What’s hilarious about this is that most of the New Right are just a bunch of cowards. Minnesota, the soft, weak-willed progressive snowflakes, beat their Nazi Kommandant and ruined their reputations. Mostly they just get to wage an online proxy war where they can pretend that Ukraine represents the decadent West and Russia is the mighty warriors! I also think that the appeal of savagery is also downstream of a distrust of education and expertise. If muscle be big and that makes man mighty then those fancy pants generals with their Ivy League degrees don’t matter as much. Many on the right are just stupid and want simple solutions for complex questions. Iran will give up because we are mean and will blow things up you don’t need operational and strategic superiority just kill more! Because so many in America generally had a falling out with expertise and institutions post-Covid, they have seen that as their chance. I hope the disaster of the Iran war and the second Trump administration will bend things back the other way. Yes it does matter to know what you are doing.
Maybe I've played too many wargames, but ruling out the role of Russian Intelligence influence campaigns on ginning up this zeitgeist of 'Russia as Exemplar of Western Christian Values' cannot be overlooked. But unlike empirical economics data, any conclusions regarding the Spy Game are by definition opaque and speculative.
Many years ago I also came to the conclusion that Donald Trump is a long-standing KGB (FSB or SVR) asset, probably recruited in the 1980's or '90's. Which hypothesis far more comprehensively explains his decade of ardently pro-Russia, anti-US/NATO/EU policies and verbiage. Far more than the "Useful Idiot" theory beloved of the MSM.
But accusing a US POTUS of being a Russian spy, is not and perhaps never will be a professionally popular position among US media elites. Not even with the left-of-center MS-Now.
Simple, because in November of 2024, nearly half of the American electorate asked to be.
Whether they all realized the extent of what they were asking for can be debated, but after January 6th and all the surrounding rhetoric of hatred, misogyny, racism, and violence spewing from Trump and his cohort as he reran for the presidency after his loss in 2020 there really wasn’t any further doubt about who he was, what he wanted, and the direction in which he intended to take the country if he and his growing band of lickspittles were able to re-occupy the Oval Office and the Cabinet.
We can debate how much Biden’s very foolish decision to run again contributed to the problem, but the Republican Party had many choices in the 2024 campaign, some of whom were at least reasonable choices, yet they overwhelmingly chose to return Trump to power.
The old saying remains valid - Be careful what you ask for; you may get it.That so many of those who supported Trump’s return are now suffering various degrees of buyer’s remorse is refreshing, but the damage they have allowed him to inflict on us in the meantime may be irreparable, and they have no one to blame but themselves.
The ‘immigration disaster’ was decades in the making, and both Democrats and Republicans had a hand in that. Biden didn’t begin it, but you may recall that the lest bi-partisan attempt to resolve it, done during the last year of the Biden administration was torpedoed not by Biden, but by Trump who wanted to continue to use the issue in his own campaign. Trump didn’t give damn about the border except as it played into his hands.
All attempts to blame Biden for whatever happened in the aftermath of the pandemic hardly equal Trump’s utter dismissal of its dangers until he could no longer do so. A number of mistakes were made both during and after the pandemic, which was not unexpected given its magnitude. But no one but Trump would have tried to dismiss it simply because he feared its effects on his agenda. Any other American president would have put the country first. Trump, as he has always done, put himself first.
I do note that nowhere do you contest my contention that January 6th and Trump’s ensuing campaign of autocracy, hatred, bigotry, distortions, and lies should have convinced any American with half a brain about his agenda, which was and remains at attempt to destroy our Republic in pursuit of his own wealth, power, revenge, and evasion of any responsibiity for the damage he has done and continues to do.
The endless right wing game of ‘whataboutism’ based solely on the border and inflation (which if you remember was coming down) ignores the fact that the Biden administration left this country in far better shape than a mere two years of Trump 2.0 has managed. It also ignores the vast range of destruction wreaked by the Trump administration, the single most autocratic , anti-democratic, and corrupt administriaon in American history.
Which Trump torpedoed anyway. Because Trump + GOP actually *love* illegal immigration, precisely because it fits perfectly into their culture war narrative of hordes of brown-skinned hordes of rapists and murderers "invading" the country.
Hello Noah. It strikes me that these New Right guys (I guess they are mostly guys) are just phone jockeys. If they volunteered in their local community (Rural Fire Service, State emergency service whatever youse have in the States), if it is not entirely white, they wouldn't hold these opinions. Instead they would meet men of good character, not the right skin colour, and start to wonder. But maybe they wouldn't......
While I agree that Noah need not stick strictly to economics, I really don't like to throw around the "both sides" charge too quickly.
Yes, at the moment, the barbarian right is vastly more damaging than the new left. But Noah is explicitly discussing the post-Trump future, so the fair comparison would be the intentions and capabilities of the new left and barbarian right in 2030 and 2040.
Looked at in that light, I am very concerned about both sides. Each much aided by the nature of online politics. Each much aided by the other -- since the most popular reason to vote for one is the threat posed by their counterpart. And neither having much regard for democratic norms like free expression and majority rule.
We know what left barbarism and control looks like. We have seen Communist regimes. A student saying, "respect my pronouns" is annoying, but not Stalinist.
The current GOP regime has publicly accused Democrats of being "vermin," and "enemies of the American people." And then used the power of the state to fire these self same ideological opponents wherever possible, and attempt to shut down universities that resist.
So pick your poison: opinionated Leftie students using peer pressure; or the Government telling you what you can or cannot read, what religion you must practice, and who can or cannot marry.
I look forward the same bold stand on the "freedom to discriminate without social or professional consequences" when it comes to refusing to make cakes for interracial weddings.
Why do you think there's always an economic cause for vengeful stupidity? If AfD was concerned about economics, they'd worry more about unfair competition from China and less about immigration.
Most of the time, it seems to me, right wing popularity is driven by feelings of loss of control by the electorate. It could be antiwar and other protests putting Nixon in power, deindustrialization killing off businesses in medium-sized cities that helped put Trump in power, or large scale illegal immigration that seems to be helping the right in Europe.
Little of this is rational, much less economically rational. In the US, big agricultural businesses depend upon immigrant labor to harvest crops. The US tech industry benefits greatly from the student to citizen pipeline from India and China. Virtually everything that Trump is doing is economically irrational, as he actively works to destroy US universities, drug research via the NIH, and even Silicon Valley by preventing access to H1B visas. Musk and Trump together are making it irrational to rely on US companies for their defense industries.
Phillips O'Brien calls this superpower suicide, and we're learning that it can happen here. Hopefully we'll stop it before it reaches the levels of depravity we saw in Europe in the 1930s, China in the 1960s, or Russia pretty much any time.
The new right are literal Nazis. And the US is currently being run into the ground by their corrupt figurehead. Your attempt to both sides that is contemptible.
Of course, who were the "Barbarians" that originally established the concept? Germanic hordes of savages trying to wash up on pro-democratic and kind of gay Greek shores (barbaroi - those who sound like "bar bar bar bar" when they speak, kind of like the South Park depiction of Islamic terrorists saying "derpa derpa").
One could easily savage these self-evidently weak and cowardly "men" (technically) that desperately want to feel tough on the internet and hit them with a blizzard of take downs about everything wrong with their sad little world view.
I remember reading how they were jealous of ISIS and wished they could do the equivalent for so called "Christians".
My main comeback would be, "Provide any example from any point in history when this was true."
The Nazis lost. The US Confederacy lost. South Africa's Apartheid lost. ISIS went max brutality and lost. Bear wrestling propagandist Putin continues to humiliate himself on a daily basis in Ukraine but is skilled on online PR, which is one of those kind of gay laptop jobs.
Even the lionized comic book version of Sparta's King Leonidas from 300 lost. His big achievement was holding the Persians back long enough for the kind of gay Athenians to arrive with reinforcements after that skinny guy invented marathon running, which, come on guys, is kind of gay compared to just watching yourself and other big muscly men in the mirror lift heavy things.
These embarassingly dense so called "intellectuals" talk about the grand sweep of history and "first principles" and yet the best they can come up with is Pinochet or Franco? Ugh...but aren't those, like, not "real Europeans" as in white? They sound kind of Latino.
Genghis Khan was surely a ruthless savage. Until you learn that what made the mongols so successful was an explicitly inclusive and multicultural strategy, easily defeating many of the pure Christian kingdoms using their superior strategy and intelligence.
These guys love talking about Rome but the Rome that was great was the explicitly inclusive multicultural Pagan Rome. The Rome we still care about and find interesting and inspirational today. Christian "Rome" (Byzantium) lasted much longer but doesn't have much interesting history other than the odd encounters where backwater Papal States Rome lectures Constantinople about what Christianity is when Constantinople was founded by the guy who made Rome Christian! They fell into centuries of tedious theological debates and decadence until falling to more skilled and dynamic Muslim conquerors.
If you look at the great expanse of history the recurring theme is the groups that harness inclusive multiculturalism, literacy and scientific innovation, and focus on free trade, dominate their savage, insular rivals and typically just steamroll these fools.
Again, provide a single example from history where groups behaving in this way were ever more than a brief flash in the pan to be conquered or absorbed by the true defenders of "civilization."
Yes, because they did it with mundane bureaucratic changes that respected the rule of law, rather than trying to be tough guys engaged in performative cruelty towards innocents.
Yes, absolutely. Our right-wingers could learn a lot from those supposedly left-wing Swedes about how to go about carrying out right-wing policy. And our left-wingers could think again about the policy itself.
Thanks for this article. I think it’s important to be pro-Enlightenment and support leaders who will carry the torch of the Enlightenment forward. Those who find something to like in the New Right’s message must not forget that the Middle Ages was also “Western Civilization.” The ignorance, superstition, and barbarism of that period does not represent anything we would want to turn back to.
It’s totally reasonable to want to not import Muslims, to expel those we can expel, to pay the ones who have the right to stay to leave, and to make life uncomfortable for those who remain anyway. The Muslim mind virus is simply not compatible with any society with liberty of religion, free speech, or anything approaching scientific progress or free markets. That is true if you are a fundamentalist Christian or an atheist libertarian.
There is no such thing as "the Muslim mind," Mr. McCutchen. You are describing militant Islamist fundamentalism (which is indeed illiberal and dangerous). For many centuries the most religiously accommodating, scientific, and trade-friendly regions of the Western world were among the various Medieval caliphates, stretching from Spain through the North Africa and the Middle East. Their holy book was the same Koran that Muslims of all types deem sacred today. And over those centuries the most religiously illiberal, unscientific, warlike, and economically insular region of the West was Christendom, whose churches taught people to revere the New Testament above all else (though few could read it and its ideas came to people through the powerful filter of the clergy).
Within the world community of Muslims, which includes places such as Indonesia (the world's most populous Muslim state), Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Turkey -- an EU member, currently embarked on a MAGA-style political adventure -- is a huge population of non-Islamist Muslims whose religious affiliation affects their social and intellectual cultures in a wide variety of ways, just as sincere Christianity appears in widely variant forms among American evangelicals (Black and White churches being starkly different), Catholics, Presbyterians, Mormons, etc.
Reducing vast populations of disparate people to a single "Mind" is itself one of the most potent and politically dangerous tactics of the dominant ideology in an illiberal society, and the antagonism it creates actually helps foster the type of cultural extremism -- in both its own culture and in members of the culture it attacks -- that it appears to decry.
Few American immigrants are Muslims. They are overwhelmingly Latin American Christians. As Noah wrote and your remarks seem to reflect, the American Right is aligning themselves with European political concerns in their putative defense of “Western Civilization.
Some commenters are suggesting that you "stick to economics." I don't have any direct response to that suggestion. But I would note that the idea of favoring Russia of the U.S. from an economic perspective seems so obviously stupid that there must be something else going on.
I asked Claude to give me per-capita GDP on a PPP basis for the G-7 plus China and Russia. Russia comes in at $52,479 for 2026 (apparently these are IMF estimates from Wikipedia). The US comes in at $94,430. So Russian toughness gives the average Russian half the goods and services as the average U.S. resident. And even though the U.S. isn't great on life expectancy as compared to the rest of the G-7, it's still more than 5 years longer than Russia (again, figures courtesy of Claude). And the Russian economy is deeply dependent on very old-school activities, mining/extraction and basic processing of mined materials.
At bottom, all of economics is driven by what consumers in an economy want, mapped onto whatever system of production exists to address those wants. Not all wants are economic, by a long shot. But at a high level, it seems like the lesson from Russia is that indulging a culture-wide taste of "toughness" costs roughly 50% of per-capita income and at least 5 years of life.
“What dangerous ideologies did he think were storming the beaches of Normandy in 1944?”
I mean, it’s fairly obvious. There are those like Curtis Yarvin who will say that the West should be like Hitler - there are those like Pete Hegseth who will only be willing to wink at those who say the West should be like Hitler.
I think you give this movement a little too much credit for being this unified. The 'New Right' is really multiple different movements that shares a single thread: hatred for the Left. JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk are all fairly different from one another in many ways. The only thing that unites them is hated of the Left and Democrats.
Donald Trump is not ideological. He has a lot of personal beliefs, but he in the end is a self-centered authoritarian only interested in pushing his own self-interest. He holds this coalition together through charisma and strength of will alone.
I think that it's useful to recognize the powerful influence on the intellectual New Right of a cult novel with equal influence on Europe's neo-Fascist movements: "The Camp of the Saints," by the widely honored French novelist Jean Raspail. Raspail pictured a huge flotilla of naked, hypersexual, animalistic emigrants sailing from the Indian subcontinent and making its way to Northwestern Europe, where it threatened to overwhelm civilized White Christian populations. The book, which has been widely translated, is the source of the "Great Replacement" theory that animates MAGA and the New Right of the dark web, as well as fueling Europe's xenophobic reaction to the immigrant wave in Europe that followed the Syrian civil war exodus.
While Raspail inspires the intellectual New Right (figures like Yarvin), the broader American audience for the New Right has been more influenced by "The Turner Diaries," by William Pierce ("Andrew Macdonald"), which is more direct in licensing the necessary savagery of resisting the replacement of a White Christian native population of the US by a black and brown population wave, engineered by Jews and abetted by a compliant liberal political culture in a process known as "White Genocide." This is a major influence on the masculine-macho segment of the New Right -- its militia movement. (Timothy McVeigh treated the book as his bible, and the Oklahoma City Bombing was scripted according to it.)
Sounds like “The Raft of the Medusa”, Theodore Gericault’s great painting in the Louvre from 1818-1819. This problem has been around for quite awhile. From Mister.
Raspail surely knew the Gericault and it may have contributed to elements of his portrayal of a very different kind of flotilla.
If by "this problem" you mean groups of people roaming the world in search of a safer haven and better future, I suppose the "problem" has been part of human history for at least fifty thousand years. We are nothing without it.
Yes. I was trying to draw a parallel between shipwrecked passengers and crew struggling across the ocean to reach civilization and displaced refugees and the native population that hosts them struggling towards a civil coexistence. Both groups face turbulence and troubled waters. And the crossing requires luck and perseverance. Maybe a bit metaphysical for Sunday morning. Peace.
It's certainly possible to be in the center or center-left and believe that if a country like France or Germany puts the far right into power then this could be a sign that the whole West has fallen and there is nothing special about the United States where it could hold on to liberalism longer than these other countries.
It is not only that one poll that shows that the right is losing young men. Other polls gleefully platformed by the NYT show that voters in general believe that the right/Republicans are focusing on the wrong things and they are susceptible to simple messages such as "Republicans are taking most of their money from a handful of billionaires [which is true!] who are building enormous power to change everything about the America you thought you knew and are blaming immigrants and outsiders to protect the rich".
What’s hilarious about this is that most of the New Right are just a bunch of cowards. Minnesota, the soft, weak-willed progressive snowflakes, beat their Nazi Kommandant and ruined their reputations. Mostly they just get to wage an online proxy war where they can pretend that Ukraine represents the decadent West and Russia is the mighty warriors! I also think that the appeal of savagery is also downstream of a distrust of education and expertise. If muscle be big and that makes man mighty then those fancy pants generals with their Ivy League degrees don’t matter as much. Many on the right are just stupid and want simple solutions for complex questions. Iran will give up because we are mean and will blow things up you don’t need operational and strategic superiority just kill more! Because so many in America generally had a falling out with expertise and institutions post-Covid, they have seen that as their chance. I hope the disaster of the Iran war and the second Trump administration will bend things back the other way. Yes it does matter to know what you are doing.
Maybe I've played too many wargames, but ruling out the role of Russian Intelligence influence campaigns on ginning up this zeitgeist of 'Russia as Exemplar of Western Christian Values' cannot be overlooked. But unlike empirical economics data, any conclusions regarding the Spy Game are by definition opaque and speculative.
Many years ago I also came to the conclusion that Donald Trump is a long-standing KGB (FSB or SVR) asset, probably recruited in the 1980's or '90's. Which hypothesis far more comprehensively explains his decade of ardently pro-Russia, anti-US/NATO/EU policies and verbiage. Far more than the "Useful Idiot" theory beloved of the MSM.
But accusing a US POTUS of being a Russian spy, is not and perhaps never will be a professionally popular position among US media elites. Not even with the left-of-center MS-Now.
“Republicans have been oohing and ahhing over Russia’s hypermasculine military recruitment ads for years”
Do you think that Republicans realize these “hypermasculine Russian soldiers” are getting their asses kicked by kids using video game controllers?
“Why are we ruled by barbarians?”
Simple, because in November of 2024, nearly half of the American electorate asked to be.
Whether they all realized the extent of what they were asking for can be debated, but after January 6th and all the surrounding rhetoric of hatred, misogyny, racism, and violence spewing from Trump and his cohort as he reran for the presidency after his loss in 2020 there really wasn’t any further doubt about who he was, what he wanted, and the direction in which he intended to take the country if he and his growing band of lickspittles were able to re-occupy the Oval Office and the Cabinet.
We can debate how much Biden’s very foolish decision to run again contributed to the problem, but the Republican Party had many choices in the 2024 campaign, some of whom were at least reasonable choices, yet they overwhelmingly chose to return Trump to power.
The old saying remains valid - Be careful what you ask for; you may get it.That so many of those who supported Trump’s return are now suffering various degrees of buyer’s remorse is refreshing, but the damage they have allowed him to inflict on us in the meantime may be irreparable, and they have no one to blame but themselves.
It wasn't biden's foolish attempt to run again. That doomed the democrats in 2024
It was the fact that biden campaigned as a centrist, but governed from the left
He did two trillion in extra stimulus. He shouldn't have done. And then when inflation started to appear, he did not pull that unspent stimulus back
Can he combine that with disastrous border policies, and an immigration disaster
If democrats really believe that trump was this unique threat, they should have governed a lot differently
The ‘immigration disaster’ was decades in the making, and both Democrats and Republicans had a hand in that. Biden didn’t begin it, but you may recall that the lest bi-partisan attempt to resolve it, done during the last year of the Biden administration was torpedoed not by Biden, but by Trump who wanted to continue to use the issue in his own campaign. Trump didn’t give damn about the border except as it played into his hands.
All attempts to blame Biden for whatever happened in the aftermath of the pandemic hardly equal Trump’s utter dismissal of its dangers until he could no longer do so. A number of mistakes were made both during and after the pandemic, which was not unexpected given its magnitude. But no one but Trump would have tried to dismiss it simply because he feared its effects on his agenda. Any other American president would have put the country first. Trump, as he has always done, put himself first.
I do note that nowhere do you contest my contention that January 6th and Trump’s ensuing campaign of autocracy, hatred, bigotry, distortions, and lies should have convinced any American with half a brain about his agenda, which was and remains at attempt to destroy our Republic in pursuit of his own wealth, power, revenge, and evasion of any responsibiity for the damage he has done and continues to do.
The endless right wing game of ‘whataboutism’ based solely on the border and inflation (which if you remember was coming down) ignores the fact that the Biden administration left this country in far better shape than a mere two years of Trump 2.0 has managed. It also ignores the vast range of destruction wreaked by the Trump administration, the single most autocratic , anti-democratic, and corrupt administriaon in American history.
Yes, when democrats were staring at electoral defeat, they did making an attempt to pass immigration legislation
And yes, that immigration legislation was better than the status quo
It was still a really bad and weak bill
Which Trump torpedoed anyway. Because Trump + GOP actually *love* illegal immigration, precisely because it fits perfectly into their culture war narrative of hordes of brown-skinned hordes of rapists and murderers "invading" the country.
Hello Noah. It strikes me that these New Right guys (I guess they are mostly guys) are just phone jockeys. If they volunteered in their local community (Rural Fire Service, State emergency service whatever youse have in the States), if it is not entirely white, they wouldn't hold these opinions. Instead they would meet men of good character, not the right skin colour, and start to wonder. But maybe they wouldn't......
Cheers
Tony
Canberra, Australia
Stick to economics Noah. Yes, much of the new right is stupid and reactive and hateful. Much of the new left is revenge-full, stupid and hateful.
Why are we in this dystopian hell? What’s the economics cause and effect of this hell?
I too remember when BIden and Obama had that woman who refused to make a gay wedding cake burned at the stake.
Stop trying to both sides this.
While I agree that Noah need not stick strictly to economics, I really don't like to throw around the "both sides" charge too quickly.
Yes, at the moment, the barbarian right is vastly more damaging than the new left. But Noah is explicitly discussing the post-Trump future, so the fair comparison would be the intentions and capabilities of the new left and barbarian right in 2030 and 2040.
Looked at in that light, I am very concerned about both sides. Each much aided by the nature of online politics. Each much aided by the other -- since the most popular reason to vote for one is the threat posed by their counterpart. And neither having much regard for democratic norms like free expression and majority rule.
We know what left barbarism and control looks like. We have seen Communist regimes. A student saying, "respect my pronouns" is annoying, but not Stalinist.
The current GOP regime has publicly accused Democrats of being "vermin," and "enemies of the American people." And then used the power of the state to fire these self same ideological opponents wherever possible, and attempt to shut down universities that resist.
So pick your poison: opinionated Leftie students using peer pressure; or the Government telling you what you can or cannot read, what religion you must practice, and who can or cannot marry.
No they just tried to ruin him and shut down his business.
Leftist tolerance in action
Meanwhile, if your daughter gets pregnant by a rapist, and you're forbidden to get her an abortion, you're OK with that?
Rightist Theocracy in action.
I know, right?
I look forward the same bold stand on the "freedom to discriminate without social or professional consequences" when it comes to refusing to make cakes for interracial weddings.
He was more than happy to sell after shelf cakes to a gay or lesbian
He just didn't want to make a cake celebrating their union. Because it was against his religious
And a pluralistic society, such as ours, we need to be able to accept people. And tolerate them with different opinions
Even and maybe especially if we don't agree with them
Why do you think there's always an economic cause for vengeful stupidity? If AfD was concerned about economics, they'd worry more about unfair competition from China and less about immigration.
Most of the time, it seems to me, right wing popularity is driven by feelings of loss of control by the electorate. It could be antiwar and other protests putting Nixon in power, deindustrialization killing off businesses in medium-sized cities that helped put Trump in power, or large scale illegal immigration that seems to be helping the right in Europe.
Little of this is rational, much less economically rational. In the US, big agricultural businesses depend upon immigrant labor to harvest crops. The US tech industry benefits greatly from the student to citizen pipeline from India and China. Virtually everything that Trump is doing is economically irrational, as he actively works to destroy US universities, drug research via the NIH, and even Silicon Valley by preventing access to H1B visas. Musk and Trump together are making it irrational to rely on US companies for their defense industries.
Phillips O'Brien calls this superpower suicide, and we're learning that it can happen here. Hopefully we'll stop it before it reaches the levels of depravity we saw in Europe in the 1930s, China in the 1960s, or Russia pretty much any time.
The new right are literal Nazis. And the US is currently being run into the ground by their corrupt figurehead. Your attempt to both sides that is contemptible.
Of course, who were the "Barbarians" that originally established the concept? Germanic hordes of savages trying to wash up on pro-democratic and kind of gay Greek shores (barbaroi - those who sound like "bar bar bar bar" when they speak, kind of like the South Park depiction of Islamic terrorists saying "derpa derpa").
One could easily savage these self-evidently weak and cowardly "men" (technically) that desperately want to feel tough on the internet and hit them with a blizzard of take downs about everything wrong with their sad little world view.
I remember reading how they were jealous of ISIS and wished they could do the equivalent for so called "Christians".
My main comeback would be, "Provide any example from any point in history when this was true."
The Nazis lost. The US Confederacy lost. South Africa's Apartheid lost. ISIS went max brutality and lost. Bear wrestling propagandist Putin continues to humiliate himself on a daily basis in Ukraine but is skilled on online PR, which is one of those kind of gay laptop jobs.
Even the lionized comic book version of Sparta's King Leonidas from 300 lost. His big achievement was holding the Persians back long enough for the kind of gay Athenians to arrive with reinforcements after that skinny guy invented marathon running, which, come on guys, is kind of gay compared to just watching yourself and other big muscly men in the mirror lift heavy things.
These embarassingly dense so called "intellectuals" talk about the grand sweep of history and "first principles" and yet the best they can come up with is Pinochet or Franco? Ugh...but aren't those, like, not "real Europeans" as in white? They sound kind of Latino.
Genghis Khan was surely a ruthless savage. Until you learn that what made the mongols so successful was an explicitly inclusive and multicultural strategy, easily defeating many of the pure Christian kingdoms using their superior strategy and intelligence.
These guys love talking about Rome but the Rome that was great was the explicitly inclusive multicultural Pagan Rome. The Rome we still care about and find interesting and inspirational today. Christian "Rome" (Byzantium) lasted much longer but doesn't have much interesting history other than the odd encounters where backwater Papal States Rome lectures Constantinople about what Christianity is when Constantinople was founded by the guy who made Rome Christian! They fell into centuries of tedious theological debates and decadence until falling to more skilled and dynamic Muslim conquerors.
If you look at the great expanse of history the recurring theme is the groups that harness inclusive multiculturalism, literacy and scientific innovation, and focus on free trade, dominate their savage, insular rivals and typically just steamroll these fools.
Again, provide a single example from history where groups behaving in this way were ever more than a brief flash in the pan to be conquered or absorbed by the true defenders of "civilization."
Please stick to Economics Noah. This article isn’t up to your standards.
The big question is whether the democratic institutions of the US can withstand this assault.
Also, aren't Mexicans of Christian European descent?
Those savage right-wing Swedes have recently toughened up their immigration policy. [ https://www.government.se/government-policy/the-governments-priorities/migration-and-integration/ ] Were they right to do so? Surely unlimited immigration from Muslim countries poses no threat to liberal democracy at all.
The "savage" part is the public death by firing squad and the performative posturing.
Increasing the language minimum for obtaining Swedish residence is not something that Hegseth is going to yell at a press conference.
It's not what the Swedes have done, but why they have done it, and the effect it will have. They want to halt unlimited Muslim (and Balkan) immigration, having seen its effects. [https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/lost-control-says-swedish-pm-as-immigrant-gangs-take-over-sweden-islamic-muslim-balkan-ulf-kristersson-2674047-2025-02-04] They're not stupid. They've got the results that Hegseth would approve of, while not attracting the hysteria of Leftist moralists.
Yes, because they did it with mundane bureaucratic changes that respected the rule of law, rather than trying to be tough guys engaged in performative cruelty towards innocents.
Yes, absolutely. Our right-wingers could learn a lot from those supposedly left-wing Swedes about how to go about carrying out right-wing policy. And our left-wingers could think again about the policy itself.
Thanks for this article. I think it’s important to be pro-Enlightenment and support leaders who will carry the torch of the Enlightenment forward. Those who find something to like in the New Right’s message must not forget that the Middle Ages was also “Western Civilization.” The ignorance, superstition, and barbarism of that period does not represent anything we would want to turn back to.
It’s totally reasonable to want to not import Muslims, to expel those we can expel, to pay the ones who have the right to stay to leave, and to make life uncomfortable for those who remain anyway. The Muslim mind virus is simply not compatible with any society with liberty of religion, free speech, or anything approaching scientific progress or free markets. That is true if you are a fundamentalist Christian or an atheist libertarian.
There is no such thing as "the Muslim mind," Mr. McCutchen. You are describing militant Islamist fundamentalism (which is indeed illiberal and dangerous). For many centuries the most religiously accommodating, scientific, and trade-friendly regions of the Western world were among the various Medieval caliphates, stretching from Spain through the North Africa and the Middle East. Their holy book was the same Koran that Muslims of all types deem sacred today. And over those centuries the most religiously illiberal, unscientific, warlike, and economically insular region of the West was Christendom, whose churches taught people to revere the New Testament above all else (though few could read it and its ideas came to people through the powerful filter of the clergy).
Within the world community of Muslims, which includes places such as Indonesia (the world's most populous Muslim state), Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Turkey -- an EU member, currently embarked on a MAGA-style political adventure -- is a huge population of non-Islamist Muslims whose religious affiliation affects their social and intellectual cultures in a wide variety of ways, just as sincere Christianity appears in widely variant forms among American evangelicals (Black and White churches being starkly different), Catholics, Presbyterians, Mormons, etc.
Reducing vast populations of disparate people to a single "Mind" is itself one of the most potent and politically dangerous tactics of the dominant ideology in an illiberal society, and the antagonism it creates actually helps foster the type of cultural extremism -- in both its own culture and in members of the culture it attacks -- that it appears to decry.
Few American immigrants are Muslims. They are overwhelmingly Latin American Christians. As Noah wrote and your remarks seem to reflect, the American Right is aligning themselves with European political concerns in their putative defense of “Western Civilization.
Some commenters are suggesting that you "stick to economics." I don't have any direct response to that suggestion. But I would note that the idea of favoring Russia of the U.S. from an economic perspective seems so obviously stupid that there must be something else going on.
I asked Claude to give me per-capita GDP on a PPP basis for the G-7 plus China and Russia. Russia comes in at $52,479 for 2026 (apparently these are IMF estimates from Wikipedia). The US comes in at $94,430. So Russian toughness gives the average Russian half the goods and services as the average U.S. resident. And even though the U.S. isn't great on life expectancy as compared to the rest of the G-7, it's still more than 5 years longer than Russia (again, figures courtesy of Claude). And the Russian economy is deeply dependent on very old-school activities, mining/extraction and basic processing of mined materials.
At bottom, all of economics is driven by what consumers in an economy want, mapped onto whatever system of production exists to address those wants. Not all wants are economic, by a long shot. But at a high level, it seems like the lesson from Russia is that indulging a culture-wide taste of "toughness" costs roughly 50% of per-capita income and at least 5 years of life.
“What dangerous ideologies did he think were storming the beaches of Normandy in 1944?”
I mean, it’s fairly obvious. There are those like Curtis Yarvin who will say that the West should be like Hitler - there are those like Pete Hegseth who will only be willing to wink at those who say the West should be like Hitler.
I think you give this movement a little too much credit for being this unified. The 'New Right' is really multiple different movements that shares a single thread: hatred for the Left. JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk are all fairly different from one another in many ways. The only thing that unites them is hated of the Left and Democrats.
Donald Trump is not ideological. He has a lot of personal beliefs, but he in the end is a self-centered authoritarian only interested in pushing his own self-interest. He holds this coalition together through charisma and strength of will alone.
I think that it's useful to recognize the powerful influence on the intellectual New Right of a cult novel with equal influence on Europe's neo-Fascist movements: "The Camp of the Saints," by the widely honored French novelist Jean Raspail. Raspail pictured a huge flotilla of naked, hypersexual, animalistic emigrants sailing from the Indian subcontinent and making its way to Northwestern Europe, where it threatened to overwhelm civilized White Christian populations. The book, which has been widely translated, is the source of the "Great Replacement" theory that animates MAGA and the New Right of the dark web, as well as fueling Europe's xenophobic reaction to the immigrant wave in Europe that followed the Syrian civil war exodus.
While Raspail inspires the intellectual New Right (figures like Yarvin), the broader American audience for the New Right has been more influenced by "The Turner Diaries," by William Pierce ("Andrew Macdonald"), which is more direct in licensing the necessary savagery of resisting the replacement of a White Christian native population of the US by a black and brown population wave, engineered by Jews and abetted by a compliant liberal political culture in a process known as "White Genocide." This is a major influence on the masculine-macho segment of the New Right -- its militia movement. (Timothy McVeigh treated the book as his bible, and the Oklahoma City Bombing was scripted according to it.)
Sounds like “The Raft of the Medusa”, Theodore Gericault’s great painting in the Louvre from 1818-1819. This problem has been around for quite awhile. From Mister.
Raspail surely knew the Gericault and it may have contributed to elements of his portrayal of a very different kind of flotilla.
If by "this problem" you mean groups of people roaming the world in search of a safer haven and better future, I suppose the "problem" has been part of human history for at least fifty thousand years. We are nothing without it.
Yes. I was trying to draw a parallel between shipwrecked passengers and crew struggling across the ocean to reach civilization and displaced refugees and the native population that hosts them struggling towards a civil coexistence. Both groups face turbulence and troubled waters. And the crossing requires luck and perseverance. Maybe a bit metaphysical for Sunday morning. Peace.
It's certainly possible to be in the center or center-left and believe that if a country like France or Germany puts the far right into power then this could be a sign that the whole West has fallen and there is nothing special about the United States where it could hold on to liberalism longer than these other countries.
It is not only that one poll that shows that the right is losing young men. Other polls gleefully platformed by the NYT show that voters in general believe that the right/Republicans are focusing on the wrong things and they are susceptible to simple messages such as "Republicans are taking most of their money from a handful of billionaires [which is true!] who are building enormous power to change everything about the America you thought you knew and are blaming immigrants and outsiders to protect the rich".