Disingenuous demagogues are not what the New Right needs.
Counterintuitively, the best way to come to grips with the here and now is not to immerse oneself in the constant froth and daily firestorms of up-to-the-minute journalism and media. Real understanding requires a perspective informed by serious engagement with political history, a study of human nature, and a careful engagement with the noble if imperfect intellectual heritage left to us by our Western and American forebears. So the latest sensation from the world of podcasting—Tucker Carlson’s two-and-a-half-hour interview with the young streamer Nick Fuentes—will not be best addressed by those caught up in the breathless excitement of the moment, nor by those fixated on the cults of personality surrounding these two broadcasters. The issues raised by Fuentes and Carlson need sober evaluation from a critical distance.
Seen from that distance, and evaluated on their merits as moral and historical claims, Fuentes’s views fail utterly to impress. One must, of course, sympathize and identify with young conservatives struggling to liberate themselves from falsehoods foisted on them by an all-too-hegemonic Left. Fuentes and his sympathizers are right that they have grown up in a culture afflicted by many false pieties and lies masquerading as conventional wisdom. But they will get nowhere if, in an attempt to shrug off this false orthodoxy, they unilaterally reject all received opinions. That will lead only to another kind of thoughtless orthodoxy, one arguably more destructive, insofar as it is more reckless, than the one Fuentes wants to be rid of. Some received opinions are indispensably truthful and solid, which means that it would be disastrous to reject them out of a sense of supposed daring in the name of liberation from received falsehoods.
This is the error that Fuentes, now 27, is both committing and encouraging in others. His “daring” is skin deep and is inseparable from the willful and systematic distortion of empirical realities.
Though he describes himself as a “Christian,” Fuentes fawns over Stalin—a totalitarian mass murderer who aimed to obliterate Christian civilization. Elsewhere, Fuentes has also expressed a weakness for Hitler. He has opined that the Holocaust, one of the most assiduously documented crimes in human history, has somehow been exaggerated. The through line in these blithe assertions is provocation for its own sake and the worship of power. And of course, distaste for what he described to Tucker as “organized American Jewry.”
Fuentes’s defenders will shrug off accusations of anti-Semitism as mere histrionics and name-calling, akin to the constant accusations of Nazism that leftists lob at anyone to their right. And indeed, woke leftists have irresponsibly cheapened accusations of prejudice by wielding them so indiscriminately that they have almost lost all meaning. But to call Fuentes an anti-Semite is not to hurl epithets at him. It is simply to describe his views.
To be sure, Fuentes is reasonably adept at presenting himself as an innocent victim of persecution by those who confuse the slightest criticism with anti-Semitism. He says that he once listened appreciatively to the likes of Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro but now is convinced that these “Zionists” control the media and label anyone who dissents from their positions an “anti-Semite.” But this personal history is a distraction.
Fuentes, as he currently presents himself in his voluminous recorded statements, is obsessed with Jews. He does almost nothing but malign them. They were the only real topic of his conversation with Tucker Carlson. In Israel and Israelis, he sees only master manipulators, a crude “ethno-nationalism,” and a “strategic liability” to the United States. If anyone disagrees with him or labels his contempt for Jews for what it is, then they, too, must be controlled or manipulated by “the Jews.” On this view, perfidious Jews control and distort both mainstream conservatism and manipulate American foreign policy at the same time. Their over-representation in positions of authority and honor is the ill-gotten consequence of their manipulative backroom dealing, whereas their over-representation among sinister leftist groups is somehow revelatory of their true nature.
This is not simply odious thinking. It is strategically foolish. In a letter to the editors of National Review in January of 1957, when the magazine was still highly skeptical of Israel, the great political philosopher Leo Strauss made the conservative case for admiring and respecting Israel. Founded by democratic socialists, the country’s bearing is nonetheless an essentially conservative one: it is
a country which is surrounded by mortal enemies of overwhelming numerical superiority, and in which a single book absolutely predominates in the instruction given in elementary schools and high schools; the Hebrew Bible. Whatever the failings of individuals may be, the spirit of the country as a whole can justly be described in these terms: heroic austerity supported by the nearness of biblical antiquity.
These words still apply to a stronger, more prosperous, and more technologically developed Israeli polity.
No one is obliged to defend Israeli domestic or foreign policy tout court. Far from it. But militant, obsessive, and emotionally charged anti-Zionism of the kind pronounced by Fuentes (and his enabler Tucker Carlson) is Jew hatred come of age. It protests its innocence rather too much.
I share some of Tucker Carlson’s criticisms of what has become known as neoconservatism. The project for global democratization, culminating in the Iraq War and President George W. Bush’s imprudent celebration of liberty as the dominant motive of the human soul, turned out to be the height of folly. One does not have to remotely approve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 to recognize that many so-called neoconservatives never distinguished between the Soviet Union and post-Communist Russia. They failed to appreciate that any responsible Russian government would oppose the unlimited expansion of NATO to include Ukraine and Georgia, and would legitimately worry about the fate of 25 million Russians in the near abroad.
Today, Bill Kristol endorses abortion-on-demand (“reproductive freedom,” as he calls it), the trans movement, and Zohran Mamdani, the far leftist (and militant anti-Zionist) who will govern the city of New York. Both Kristol and Robert Kagan uncritically support the woke imperium at home and abroad.
However, an older neoconservatism, represented by the likes of Bill’s father Irving Kristol or former Reagan U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, had little or no sympathy for Wilsonianism, muscular or not. The original neoconservatives wisely warned about “the unintended consequences” of rationalistic social policy, and even called for America to become a more “normal country” again after the end of the Cold War. They were solid social conservatives, incisive critics of the counterculture, and American patriots of the first order. Fuentes passes over all of this. He finds in neoconservatism a Jewish plot or conspiracy, a Jewish phenomenon through and through, although Carlson acknowledges that Bush II’s “neoconservative” foreign policy (with its inevitable “forever wars”) was hardly the product of a Jewish cabal.
But Tucker never dissents from Fuentes’s broad picture except to express misgivings about his uncritical endorsement of the crude, and indeed disgusting, views about men and women put forward by the “chauvinistic” “Muslim polygamist” Andrew Tate. In highlighting and legitimizing an ignorant and foolish demagogue such as Nick Fuentes, without meaningfully resisting or even questioning his cutesy fondness for history’s most murderous villain, Carlson has done a terrible disservice to those young men who are searching desperately for a viable path forward. I once respected Tucker Carlson. I no longer do so.
What is conservatism, or political decency simply, without clear, principled, and informed opposition to totalitarianism in all its various forms? What kind of conservatism winks at Hitler but disdains Winston Churchill, an authentically great man who defended Western civilization with rare honor and courage when its very survival was at stake? Churchill encouraged lucidity about Communist totalitarianism as a vitally important component of “peace through strength.” Contrary to legend, he was a peacemaker who in no way believed it was always “Munich 1938.” This defender of “liberal and Christian civilization” never made an idol of “democracy,” even as he fearlessly supported law and liberty.
The new pagan Right—and that is what Fuentes represents, despite his professed Christianity—is far more Darwinian and Nietzschean than classical, Christian, or American. All lovers of the American way of life, young and old, should repudiate Fuentes. True conservatives, and authentic Americans, must remain committed to “a manly, moral, and regulated liberty,” to cite the memorable words of Edmund Burke at the beginning of his Reflections on the Revolution in France. That remains our task just as it was at the beginning of the age of ideology. Faced with new and perhaps unforeseeable challenges, such conservatism will continue to esteem the likes of Burke, the Founders, Tocqueville, Lincoln, and Churchill. And it will never succumb to misplaced admiration for the totalitarians of the 20th century.
