald Trump to be their emperor, but by no means all. Plenty would be perfectly happy with Kamala Harris, as long as she uses the full power of the state to mercilessly crush all opposition. Yarvin, their intellectual godfather, is still formally endorsing Biden, despite his having dropped out. There’s a surprisingly influential faction of the American Right that wants to build a new political order based on Pindar’s Odes—a collection of lyric poems honoring the great athletes of the fifth century BC—and also eating raw eggs. A persistent current wants to turn the state into a minor facet of the Catholic Church. It’s true that less than a quarter of the country is actually Catholic, but maybe enough immigration from Latin America could yet transform the USA into the Empire of Our Lady of Guadalupe. There are even currents on the online Right who believe that the Caribbean was originally settled by white-skinned men from the North Pole, or possibly outer space. Others are outright neo-Nazis. That last group seems plain next to their neighbors. Unimaginative.

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