Among The New Right VanguardThe rich and connected people who are planning for the slow-motion decline of the American state
Rod Dreher
Feb 22, 2023
The thing you should read today is James Pogue's rambling but fascinating Vanity Fair piece about key figures in the New Right, and their vision for a post-American America. You might think when you finish that this is a motley crew of rich gonzo intellectual types that probably won't amount to much. You might be right. But you should also be thinking of Lenin and the early Bolsheviks, in their Siberian exile, meeting to study, build community, and to plan for the future they wanted -- and, alas, that they got.
I was startled to see my name turn up, as well as the names of my friends Paul Kingsnorth (who is apolitical) and Patrick Deneen, as intellectual contributors to the conversation in these circles. Let me cite those passages; I'll tell you why afterward.
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I think the main difference between this crowd and me is that I still believe that it is possible to work for meaningful change within the system we have. It will definitely not be solved by politics alone, and in my view, won't be solved at all without a serious, widespread return to religion. But Viktor Orban's Hungary shows what can be accomplished by politics. The problem we Americans of the non-normie Right have is that we have not had a political party that shares our critique of the system, in even a general way, and the only countercultural political leadership we have had has been Trumpian, which was more performative than effective. I keep boosting Orban to American conservatives because he is an example of how much can get done with the right political leadership. But even Orban openly recognizes the limits of politics in social and cultural renewal. Still, it's something, and it's no small thing, either.
That said, I share with that crowd the belief that we cannot go on like this -- that things are falling apart, and that they're not going to be put back together in the customary way. Here's a quote from the Pogue piece:
Their cohort sees the Northern Rockies as one of a few places in America that will be livable in the coming decades, when life in much of the country is likely to be defined by heat waves, floods, storms, and fires. But they were concerned about living through what people in these spheres tend to call “managed decline,” a comedown period from the age of cheap fossil-fuel energy and rapid economic and technological progress, in which America’s so-called “state capacity”—our collective ability to do things—steadily degrades, our “real economy” hollows out, and political divisions worsen. It is a scenario that looks more like the long decline of the Roman Empire than it does cataclysmic collapse. And it’s this scenario—a muddling, unhappy, middle course—that most people in this sphere tend to predict is coming.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/among-the-new-right-vanguard/
