Andalusian Blues: notes on the end of a world
Or, the engineers vs. the traditionalists
Dear readers,
As you might be able to guess based on my election day post about our emaciated democracy, I was not terribly surprised to see Donald Trump re-elected. I was surprised by how decisive it was, and the inroads he made in very historically blue states. New Jersey a swing state? Welcome to 2024.
My general take is that the Democratic party is feckless and incompetent, almost wholly in the arms of capital, and thus unable to take class seriously or understand the nature of the legitimation crisis. A party that thinks Liz Cheney pulls more weight with the electorate than Joe Rogan is not one that is going to win elections. I grew up in a South Dakota that had two Democratic senators and a Democratic house member (we only get one). The idea that it would be easier to eliminate the electoral college than to craft a Democratic platform that speaks again to these voters is very telling.
The New York Review of Books asked me to write a short response, which subscribers can read in full here. The gist:
Donald Trump has continued making inroads with immigrants, young voters, and a multiracial working class. We must grapple with this fact and forever retire the notion that voters of color are naturally progressive. So too we must recognize that an overwhelming portion of the electorate neither thinks nor speaks like online theorists of privilege and marginalization. They go to work and try to afford groceries, housing, and childcare. The rapidity with which many liberal commentators dismiss such concerns as selfish only underscores the distance between a politics of recognition and one of material security. We won’t make progress on the former without tackling the latter.
In other news, I traveled to Brussels this week to speak with some members of the European Parliament about the New Right. I am sharing an adapted version of my lecture here because A. I think it brings together a number of disparate figures/ideas that I’ve been writing about over the last few years in a single place; and B. It lays out the contours of a new-old form of economic organization that I’m calling the patronage market. This is all a work in progress, so I’m especially curious to hear your thoughts.
‘Til soon,
Dr. Small Talk
I was in Andalucía recently, beset by melancholy. This may seem an importune place to begin these remarks about the ascendence of anti-democratic factions worldwide, but bear with me. To visit Cordoba—the home of Maimonides and Ibn Rushd (known in the West as Averroes), the great transmitters of Aristotelian philosophy to the Latin-speaking world, including to a young Thomas Aquinas—is to survey the ruins of an early European cosmopolitanism. To see the architectural splendor of Alhambra or Seville’s Alcazar—the latter constructed in Moorish style for a Christian king by Muslim craftsmen sent by the ruler of Granada, down to the Qur’anic inscriptions on the wall—or to learn about the court of Alfonso X, replete with its scholars from different religious traditions, is to grasp at an intellectual and cultural world that was violently extinguished.
The Catholic monarchs, Isabella and Ferdinand II, have as much a claim to anyone to be inventors of the modern world. Beyond supporting the voyage of Christopher Columbus, they arguably created the first nation-state, unifying the regions that would become Spain and establishing the principle of population homogeneity as a prerequisite for civic union. The mixing of populations—far more the rule than the exception for our notoriously migratory species—was heretofore to constitute a threat to the state. Jews and Muslims would be violently persecuted through the inquisition, tortured, killed, and finally expelled. Protestants would not fare much better in the years to come. It was in Toledo, in the mid-fifteenth century, that we find the first mention of purity of blood in ordinances preventing converts or their descendants from holding public office. Scholars of colonialism have traced how this emerging notion of racial purity traveled with Spanish forces to the new world and helped underwrite the extermination of supposedly sub-human natives, before returning to the continent and fueling the rise of scientific racism. Al-Andalus was lost; the modern world we inherited was stamped instead with the mark of Ferdinand and Isabella.
Worlds come and go, and ours is no different. So much of modern political and social thought is dedicated to denying this inherent instability. The doctrine of progress, of slow and steady but inevitable improvement, and false belief that what has been won cannot be lost: these are the hallmarks of a view of history that has remained lodged in our collective consciousness despite its philosophical impoverishment.
Over the past few years, I’ve felt an ambient sense of our own world slipping away. That the capitalism we recount in our studies is being eclipsed by new structures of economic power, still fuzzy around the edges; that liberal democracy has decayed as its institutions were captured by special interests, leaving only the hollow shell of rule by the people; that our forms of sociality have atrophied such that the reification of identity as pure, essential, “natural” even, flourishes in a globalized world wholly at odds with these labels. The great age of quantification, standardization, and objectivity has bred that of conspiracy, alternative facts, and vibes. Liberalism and neoliberalism turn out to be mere historical eras that can and are being supplanted. We must think, honestly and critically, about the why liberal democracy’s foundational assumptions and institutions have proven so inadequate to either address the climate emergency or forestall the resurgence of fascism.
A battle now rages over what will come next, and in this fight the assemblage of forces I call the New Right has a distinct advantage. Partisans of this movement give expression to the ambient sense that our governing principles and institutions have run out of steam, feeding on the legitimation crisis of which Donald Trump, Brexit, and the rise of far-right parties are mere symptoms. The legitimation crisis manifests in multiple ways: in anti-elite sentiment and attacks on traditional sources of authority; in faux-populist critiques not of power structures but of knowledge itself; in the allure of conspiratorial thinking; in the pivot to the alleged efficiencies of authoritarian governance; and in the embrace of violence as the premier mode of civic participation.
As unabashed “post-liberals,” New Right populists are free to acknowledge the failures of globalization and financialization rather than defend the status quo; they are aided by very real material insecurities in developed democracies – a situation in which many cannot afford housing, medical care, or fuel despite being overrun with cheap commodities. Heightened xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment signal a deep structural crisis brought about by a decades-long march toward scarcity, with the corresponding degradation of public institutions, spaces, and services that are both overtaxed and underfunded. The concept of a unified citizenry is rapidly giving way to tiered citizenship, with stratified access to basic goods and services, from schools and doctors to fire fighters and police forces. We cannot harbor the delusion that such division are compatible with democratic freedom, as in practice they undermine any notion of the demos.
Just over two weeks ago, Donald Trump achieved a stunning victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, managing to win the popular vote alongside the electoral one. Fueled both by low voter turnout and an increasingly multi-racial coalition of working-class Americans, the former president triumphed over his opponent despite being a convicted felon who tried to block the peaceful transition of power. But strongmen are hardly an American phenomenon. Whether we look at Russia, India, Turkey, Hungary, or Israel, we encounter an ascendent mode of nationalist politics that is xenophobic, contemptuous of liberal norms and institutions, and dismissive of individual liberty as the basis of political order.
As I’ve traced in my work on the National Conservatism movement helmed by the Israeli American political theorist, Yoram Hazony, the new nationalists are ironically the new internationalists – far outstripping their rivals on the left in terms of global coordination. Aided by a new circuitry of illiberal institutions, ideas and practices migrate rapidly from one country to the next, even as ideologues stress the singular distinctiveness of each nation’s history and culture. Thus, attacks on judicial independence which began in Israel in the 1990s and accelerated during the Second Intifada provided inspiration for Viktor Orbán, who in turn further emboldened the Netanyahu government to pursue the controversial judicial overhaul package in the spring of 2023 – now with the help and funding of organizations explicitly modeled on the American Federalist Society. One simply cannot tell the story of the New Right while remaining within the national boundaries that are so sacred to its partisans. That means our perspective must be global if we wish to grasp the nature of the post-liberal project, whose constituent pieces have been assembled not just in Western capitals but in Cairo, Jerusalem, Delhi, and Singapore.
But the National Conservatives are not the only ascendent New Right faction that deserves our attention. It is just as important to consider the supposedly libertarian billionaires of Silicon Valley, who promise a world revolutionized by AI, cryptocurrency, longevity, and space colonization. Associated with figures including Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Palmer Luckey, and Peter Thiel—who has also served as a key supporter of the NatCon movement—the tech billionaires distinguished themselves this election cycle by throwing their weight behind Donald Trump.1 As a frequent speaker on the NatCon circuit and former venture capitalist who worked for Thiel, J.D. Vance was uniquely positioned to speak to both arms of the New Right and smooth over their contradictions. Indeed, unlike the techno-libertarians, the National Conservatives have lost faith in the free market; continual economic disruption, they note, also entails continual social disruption that makes it impossible to conserve anything of value. Much of American and by extension global politics in the coming years will be shaped by a confrontation between these dueling New Right factions, who I will refer to as the traditionalists and the engineers.
The traditionalists have gravitated to Hazony’s National Conservatism movement. Using the language of religious Zionism as his template, Hazony speaks in mystical terms about the nation and its cultural heritage, imagining a world carved up into homogenous nation-states, with each people assigned to its “proper” territorial unit. As the movement’s statement of principles reads:
We see the tradition of independent, self-governed nations as the foundation for restoring a proper public orientation toward patriotism and courage, honor and loyalty, religion and wisdom, congregation and family, man and woman, the sabbath and the sacred, and reason and justice.
It is a deeply ahistorical refutation of cultural exchange and cosmopolitanism, one that fixes the nineteenth century nation-state as a historical constant and ethical ideal.
By dismissing the idea of a social contract and instead tracing a political genealogy that runs through the family and tribe, the traditionalists reject the principle of a common civic identity that overrides an ethnic one: multi-racial democracies are simply impossible according to ideologues like David Engels, who argues that social cohesion “cannot be based on purely humanist and universal values; it requires a deeper anchoring in the cultural, historical, and spiritual subconscious of a common past shared for centuries.” For the traditionalist, the state’s primary role is the preservation of its supposedly singular national identity, which allows it expansive powers to target enemies without and within. This is accomplished by advancing a notion of collective or national freedom that overrides individual freedom; likewise, as the case of Israel underscores, universal human rights and the international institutions meant to uphold them are dismissed as little more than imperialist attempts to undermine the sovereignty of the nation-state. Even genocidal conduct is theoretically the right of each state so long as it does not spill over its borders.
The engineers, on the other hand, represent the triumph of instrumental reason in our new century. Openly contemptuous of the humanities, they have collapsed the distinction between could and should, and pursue scientific advancement untethered from either ethical concerns or political oversight; indeed, the democratic state is understood as an impediment to the sort of ‘progress’ they desire. Engineers are important to any modern society, of course, but there is ample reason to fear their rule.
Consider Palmer Luckey, for instance, the 32-year-old founder of the defense startup, Anduril (and prior to that, the virtual reality company, Oculus). Luckey was an early Trump supporter and has given millions of dollars over several election cycles to Republican candidates and causes. His notable inventions include an exploding VR headset that kills the user when his avatar dies in the game they are playing. When Anduril describes itself as “an engineer’s playground where we make what we feel is right and needs to exist,” we might rightly ask whether the power to decide the scope of such destructive technologies should rest in the hands of a private corporation with zero democratic accountability. Perhaps it is worth noting, as I found in my prior book on the Islamic State, that engineers are disproportionately represented in the ranks of contemporary mujahideen. They may be strange bedfellows – what unites them is the fantasy of a world without politics, where questions of the good, the just, and the moral have either been definitively resolved or rendered irrelevant. This is a sort of depoliticization that reduces government to mere administration.
The traditionalists and the engineers advance competing visions of the future and are particularly at odds on questions of economic organization. While the engineers dream of slashed regulations, corporate tax cuts, global markets, and even new sovereign entities outside the existing state system, the traditionalists embrace protectionist measures, tend to support organized labor, and dismiss the idea that market efficiency is an end-in-itself. In the words of the American economist Oren Cass, “Market forces are not the family’s friend, and public policy plays an indispensable role in protecting the family’s foundations from relentless erosion by the market’s push for profit. Families are not ‘efficient.’ We should not want them to be.”
I always say that historians have notoriously fuzzy crystal balls, so I can only speculate which of the two factions will prevail. My money is currently on the engineers, who promote an economic agenda more proximate to that of the mainstream GOP. However, there are some very important differences between that theoretical object of conservative love, the free market, and the forms of economic life that Silicon Valley billionaires are pining for, and in the time that remains, I want to flesh out those differences in more detail.
Despite being one of the New Right’s most influential thinkers, Curtis Yarvin is hardly a household name. Yarvin is a former computer programmer, court philosopher of Silicon Valley’s right flank, and chief intellectual architect of a movement variously called neo-reactionism, the dark enlightenment, or neo-monarchism. He maintains close ties to Peter Thiel and through him, has forged a relationship with J.D. Vance. Yarvin’s essential argument is that democracy is a doomed project because most people are fundamentally incapable of governing themselves. This applies not only to Black Africans, he tells us, but poor white Americans as well. There is, it bears repeating, nothing populist about this vision. The masses are fools who must can be kept docile through the efficient management of their affairs and Netflix subscriptions – a 21st century version of the Culture Industry so memorably described by Adorno and Horkheimer.
In lieu of self-government, Yarvin argues that the ideal political structure is the corporate one, topped by a CEO monarch who governs the state like a start-up, exercises absolute power, and is accountable only to a small board of directors. As he writes, “I believe the best form of government, for America now and also for most places in most times, is a ‘benevolent dictatorship’—an absolute (yet accountable) monarch or ‘sovereign CEO,’ governing autocratically.” Yarvin displays an extreme version of engineering brain, one that fetishizes efficiency and imagines life as a series of optimized inputs and outputs. Political freedoms are not good in themselves, but points of friction that needlessly interfere with the rational management of social life. His explicit goal is depoliticization, with Singapore and the Gulf monarchies identified as the closest approximations to his desired authoritarian capitalist state.
It is this unapologetically anti-democratic strain of Yarvin’s thought that attracted Peter Thiel, who already in 2009 wrote that he “no longer believe[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Since the 1920s, he continued, “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” In this earlier period, Thiel suggested that one interested in freedom would have to escape the state to preserve it, as he defines freedom narrowly as the freedom of capital from taxation and redistribution. But over the years, he has arguably moved closer to a different position, aided by folks like Yarvin: one need not escape the state if one can extinguish its democratic attributes. In fact, the state can be a great source of wealth.
Crucially, this is not a libertarian vision. Yarvin anticipates a form of capitalism that depends on capturing the state in order to dismember democratic institutions and dissolve systems of public accountability. He calls this new economic model turbocapitalism and hypothesizes about how it might first be implemented in the Global South, using El Salvador as a case study. “Under turbocapitalism, the state establishes a new private sector using public-sector energy, by first scaling up a high-efficiency productive sector, then privatizing it.” In El Salvador’s case, after dissolving all existing governing institutions, the new king would establish CoffeeCo and TouristCo to develop and maximize the country’s two major industries and offer the new companies the right to expropriate and nationalize land as they see fit. A few decades later, once the companies are on solid footing, the monopolies will be broken up and privatized.
However far-fetched, this example contains important clues about the New Right economic model, which we might describe as a revived patronage market. In a patronage market, the pathways to private wealth accumulation run through the halls of political power. This is arguably an intensification of dynamics that are already prevalent in the United States, where corporations spend billions of dollars on lobbying and campaign donations, rather than a wholly new development. But the patronage market will extend beyond assuring a friendly regulatory environment or securing government contracts to embrace a new form of industrial policy – traditionally an anathema to free marketeers worried about the state “picking winners.” This is one point of overlap between the engineers and the traditionalists, both of which support an expanded role for the state in managing production. But what sort of winners will the state pick, and how does one position a company as a national champion?
As Elon Musk’s own trajectory suggests, entrepreneurs who hope to benefit from anticipated state investment in reindustrialization, infrastructure, or AI will be quick to position themselves as the enemies of all things woke – from ESG investing to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. As a recent op-ed in Fox Business argues:
Many C-suiters — perhaps bamboozled by woke warriors in their HR departments or intimidated by activist investors — still believe that DEI is the key to getting ahead.
So, what should executives be doing?
First, they need to stop chasing yesterday’s politics and grasp that patriotism and profit can be mutually reinforcing.
Trump is promising an America-First policy agenda paired with a clear stance on culture: corporate values should strengthen our nation, not divide it. His second administration will back companies like SpaceX and Anduril that embrace our country’s foundational principles and take seriously the notion of national sovereignty.
Or, if you prefer the slightly more sophisticated account that appears in Project 2025, “Those who run our so-called American corporations have bent to the will of the woke agenda and care more for their foreign investors and organizations than their American workers and customers.” In lieu of the cosmopolitan businessman, the New Right promotes the patriotic entrepreneur – a status that notably does not depend on paying workers a living wage or supporting an expanded safety net, but their partisanship in the Culture War.
In this game, no one excels like Musk who, as the joke goes, might be the first person radicalized by his own algorithm. Donald Trump recently announced that Musk, along with pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, will head a new Department of Government Efficiency charged with slashing regulations, reducing bureaucracy, and eliminating waste. This would entail allowing Musk to determine which government agencies and employees should get the boot — which is particularly troublesome given that his companies have amassed an impressive roster of labor, environmental, and other regulatory violations, most recently arguing that SpaceX should be allowed to dump contaminated water into Texas rivers because it serves the cause of getting to Mars. The New York Times had to make a handy chart to keep track of it all:
As the NYT has also reported, Musk has extensive dealings with other governments as well, often positioning his ventures less as private enterprises than as complements to—or better yet, replacements of—state functions. He has used his social media platform, X, to court favor with Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, and Argentina’s Javier Milei—particularly around election time—and has received much in return: slashed tariffs on Teslas in India; fast-tracked regulatory approval for Starlink in Brazil, and secure access to lithium deposits in Argentina. This use of social media to boost the electoral chances of leaders who promise to deal kindly with Musk’s companies offers insight into what he was really buying with that $44 billion check.
I do not believe the patronage market will heal what woes the American working class, even if it succeeds in reindustrializing certain regions. As Mishel, et al. have shown, the declining wages of American workers over the last several decades has less to do with deindustrialization per se than with attacks on organized labor – which will only accelerate if the engineers win the day. As much as Trump positioned himself as an anti-establishment candidate, the big tech wing of his coalition embraces familiar neoliberal positions on everything from privatization and deregulation to the fetishization of efficiency as the preeminent social good. Their innovation comes in recognizing that the state is not an impediment to growth, but a crucial resource that must be captured and exploited – if only democratic forces will finally get out of the way.
The world that seemed so durable to post-war planners is coming to an end. If people like Musk and Andreessen pine after space colonization, that is because they have already accepted the destruction of this world as a fait accompli — one they’ll do their best to accelerate. Countering this vision requires new forms of thinking about freedom, sovereignty, markets, democracy, and rights – not just of individuals and communities, but of nature itself, so long regarded as an object for human exploitation. But we also need to reconnect with far older thinking about human dignity, to remember that justice and efficiency are not the same things, and to regard any grand plan to optimize human existence with the utmost suspicion. We may indeed be in a post-liberal world: we cannot let the New Right alone define what that will mean.
Thiel is an interesting case because he soured on Trump after supporting him in the 2016 race and did not back him during the 2020 or 2024 cycles. Instead, he has thrown his money behind the more ideologically coherent J.D. Vance—on whose 2022 Senate race he spent $15 million—and right-wing nonprofits like the Edmund Burke Foundation.