Has the New Right Already Peaked?
With X and JD Vance, the New Right is having a political moment—yet it already appears to be passing.
THE HYPERONLINE, CULTURE-WAR-FIXATED, democracy-skeptical movement known as the New Right is on the proverbial march. Their recent gains include Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, which he has spent much of the last two years retooling to better suit their needs, and getting one of their own, JD Vance, on the Republican presidential ticket. The sorts of people who post memes of Donald Trump in Warhammer 40k armor are salivating at the thought that the next vice president, who might be a future president, could be groyper-adjacent.
But they may soon become victims of their own success: Both the recent changes at X (Musk’s new name for Twitter) and the choice of Vance as a running mate illustrate problems for Trump’s coalition that could hobble his campaign for the presidency.
The problems start with the New Right’s basic understanding of reality. The movement’s worldview rests on an insane theory of power: Members of the New Right unironically believe that American institutions are dominated by radical leftists who use their power and positions of influence to force their beliefs on an unwilling populace while suppressing dissent.
A weirdo from the internet named Curtis Yarvin calls this imaginary arrangement “the Cathedral.” Yarvin is a self-described “neo-reactionary” and “monarchist,” and he makes no secret of his hostility to democracy. I wouldn’t bother naming him—why elevate cranks?—but JD Vance refers to him as an influence, so the elevating has already been done. Vance and Yarvin have been friends for years, and both are also close to Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, Vance’s former employer, who has bankrolled the senator’s political career.
The problem with this theory of power is not just that it would classify as powerless the U.S. Supreme Court, state governments, market-dominating media outlets, churches, much of the business community, and many other right-leaning American institutions. That is already insane. But it also encourages its adherents to believe their ideas have widespread appeal, and the only reason their ideas aren’t dominant is that right-wing viewpoints are being erased from the public discourse by the people who control it. That conspiratorial belief is within bounds for them; what’s apparently out of bounds is the idea that most Americans really are neutral-to-positive regarding the values of democracy and diversity.
Leading New Right figures often use grandiose language to cast themselves as victims of this leftist power complex. Elon Musk is a perfect example. The CEO of Tesla and X has a trans daughter from whom he has been estranged; he rejects her identity and has claimed his “son is dead,” “killed by the woke mind virus.” Musk went on to say, “I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that, and we’re making some progress.” (Lest you think this episode was a painful one for Musk, he also said of the broken relationship, “Can’t win them all.”)
What’s the upshot of Musk’s vow so far? Mainly, he’s changed the rules of the social network he bought, which at his direction has loosened automated restrictions on the n-word and anti-trans slurs while designating “cis” and “cisgender” as slurs that can lead to account suspension. This, to him, is what it means to advocate free speech.
By changing moderation rules, by mass-distributing his own content and material he agrees with, by reducing the overall reliability of information, and by boosting paid accounts, Musk has made X more hospitable to the culture-war right. Because many journalists, influencers, and political figures remain active on X, the platform still has vestiges of the outsized influence it enjoyed before Musk’s takeover. The biggest difference between then and now is that it has become even more swamped in conspiracy theories, misinformation, and bigotry. It’s gotten close to the way people commonly think about 4chan—a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
This diminished the site’s appeal to normies, and many advertisers followed them to the exits. (Cue more aggrieved grandiosity from Musk.) But as its general popularity has declined, the site has seen its influence go up with one group in particular: the MAGA faction currently dominating the Republican party. Musk has endorsed Trump, the only social media owner to endorse a candidate, and his site has become an online nexus of the New Right and the GOP.
All this could be a liability now that the Democratic nominee is Kamala Harris. When President Joe Biden was still the presumed nominee, the online right did eager and energetic work going after his age. This was safe territory for them; the age issue was a widely shared concern and might have sunk Biden’s candidacy by itself. But now that the president dropped out, those same right-wingers are obeying their baser instincts and going after Harris for her race and gender.
Conservative attorney Will Chamberlain went viral last week with posts arguing that Kamala Harris shouldn’t be president because she has “no children.” Not being a biological mother leaves her, Chamberlain argues, incapable of understanding “the concerns of parents and families” and without “a stake in the future.” (Chamberlain even anticipates a direct factual objection, writing that having stepkids, as Harris does, “doesn’t count.”)
X churns up toxic content like that all the time. While it might get a strong response from New Right types online, it often crosses into the sort of explicit bigotry that makes most Americans uncomfortable. The more this sort of right-wing discourse breaks its online containment to seep into the real-world public’s impression of the Trump campaign, the more it risks turning off undecided voters and rallying Harris supporters against it.
Less-online Republican politicians recognize this as a political problem, but they seem unable to address it. Speaker Mike Johnson and other House Republican leaders have asked the caucus to stop making racist and sexist attacks against Harris—the most common gibe is that she is a “DEI hire”—but they’re not listening. They’ve been influenced by, and playing to, the online right for years, and the right-wing culture warriors of X can’t get enough of the DEI smear. Figures like Donald Trump Jr. and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk have spent the last year or two trying to blame plane malfunctions on black pilots. Elon Musk likes that angle too, no matter the lack of evidence for it. That’s the kind of move this crowd likes to make on virtually any issue. The 2024 Republican campaign can’t get away from it.
A New Right Veep
THE PROBLEMS WITH the hyperonline New Right are now problems with the Republican presidential ticket. When JD Vance, Trump’s choice of running mate, was running for the Senate in 2021, he made remarks that anticipated Chamberlain’s viral attacks. Vance mocked Kamala Harris as an example of the “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” As Cathy Young writes in The Bulwark today, Vance has since doubled down on this charge.
Online edgelords find this kind of thing very based. But notwithstanding the New Right’s theory of power, these posters do not represent a large part of the electorate. And that spells trouble for the Trump campaign.
Presidential candidates usually pick a running mate who broadens the appeal of the ticket. That’s why Obama picked Joe Biden in 2008 and Biden picked Kamala Harris in 2020. Looking to consolidate his support from evangelicals, Trump picked Mike Pence in 2016. That consolidation is complete, plus he almost got Pence killed during January 6th, so Trump chose a new running mate this time around. But his pick doesn’t add to the ticket.
Vance has two sources of appeal. First, more than any of the other Republicans who were reportedly under consideration as potential Trump running mates, Vance has advocated the Big Lie about the 2020 election and says he would have overturned the results on January 6th. He seems to be signaling his willingness to attempt the same in the future, should the occasion arise. Perhaps this is why Axios reported during the Republican convention that Trump had “genuine affection” for Vance.
Second, Vance is close to the New Right and the tech-billionaire wing of Trump’s movement, whose interests he represents. Elon Musk, tech VC and Putin apologist David Sacks, and former Fox host Tucker Carlson all reportedly called Trump to advocate for Vance in the days leading up to the Republican convention.
But that’s about it. Politically, Vance has little else to offer. His only election at any level was the 2022 Senate race in Ohio. He won with around 53 percent of the vote, running over nine points behind the Republican governor. Before that, he came out of a crowded Republican primary with a nomination-winning plurality thanks to generous support from tech billionaire Peter Thiel. There’s not much in this record that suggests political talent or the ability to win over swing voters.
Vance’s greatest appeal is supposedly to working-class white men, but they’re already Trump’s strongest constituency. He’s on record supporting a national abortion ban, which makes it harder for Trump to finesse the issue, a proven winner for Democrats. And now, Vance has become the first vice-presidential nominee to register a net negative approval rating in post-convention polls.
Early signs suggest he’s going to struggle to expand his appeal. In a viral clip from a July 22 rally, Vance claims Democrats “say it’s racist to do anything.” He offers Diet Mountain Dew as a hypothetical example: “I’m sure they’ll call that racist, too.” Vance pauses for laughs, which barely come, and then awkwardly riffs. His joke would’ve landed in online-right spaces, getting likes and shares on X. But it sounds weird to almost everyone else. Hyperbolic. Whiny.
Vance creates a novel vulnerability for the Trump ticket, too: He creates a direct connection between the campaign and Project 2025, the radical plan the New Right aims to enact if Trump wins. Trump and his campaign have repeatedly tried to disavow the effort, as recently as Tuesday. They would prefer those plans to be enacted as a fait accompli after Trump 2.0 is installed rather than become an electoral issue beforehand, for obvious reasons. (I doubt even the people who wrote the plan believe that banning porn and abolishing the Department of Education are issues that will bring swing voters on side.)
They can’t help talking about it, though. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts is the lead author of the project, and he threateningly described his movement in this way: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
“If the left allows it”—a perfect illustration of the New Right’s look-what-you-made-me-do rationalization of overthrowing constitutional democracy. And it’s a good way to make the New Right’s post-election plans into an electoral issue.
Trump’s efforts to distance himself from Project 2025 are made harder by the fact that so many of his people have worked on it, to say nothing of Trump being on video praising the project as it started. And it doesn’t help that Kevin Roberts has a book coming out in September advocating Project 2025’s vision of a Second American Revolution under Trump—with a foreword by none other than JD Vance. (You can read it yourself here.) The deniability is becoming more and more implausible.
Disrupting Democracy
YOU NEED STATE POWER to enact a radical vision, and getting state power in our country means winning elections. That requires appealing to the public.
Because of their grievances and theory of power, the New Right believes its ideas appeal to a “silent majority” suppressed by powerful left-wing figures. This creates cognitive dissonance that blocks off self-awareness. The more they ensconce themselves in information bubbles to avoid reckoning with the actual opinions and desires of the public, the less they see how far they are from mainstream American opinion.
Musk retooled X to show that more Americans are opposed to trans acceptance, as he is. But political campaigns that appeal to anti-trans sentiment have flopped. Christopher Rufo reset New College in Florida to show that anti-woke higher education is a product Americans didn’t even know they wanted. The institution was thrown into disorder. School boards across the country have banned books that discuss racism in American history out of a conviction that parents want them to protect their children from leftist indoctrination. But Americans overwhelmingly oppose the bans, with most saying the main point of teaching this material is helping students “understand what others went through” rather than making them feel bad about the past.
The New Right’s ideas have become more influential, and they’re positioned to have a fellow traveler at the heights of power. But they still don’t understand what appeals to a majority, and they’ve linked Trump’s campaign to the online right in ways they can’t easily fix or roll back.
If Trump loses this fall and the New Right falls short in their bid for national power, they’ll have themselves to blame.
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