Conservatism in Velvet and Leather

Such analogies can seem ridiculous. Decadence, after all, has been the target of conservatives for centuries, and accusations of it remain one of the Right’s most reliable ways of condemning liberalism as a culture of relativism and nihilism. And yet the suspicion that we are witnessing a new Decadence — this time emanating from parts of the Right — is not mistaken. The resemblance to earlier cultural episodes — whether F. Scott Fitzgerald’s roaring twenties or the fin de siècle Decadents of Britain — is deeper than it appears and is worth tracing further.

That earlier generation of Decadents, including figures such as Oscar Wilde, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, is usually seen as progressive. They sought to free forms of artistic expression and individual life from bourgeois straitjackets. Disparaging conventional and often hypocritical social and sexual morality and rejecting the bloodless formality of Victorian bourgeois values, Decadent art and literature was bodily, emotive, transgressive — and is often celebrated as such today.

However, as Alex Murray has argued in his remarkable study of Decadent conservatism, it was also in many ways deeply, if complexly, conservative. The Decadent’s attacks on a degraded present drew on aesthetic and ideological elements of the medieval and absolutist past. Attracted to elitism and aristocracy, its adherents reveled in the provocative and the ornate, setting themselves firmly against much of modern culture and, often, the democratic ideas of their age.

The echoes found in parts of today’s conservatism are striking. The most obvious similarity is their assertive individuality. The literary Decadents stood opposed to what they identified as Victorian moral and intellectual oppression. Freedom of thought and expression, particularly that of elites, was vital in combatting the intellectually and socially numbing impact of mass culture. Art needed to be saved from industrial society and, perhaps, art could help save society from itself.

Today’s conservative Decadents are often libertarians of one kind or another, defining themselves, as everyone knows, against the orthodoxy of “woke liberalism.” Their milieu is techno-philosophy, not literature. But like their predecessors, they combine provocative self-fashioning with theoretical rumination and elite politics. Black leather jackets may be their velvet morning coats, chainsaws their props, and Twitter/X their media of choice. Yet they are often, unmistakably, intellectuals.

Make Monarchy Cool Again

Foremost among their concerns is the importance of individual freedom of thought. Championing the audacity of creative forces outside liberal institutions, Thiel frequently characterizes contemporary liberal culture in images reminiscent of T. S. Eliot. Liberalism, he contends, is “over” — drained of imagination and vitality, it has become little more than a decrepit, decadent “machine”: one that enforces the views and interests of its supporters and silences those of its adversaries.

This, for Thiel, is not merely a matter of individual rights. It is especially important for elites, whose intellectual liberty is essential to the advancement of society as a whole. In his view, the world is caught in a deadly race between dysfunctional politics and technologies that carry either devastating or liberating potential. The fate of capitalism and, from a libertarian perspective, human liberty is at stake. Elite individuality is all that stands between us and the abyss: “Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”

The earlier Decadents were skeptical — sometimes overtly hostile — to democracy. Like Alexis de Tocqueville, they feared its leveling effects: that it would dull individuality, erase distinctions of excellence, and empower the mediocre. They found inspiration for an alternative in the past: particularly in a return of the supposedly more enchanted age of the Stuart monarchy with its freer individual morality and anti-Puritan appreciation of aesthetic and physical pleasure. The staid rule of Victoria seemed lifeless and restrictive in contrast to the rich rituals of Catholicism and the aristocratic gallantry and grandeur that ended with the execution of Charles I.

Today’s Decadents express a similar disdain for liberal democracy. In 2009, Thiel rather infamously declared, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” They also frequently turn to the past for inspiration. Consider Curtis Yarvin, a computer engineer and political theorist, with a growing public presence bolstered by his connections to Michael Anton and Vice President Vance. Yarvin, too, adopts a countercultural persona.

Yarvin’s portrait in a New York Times interview bears uncanny resemblance to one of Oscar Wilde. And like those earlier thinkers, Yarvin shares a suspicion — indeed, hostility — toward democracy and looks to the past for inspiring alternatives. In his case, the answer is not a Stuart Restoration, but a revived neo-Monarchial system with its roots in Prussian Cameralist ideas from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Updated to the present, Yarvin envisions a national CEO in place of representative democracy — an executive sovereign who would foster individualism, support elitism, and destroy liberalism.

Disenchantment and Reaction

Yarvin’s claim that disenchantment with liberal democracy is the precondition for being “fully enlightened” politically stands alongside another current with striking echoes of an earlier era. Fin de siecle Decadents were captivated by the experiential richness of the past — by diverse forms of life that gave access to human experience that had been crushed by the disenchanting logic of modernity.

For some, religion provided an alternative vision of authority grounded in hierarchy, not liberalism and democracy. It was not merely authority that drew them to religion but the mystery of faith itself — its capacity to evoke sentiments and experiences beyond Victorian piety. The medieval world, and often the Catholic church in particular, served not only as a model of hierarchical order, but as a historical and institutional reservoir — something to be tapped in the effort to recover emotional, aesthetic,  and social forms that had been degraded almost beyond recognition by materialism, utilitarianism, and industrial society. It was not conventional moralism that appealed to the Decadents but the hope of reviving lost dimensions of experiences and social life.

Revealingly, it is not difficult to find such ideas popping up again among today’s Decadents. A great example is the computer technologist and venture capitalist Mark Andreessen. An acquaintance of Thiel, Yarvin, and numerous other Silicon Valley luminaries — as well as a supporter of Donald Trump’s campaign — Andreessen echos the Decadent’s fascination with the experiential aspects of lost pasts and the latent wisdom they retain.

Here, disenchantment turns into re-enchantment. As Matthew D’Ancona has observed:

Andreessen swears by the hitherto obscure 1864 study The Ancient City by the French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges. As he put it on Lex Fridman’s podcast in June 2023, this account of Indo-European culture before the classical era portrays a “civilisation [that] was organised into cults — and the intensity of cults was a million-fold beyond anything that we would recognise today.” With a chuckle, Andreessen observed that contemporary life is “very colourless and grey, as compared to how people used to experience things. Which is, I think, why we are so prone to reach for drama. There is something in us, deeply evolved, where we want that back.”

This is not simple reaction: it is a vision of radical futures accessed and inspired in part through the past, not as a return to it.

The New Decadents

Seeing these ideas and figures on the contemporary right as shaped in part by a new Decadence allows us to make sense of important parts of contemporary conservatism. The Decadents of a century ago were a culturally prominent but politically marginal force. Their ideas certainly made an impact, but their influence was primarily aesthetic. The same cannot be said of today’s conservative Decadents. They lack the aesthetic powers of Wilde, Yeats, or Eliot — but they possess wealth and power that would have impressed Jay Gatsby, and an intellectual and cultural confidence he would doubtless have envied. They form part of what John Gray has called a “counter-elite” standing against the liberal elites they bitterly oppose.

What makes them distinctive is their ability to mobilize the rhetorical and performative elements of a recognizably Decadent conservatism — projecting an appeal beyond the staid, traditional conservatism they’ve rejected and, to a considerable degree, replaced. Decadence has always carried a subversive charge. It can offer a sense of edgy, youthful individuality, transforming conservatism into transgression against a dominant liberal culture and a sclerotic political order. It speaks to yearnings for foundations, using the past not as an end point but as a lens through which to pose existential questions in new and radical ways. It embraces the power of myth. In all this, it has become a powerful part of conservative politics today.

The new Decadents have played an important role in the rise of MAGA conservatism. But their prominence also creates potential fissures. Steve Bannon has already launched scathing attacks on the “broligarchs,” and it is not difficult to imagine other more socially conservative or religiously traditional factions growing similarly disillusioned. The increasingly public rancor between Musk and Trump emblematizes this disjuncture: a clash not just of personalities, but of vision. This said, no one on the Left should expect such fissures to lead to the collapse of the MAGA coalition.

Diverse elements on the Right have shown considerable willingness to overlook their differences to maintain conservative unity and advance their specific agendas. Moreover, the contemporary left shows little sign of providing an attractive alternative for splinter groups from the Right. The new Decadents could well become a lightning rod of controversy — but are not, at least for now, a source of serious destabilization. Even so, cultural politics have been a key aspect of the MAGA ascendancy: the cracks within it deserve close attention.