The Roots of Reaction

The change dominating political discourse the past decade is simply the more visible tail end of a much longer, and global, reconstitution of reactionary power. When William F. Buckley coalesced the American conservative movement in the 1950s around his magazine National Review, it was more a hodgepodge of various ideas than a singular and coherent ideology. There was an old right that was historically aristocratic, isolationist, and openly bigoted, unafraid to justify social hierarchies in gendered, racial, or naturalistic terms. But Buckley’s “acceptable right” muted this somewhat and instead centered the emerging free-market consensus, hawkish foreign policy, and a form of Christian moral puritanism, now articulated in the language of individual responsibility rather than the old right’s appeals to group hierarchy. The conservative movement, even in its Buckleyite form, always had a far-right ideological stratum sitting beneath it. But because it was vying for an electoral future and had to make its case in the early years of the civil rights movement, a different set of arguments was foregrounded, and relationships with big business were preferred.

The Right exploded when evangelicals were politicized by school desegregation and abortion. This coalesced into the moral majority, a rightist voting block that ultimately secured the 1980s right-wing ascendency and a twelve-year White House run. But while the Reagan-era conservative establishment built a network of think tanks, the far-right grew dissatisfied with its moderate leadership. In the 1980s, this took the form of paleoconservatism, a concept coined by academic Paul Gottfried for a cohort of right-wingers drawing on old right traditions. Their politics included elements of neo-Confederatism, anarcho-capitalism, agrarianism, and what they euphemistically called an interest in sociobiology — often a stand-in for race science in their milieu. Gottfried and his friend, fellow paleocon Sam Francis, developed theories about modern politics and how the American working class could be shifted to the right.

Gottfried critiqued what believed was a neoconservative-controlled GOP, which accepted the welfare state as a given and failed to successfully counter liberalizing, globalist influences. Over the twentieth century, he argued, a “managerial state” had taken over — one that operated not for everyday Americans, but for a particularly disconnected class of elites. The liberal therapeutic state, in this view, had become a totalitarian system suppressing traditional community identity — the inherited cultural loyalties that would not willingly be subsumed by immigration, progressive values, or global trade. The alternative to this managerial entity, Gottfried claimed, was cultural particularism, nationalism, and an organic social hierarchy anchored in group identity rather than what he saw as corrosive individualism. He viewed modern egalitarian mass democracy as inherently coercive, since it empowered managerial elites, and believed that a nativist national conservatism could undo America’s leftward drift.

Francis was always more radical, and more explicitly racialist, than Gottfried. He saw the party’s future in something called the “Middle American Radicals,” or MARs. The MARs were often Midwesterners, or Southerners from the American middle — neither destitute nor affluent — who saw America losing its soul and were ready for a radical break with the status quo. Francis largely agreed with Gottfried about the technocratic state and drew heavily on James Burnham’s critique of the “managerial class” of technocrats he believed controlled modern society. Francis believed these elites were subverting popular control in favor of corporate capitalism by using multiculturalism, globalization, and social liberalism to destroy the bonds of the organic American (white) nation.

Against the Managerial State

The egalitarian social policy didn’t persuade MARs, who saw elites as only caring about the very poor and the very rich. MARs wanted to rebuild the system in their own image. “The strategic objective of the New Right must be . . . the localization, privatization, and decentralization of the managerial apparatus of power,” wrote Francis in his 1993 book, Beautiful Losers. The starting point would be the end of “mass immigration” since Francis, who became increasingly racialist as the years went on, saw demographic change as a ploy by the ruling class to exploit Middle America.

Both Francis and Gottfried floundered, in part because they were quickly excised from polite conservatism. When the white nationalist conference American Renaissance first launched in 1991, Francis was among its first speakers; he remained connected to that milieu until his death. By the mid-1990s, he had been fired from the Washington Times and expelled from mainstream American politics.

Gottfried, however, maintained a fringe, though influential, connection to popular conservatism.  In 2008, he gave a speech in at the far-right H. L. Mencken Club’s conference, arguing for an anti-egalitarian “alternative right,” a label he intended as a critique of the neocon-dominated GOP. One attendee, Richard Spencer, a former American Conservative editor, embraced the term and soon launched AlternativeRight.com. Gottfried maintained ties with Spencer for years, even as Spencer took over the National Policy Institute, a nonprofit originally established by Francis’s ally William Regnery II, the heir to the Regnery Publishing fortune.

Francis’s ultimate contribution, despite his continued status as an underground legend in right-wing circles, lies in how his description of MARs arguably became reality in 2015 — ten years after his death — when Trump appealed to a class resembling the MARs in his “Make America Great Again” campaign. Trump’s base came from that demographic, and conspiracy theories paved their pathway to populism — channeling fears of financial and social instability into support for right-wing policies under the guise of working-class politics.

Gottfried became more relevant as his brand of conservatism entered policy circles; with Chronicles Magazine (where he serves as editor in chief) and institutions influenced by his thinking — including the Claremont’s Institute’s conservatives — began to shape broader right-wing currents.

“I think the next generation will be strongly influenced by paleoconservatism,” Gottfried told me in 2023. “I know I have an influence on them.” The National Conservatives have now taken a largely pro-Trump stance, but unlike the MAGA movement more broadly are still interested in creating professionalized political operations capable of long-term planning.

Together, the MAGA movement, MARs, and the post-paleoconservative National Conservatives emerged resulted from the inability of the institutional Republican Party to respond to social shifts and the 2008 financial crash. For years, party apparatchiks had seen declining returns with young voters and minorities, who formed the Democrats’ base. The MAGA movement became the rank-and-file folk populism Francis envisioned, while the National Conservatives offered a more institutional path for establishment Republicans to transform, guided by Gottfried’s ideas. This dual track became the route for young people to the right: institutions followed, and they remade the party from the inside out.

Groypers in the Tent

But what made Fuentes unique was that he remained ahead of the curve. Fuentes’s experience of conservative excommunication was one Francis and Gottfried had experienced decades earlier. Francis was influential on Fuentes when he entered the movement — as he told Owens — and Gottfried had helped set up the intellectual framework of dissent that Fuentes inherited. For both Gottfried and Francis, the greatest struggle wasn’t with the Left but with the conservative establishment who had “purged” the “real right.”

“It’s people like me, it’s people like Peter Brimelow, people like Pat Buchanan, Jared Taylor, Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried, going back down the ages, going back down nearly a hundred years,” said Fuentes, following his first YouTube deplatforming. “That’s the conflict.” If the paleocons were defined by their exclusion from the Republican mainstream, Fuentes now cast himself as the paragon of the persecuted truth teller, excised by a conservative movement that was betraying the wishes of its base.

When the alt-right collapsed, Fuentes had already cultivated a persona built to survive. He spoke the language of the MARs and framed his white nationalism as “American Nationalism.” Groypers began as outsiders, but as controversy after controversy revealed, they were quickly entering organizations such as Turning Point USA, positions within the broader conservative movement, and, eventually, Republican politics itself. Across conservative social media, and even some official channels, thinly veiled alt-right memes circulate as a kind of online currency. When the Department of Homeland Security X account recently posted a racist “moon man” meme emblazoned with the sentence “life after all criminal aliens are deported,” Richard Spencer remarked that the number of “groypers currently working in the government shouldn’t be underestimated.”

It is, ironically, Fuentes who may lose from this situation. His appeal rested on offering something his competitors would not. But if mainstream Republican figures like Tucker Carlson now provide similar racial provocations without the overt white nationalist baggage, what distinguishes Fuentes from the rest of the pack?

The same dynamic was on display when former Klan leader David Duke won a state legislative seat in Louisiana before running competitive races for both Senate and governor. “Take a hard look at Duke’s portfolio of winning issues and expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles,” said Pat Buchanan, echoing an observation Francis himself had made. Buchanan built his 1990s political runs by porting over a more respectable version of Duke’s message and was unapologetic about doing so.

If Buchanan restated Duke in polite terms, Trump did the same in a far more impolite register. And to a degree, Fuentes is the Duke of this moment, advancing the model developed by figures like Francis and Gottfried at a time when the GOP they once critiqued is moving closer to their vision. And just as Duke didn’t invent his slice of the Republican Party — he inherited it — the GOP has moved closer to the worldview Nick Fuentes embodies, not because he converted the base but because he reflects a part of it. There are millions of Nick Fuenteses now.