Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.Second terms are usually intellectually exhausted. And maybe if Trump had been re-elected in 2020, that’s how it would be. But he wasn’t. So between 2021 and 2025, the ferment driving MAGA’s ideas deepened quite a bit. The nature of its coalition expanded quite a bit.I’m not sure Trump himself cares much about this fight over ideas, these visions of the future. But the people who are staffing his administration — both at the top and, much more than that, the 20- and 30-somethings who actually do the work of presidencies — they do care. Ideas do matter. The intellectual cultures that form political parties matter.James Pogue is a contributing writer at New York Times Opinion, and he’s been covering the New Right at Vanity Fair. Over the past few years he has published great piece after piece on the MAGA intellectual scene and the various factions and ideas and people within it.So I wanted to talk with him about the ideas that hold MAGA together, the factional fights that threaten to tear it apart — and whether any of this actually affects what President Donald Trump does or thinks.Ezra Klein: James Pogue, welcome to the show.James Pogue: Thanks for having me. So honored.You’ve been covering the New Right for a while now. How would you describe the thing you’ve been covering? Is it a coalition? Is it a scene? What’s the term for it?It’s a coalition now. I’ve been paying attention to this stuff since the first time I met JD Vance at a diner in our mutual hometown. At that point, I had never heard the buzzwords of the whole movement — “the regime,” “elite replacement” — this attempt to essentially reshape not just American politics in the way that elections always do but actually reshape the ruling oligarchy of the United States. I didn’t know anything about this stuff.And now, suddenly this guy, Curtis Yarvin — who’s somewhat exaggeratedly but often described as the dark lord intellectual godfather of this whole thing — suddenly he’s mainstream. And we’re seeing a true political coalition having to navigate very big questions about how to keep themselves together.Let’s go back a couple of years. It’s 2022. Donald Trump is not yet officially running for president again — he’ll announce very late toward the end of that year. JD Vance is certainly not the vice-presidential candidate. And you’re covering these people. You’re going to their parties, and you’re outside having your smokes with them.If I had asked you back then what ideas bound them together, what would you have told me?JD Vance is the unifying figure within the coalition. He is, for this intellectual wing, as they would say, “their guy.” Which is a term that comes up a lot in these worlds.What that means is not just that he shares some politics with them. It means he’s formed by the same forces as them — which are largely derived from Twitter and old neoreactionary blogs and things like that.JD had a conversion to a worldview that is, I would say, now pretty general among MAGA spheres — but wasn’t in 2022.He had a conversion toward a politics where he saw a global empire, deriving from the imperial seat here in Washington, D.C., that was run by people who were actively engaging in politics detrimental to and plundering the wealth and value systems of the people he came from. And he describes them as “my people” in a way that, when you hear it, you go: What is the subtext of that word?You could argue that JD Vance is, in the modern era, the first type of politician to use phrases like “my people” with the subtext that that possibly means Anglo-Saxons and Scots Irish people living in Middle America.JD came to this with an idea that the Jamie Dimons and the Mark Zuckerbergs and people like that were not just enemies because they weren’t conservative — they’re actually class enemies and enemies of an oligarchy that they wanted to replace and, essentially, become.There’s a really profound pessimism in this intellectual class about modernity that feels very much in a way ’70s leftist to me — that human beings are now living in a very inhuman way. Spin out their critique of modernity. What do they say about it?Curtis Yarvin is a reactionary. He thinks that Pennsylvania farmers in 1800 were better formed people than people today. And Curtis is, to some degree, a technologist. He founded a tech company and comes from the tech world. But he’s actually written against the idea of techno-optimism, because he thinks that technology has weakened us and degraded us.I think JD Vance is very much the kind of person who comes from that techno-skeptical world. He’s a little less strong on the tech skepticism stuff than some of the people you’ll hear in this world.To give a good example: Basically everybody in this kind of intellectual elite would argue that the communications technologies that we have developed in the past few years are not beneficial to human life — which, candidly, is an inarguable point. And we’ve built a world where everyone is addicted to their phones and everyone is in what we might call a rent-seeking economy, where the incentive structures for American corporations are built around getting you to pay money every month.Pretty famously, Blake Masters, when he was running for the Arizona senate seat, recommended that people read the manifesto of Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber — which created this big scandal. But Blake’s point was that there’s a lot to learn about what tech has done to us on a personal level, in terms of what they might call enfeebling men, enfeebling their power to do things in the world — and creating a feudal structure under which human agency is a little bit derived and withdrawn from a human who now can’t really control the device that decides everything they do all day.If I may be candid, I actually find that critique quite compelling. And I think you’re right. It does go back to a ’70s leftism — as a lot of this thought does.Ted Kaczynski seems to be popping up in a lot of places. He was in Luigi Mangione’s Goodreads. He’s referenced quite often on the New Right, including, as you mentioned, by Blake Masters, who’s a Peter Thiel protégé — though it’s worth noting that Masters lost a quite winnable race in Arizona. Kaczynski seems to be coming back as a contrarian spirit. Why?Insomuch as you and I, exponents of the regime media, can be compelled and interested by this literal terrorist manifesto, it clearly was hitting on something that a lot of people came to feel post-2016, when our politics became consumed by these technological forces that were causing waves of outrage, divisions and hatreds within our society that seemed actually impossible to corral because of these network forces that everyone was completely addicted to.And it’s just not true, in my opinion, that only politicos were feeling this. My mom is on Facebook. Everybody is experiencing this. It’s a physically unpleasant way of going through life — staring at a phone, your head hunched over. You’re losing your eyesight because you’re staring at this thing so close.So all of a sudden things that Kaczynski was saying in his critique of industrial society, in his critique of something that goes a lot deeper than communications technologies started to make sense to people on a gut level — including to people who would have never shared this thought years ago.And broadly speaking, we may still have an entire societal consensus on both left and right that once the technology is here, you can’t really put the genie back in the bottle. But I think we also have a pretty broad-based societal consensus on left and right that these technologies are not benefiting us and that it would almost be better if, say, some societal agency could corral how they functioned and what they did to us during that period.I don’t want to jump too far ahead in our story, but I think it would be strange to listen to that answer and then not ask this question: We just nearly turned off TikTok. And the movement that saved TikTok — and that put the TikTok chief executive in a prime seat at the inauguration — was not the Democratic Party. It was Donald Trump, the icon of the New Right, with JD Vance sitting not far from him.Has there been a mass howl over this?There are a million different ways this could all end up going bad, and in certain ways it already is. But part of it is that Trump himself — as the sort of kingly figure looking down over this squabbling coalition — is a patronage politician at this point. And if you’re a patronage politician, you look around you and you say: Well, that guy’s got a constituency, and I’ve got to keep that guy happy.It was originally Trump saying: Yo, TikTok, we got a problem here. And then he flipped because he discovered that there was a constituency for it that was going to hurt him if he lost them. And based on the conversations I’ve had with JD over the years, I would wager that if JD had his way, there would still not be TikTok.To editorialize a little bit, I think something opened up in our society when we saw TikTok go down for a minute. There has been a pretty long period in our history where we just thought we didn’t have the state capacity to shut down something with 170 million users and however many billions of dollars in revenue.And through some combination of Trumpian resurgence and a real belief that they can suddenly wield the levers of state to do their stuff that are far more powerful than they believed in 2016, something has opened up, where everyone realizes now that the state has to get back in the driver’s seat.That’s interesting. I’m going to think about whether I think that’s true.I’m not sure that the way the political system has absorbed that moment of TikTok shutting itself down in order to generate outrage and then opening itself back up and saying: Thank you, President Trump — is being taken as evidence of state capacity or state incapacity.There is a strange dynamic to these people, a strange tension in who they are to me. On the one hand, if you ask me what view they all seem to share, it’s that the communication technologies upon which we now do our communicating and our thinking in public are bad for us.But if you asked me for another characteristic they all share, I would say: They are the most online politicians in America. That goes for JD Vance and for Blake Masters. And it goes for a lot of these people that we’re talking about. To the extent anything is forming these people and their worldviews, it is a very unusual level of engagement with what I would call the replies on X and the comment threads on YouTube.It’s a digging deeper into the online wormhole, which seems to be creating a reflexive despair. And I can never even tell if the despair is a projection. But there is a strange tension between their simultaneous rejection and complete, literal embrace of these platforms.To keep with the old school leftism for a second, what’s the phrase — dismantling the master’s house with the master’s tools?The phrase is that you can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools — which I think is a useful Freudian slip there.That’s very funny, actually.Because then Elon Musk buys the house and becomes your leader’s best friend. You’re literally watching it play out in a way.There was something about Twitter pre-Musk that actually made their culture very vibrant. And it essentially worked to serve their movement incredibly well.I don’t want to blow up anyone’s spot, because some of this I don’t have completely fact-checked. But I will tell you behind-the-scenes that some of these people who came up as Twitter anons are now going into the administration and taking jobs in the actual seat of power. And they built that by having this worldview that was just interesting to a lot of people who weren’t even necessarily right wing. It felt cooler.And insomuch as Twitter operated as “the ultimate editor” of institutions like The New York Times, it gave them a huge amount of freedom to kind of experiment and yet not drive themselves into superextreme positions. Because if you went into superextreme positions, suddenly you’re banned and you’re not getting a lot of engagement.Post-Musk, that has changed. What you’ve seen — and people on the right will criticize this a lot, actually — are a lot of jokers and morons who drive conversation by being really adversarial, by policing the bounds of the movement, by jumping on anything that deviates even a little bit from what they’ve decided is the MAGA-agreed worldview.For example, when the H-1B visa dust-up happened over Christmas, what you saw were really extreme voices of people who are pretty much openly saying: America is a nation built by white Europeans, and we should get it back to being a nation built for white Europeans. And that was what basically became the general view, because that’s now what succeeds.There are other issues here, too. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in some ways is an awkward fit in a Republican administration, but actually in this movement his concerns about microplastics, vaccines and the way that we have moved away from a natural way of living and what that is doing to our bodies, fits.There’s a lionization of the aesthetics and the almost spiritual dimensions of weight lifting. There’s a movement back to older visions of masculinity — a Spartan aesthetic. You see it in people like Bronze Age Pervert. But you also just see it in Substacks that Marc Andreessen writes.Talk to me a bit about this broader embrace of the past.What we’ve basically seen in the last few months is a consensus built that the way back to the past is by rocket-shipping into the future.And some of that is actually coalition politics. Some of that is, in my opinion, people who are more tech skeptical just saying: All right, let’s try this.For example, I was friends with David Graeber, the great anarchist intellectual. And David did a debate with Peter Thiel on tech, and the critique was that technology is not actually benefiting us — it has become this rent-seeking capitalist, evil check on human progress.And this is a bit of a famous moment for some people who follow this stuff because Thiel sat down with David and agreed in broad strokes. And Thiel would have said: Well, the way we fix this is by unleashing capitalism. For Graeber, it was by building a more communal society where people had more agency among one another.But the trick here is that when you talk, for example, about masculinity, there’s a really fundamental question that you’re seeing even people like Mark Zuckerberg wrestle with now, where he’s saying that masculine culture has been excluded from American corporate culture and things like this.And what people are wondering is: Do men need violence to feel good? Are men supposed to be ultracompetitive? And the best men get the best women, and the others are sort of shunted aside? That’s the Bronze Age Pervert kind of thing. Do men need a physical culture in order to feel good in their lives and progress and do excellent work in whatever field they’ve chosen?And what we’re seeing is that it turns out to be quite compelling, even — to bring back Zuckerberg — to someone who has discovered, as I did many years ago, Brazilian jujitsu. If you’re in the world of Brazilian jujitsu, suddenly you are in a very masculinist culture.And it’s not a superviolent, competitive, bad, misogynist world. But it is a world where everybody gets on the mat and goes: If I didn’t have this, I wouldn’t be OK in my life. So you could argue — and I will argue here — that Mark Zuckerberg is probably pretty far into these New Right-ish conversations about masculinity.And I think this sort of goes back to the tech skepticism: Can you build technologies that, in fact, help people — in this case, men, as they’re very preoccupied with? Can you help men work in tech fields that are going to build things that are going to go to Mars? They believe men need a searching quest. Men need violence. Men need competition. Are we going to go take Panama?Some of this is literally going back to just understanding tribal societies and thinking: If men don’t have a project to go to war and do something for their collective nation or tribe, they’re going to feel lost.Behind the scenes, for years, I’ve been hearing this. Like, we have to invade Mexico and take out the cartels. Not because it’s good policy, but because if we fight China, it’s going to get really bad. But if we don’t have a war, nobody’s going to have anything to do or shape us.Wars, of course, give men meaning.Exactly. So that’s kind of how you square that circle, at least how I understand it.R.F.K. Jr. is a supercompelling addition to this coalition. I think it’s actually, in a weird way, the most interesting part of this coalition.A strong ally of the worldview that R.F.K. Jr. is bringing is someone like Thomas Massie, who’s not really New Right. Massie is a Kentucky congressman who represents a district right across the river from where JD and I grew up. And he built his own home from limestone he hewed from his land. He lives off the grid. He drives a Tesla and powers his home with a Tesla battery that he repurposed. He’s also a regenerative farmer and raises beef.Micah Meadowcroft — who’s, I think, one of the smartest people of this world and not by any means a true radical — described this to me as an attempt to rebuild a sense of yeomanry in the United States, a sense of agency that you have control over your physical environment.So they’ll talk about the right to repair, which people on the left talk about, as well. The right to get into your highly complex new Toyota Tacoma and have the government say: No, you’re supposed to be allowed to work on this thing and have the right to manipulate your land in ways that certain environmental policies do make a little bit difficult, depending on where you are.So yet again, it’s all of a piece of — I don’t want to say purely masculine agency. But it’s a way of rebuilding a sense of yeomanry and agency in this new golden American dynamic dawn that everyone’s now promising.One intellectual difference between the left and the right that has felt very salient to me over the past couple of years is that the right is very interested in an old idea of human formation. How do you flourish into a man or a woman and pursue a certain sort of excellence?And the left is interested in something — some people connect it more to original sin, but it’s a little bit about purging. It’s about moving away from being what your base nature would make you and becoming enlightened above it. It’s a remaking of the self away from your impulses, away from implicit bias, implicit discrimination.You look at what get called the bro podcasts, and they’re very self-improvement focused. The left, on the other hand, is very therapeutic focused. There were big podcasts on the left in this period, like “Maintenance Phase,” that were very hostile to most self-improvement cultures. And I’ve actually thought this is a much bigger division line in our politics.I don’t feel like I have this completely nailed down, but in terms of the intellectual cultures, it is one of the ways they differ the most.Pogue: To go back to Uncle Ted, as people call him, a lot of what people in the right-wing world like in that manifesto is actually not purely the tech critique. It’s the parts where Kaczynski talks about how oversocialized the left is.And what he means there is sort of vague if you’re not already a little bit in the head space. But I’ll start by saying that I don’t think you could possibly be more right about that fundamental dividing line.Broadly speaking, it’s not even just a leftist project. Liberalism is, to some degree, an idea of: We got to a point where we almost thought we could reduce harms as a societal project. Almost to a millenarian extent, the left really did feel like men can just be better. We can have a societal conversation, and suddenly men are going to behave in ways where, in the workplace, we no longer have interpersonal sexual issues.The idea of reshaping human people into forms that actually just fit into collective structures well and then policing the bounds of their behavior when they don’t fit into those collective structures — I do think that really came to shape with not just leftism but liberal centrism across the Western world.So it becomes a very difficult conversation — to have an election where half the country is consuming these ideas via Twitter and podcasts and all kinds of different things that liberals are not listening to or even aware of 90 percent of the time. And suddenly people are saying: No, we actually have a different conception of human nature than you.I’m 38, and for most of my lifetime living under this kind of neoliberal establishment consensus, that conversation wasn’t even possible to have in the public realm. And arguably it’s still not possible to have in the public realm because the media spheres are so separate.I want to go at this other concept that has been dancing around the conversation, which is the “regime.” When someone like JD Vance talks about the regime, what is he talking about?When I first met JD, he was talking about overthrowing the American regime — the process that they’re now trying to fully achieve.I met him coming from the left as a curious observer, writing a skeptical piece for The American Conservative, which is a really weird project. And it was nice of him to be willing to participate. So he had to do this process —What year are we talking about?This was when he was just entering into his Senate race.He had to sit me down and explain the basics as though to a kindergartner.And I asked: What is this regime? And he said the regime is the 20 percent of the American public that knows that its children are going to have to get into one of the Ivies or Chicago or Stanford in order to get ahead in this essentially oligarchical culture that he believes we live in.So when people think about the regime, they frequently mistake what the right is talking about these days, because they’re frequently thinking that it’s synonymous with the deep state. And it’s not really that. It’s this complex of university professors, nongovernmental organizations — which I’m sure we’ll talk about at least a little bit — and the way that NGOs work to shape policy and to shape worldviews in the United States.It’s also this cathedral, this complex of media enforcement of an ideology that they see emanating from institutions like The New Yorker and The New York Times.And the tech companies.And the tech companies — although that’s a little bit changing.Well, now it’s changing. As I understood this set of concepts, it was the idea that, even compared to other periods in American life, you now had a unity of culture across the commanding heights of American thought and policymaking. The people who run the government and run the military believe the same thing as Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos who believe the same thing as the nonprofit heads and the media. Everybody is moving back and forth, and they’re all talking to each other and going to Davos together.And it’s not exactly about money. There are plenty of rich, right-wing billionaires — the Adelsons and so on — and multimillionaires. It’s about a sense of a loose coalition of institutions that can set the boundaries of acceptable thought.Yes. And they would argue, perhaps compellingly, that the idea of equality and equity, the idea that all men are created equal — as well as the ideology of, essentially, globalism — became the governing liberal worldview, shared across all institutions.And fundamentally, part of what goes into conservatism is that all men are not created equal. Some men are born to be elites. Some men are born to rule.I think it’s worth talking about this question of equity because it cuts in different ways here.You could imagine a worldview of the kind you’re describing being extremely pro-regime. If you have made it to the top of Harvard or the top of the Ford Foundation or the top of government or the top of the military — not all men are created equal. And here we have the ultimate outcomes of our meritocracy or our system of selection, and you have to accept that.But this is not a world of people who say that Barack Obama represented the very best of us, and the problem is we did not give him sufficient fealty. This is a world of people very much contesting who is on top. I’ve had Patrick Deneen on the show. One of his big arguments is about replacing the elites with other elites.Some of these concepts are unusual for people, I think. [Laughs.] So I think it’s worth bringing in this other thing that is stewing, that I think is more connected to Donald Trump than a lot of the pieces we’ve been talking about.People say Trump is a nationalist. But there’s this related idea of traditionalism that Steve Bannon is very into. What is traditionalism?Traditionalism is a really loose ideology.The traditionalist thinker that probably most people will have heard of is this guy Julius Evola.A household name, if there ever was one. [Laughs.]Yeah, exactly. [Laughs.]Evola had this whole deeply esoteric philosophy of — I can’t even really go into it. Ideas of solar-influenced and lunar-influenced people and nations and things like that.To go a little bit afield here, you’ll hear Aleksandr Dugin talking in Russia about solar Putin and things like this. And that’s coming from this traditionalist ferment.But essentially, traditionalism is an attempt to formalize a lot of what we’re talking about — that there are essentially these fundamental elites, that there are fundamental differences between peoples. Evola very much was one of these people that thought that whites were above other races and things like that.And we can speculate and talk for days about whether or not Bannon believes that racial element of traditionalism. I have talked to him a lot, and he’s very careful about saying: Hey, my populist nationalism is pro-American citizen. I don’t care what color of an American citizen you are, but I am pro-American citizen.You’re right that getting into Evola can be incredibly complex and bizarre. I do really recommend this great book by a guy named Matthew Rose called “A World After Liberalism,” which, if you would like to be introduced to more ideas like this, you should pick up.The reason I’m bringing it up is that nationalism is, I think, an idea people think they know about. George W. Bush was, in many ways, a very strong nationalist. After Sept. 11, we had this period where everybody was wearing flag pins.What Steve Bannon and a lot of the New Right people seem to share — and what I think Donald Trump intuitively represents — you could call it a more ethnic nationalism, but I think it’s more of a mystic nationalism.They’ll protest sometimes if you say it’s a blood-and-soil nationalism — in part because blood and soil has very dark connotations. But you’ll have people like JD Vance, in his Republican National Convention speech, get up and talk about how many generations of his family are buried in Kentucky.It is not just about becoming a citizen. They’re not excited right now about the idea that you had H-1B visa holders who would have children and they become citizens. They’re trying to stop that from happening.It’s not about being a citizen. It is about being, in some way, connected at a level they respect to the American homeland and spirit, such that you will fight and die for it. And your connection to it is not merely rational or opportunistic or instrumental. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s my best rendering of it.I think that’s very true. But you have to incorporate another element to it. To go back to someone like George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan, I agree, they’re nationalists. At the end of the day, these spiritual conceptions that existed latently in our culture, long through the modern era, of the idea that America is a shining city on a hill, America is a special project.On the right, America is even like some form of Zion — put here by God to lead people into a better future. These are, in their own way, spiritual views. And they have retained a great deal of force on the right for a long time.What someone like Steve Bannon would say is that, actually, the superstructures of global politics made being a casual nationalist increasingly impossible. So the forces of globalization, the worldview that, hey, it doesn’t matter how many people come in.What Bannon does is basically say: Look, this is the structure. This is how it works. This is how the dollar system works. This is how our system of overseas bases works. This is how global trade flows work. And this is why you can’t have that nationalism anymore. And that’s why we have to destroy it.So the Bannon project is actually a policy-based attempt to explain to people in Kentucky why he feels like they have been screwed, and why he feels like their leaders no longer allow them to say that it would be great to have my kids buried in the same cemetery as my grandparents. Because suddenly that did start to sound like a weird thing to say. And for most of American history, that would have just been normal — sure, yeah, you want your whole family buried in the same cemetery. Like: We all want to stick together. We’re all one little group of family —Wait — I want to stop this for a second. I’m not saying you’re making this argument, but I don’t agree that that’s what was notable about what JD Vance was saying. And I had heard him say this first at the National Conservatism Conference — which is an interesting ideological dimension of all this.What he was saying was that, because of that lineage of burial, his relationship to America was very different. He talks about why people will fight and die for a homeland. And there’s the whole thing about who really fights for America. And I think Bannon has his line about how the elites don’t fight — that’s just not what they do.This is why it becomes politically controversial. It’s a fundamental questioning of the allegiance of a naturalized immigrant or a second-generation American to the land. Which, by the way, a lot of immigrants and children of immigrants fight, if you look at the numbers.But there’s an argument about who’s a real American here. And it’s about being connected to the soil. And all these immigrants coming over the southern border — even if they all learn English, they don’t have it. So if you let a bunch of them in, you’re going to fundamentally change the character of the nation.That’s why I connect this to Trump. I think there are a lot of ideas we’re talking about here that Trump does not give a damn about. But I do think he has a very intuitive sense that nations are connected to ethnicity, to length of time here. This sense that if you have a bunch of immigrants, you will change and corrupt the character of a nation. He believes that, I think, very strongly. Without having all of Steve Bannon’s architecture of complex theories about international bases and dollar exchange rates.Again, I couldn’t agree more with that. The term that people will use is “heritage Americans.” And I sometimes get confused because there’s a little weirdness in how they use that. Like, are Italians who came in the Ellis Island era heritage Americans? And candidly, most people who are using this phrase would not say that’s true.There is something about the heritage American that comes from those original tribes of largely Scots-Irish or English people settling the trans-Appalachian or the Northeast. And in America, that derives its culture from the song, story and religion of those people that is being diluted.It’s funny, because I think a lot of people in this world would consider liberals as sort of pearl-clutching and being completely unreasonable. Because their point would be that that just happens to be the Americans who built the nation. And if you’d want France to suddenly be a country where it doesn’t matter at all that you had French heritage going back to the Gauls, then that’s fine. But then you just don’t care about countries at all.And then you and I can sit here and go: Well, downstream of that, you’re basically saying that all these people can never be real Americans. Particularly on this continent, in this nation built on ideas, this is fundamentally anti-American.I quoted Jeremy Carl — whom I know quite well, who worked in the Trump administration and who wrote a book about anti-white racism. And Carl will say, in the pages of The New York Times, America is not an idea — America is a people.And it’s a line Vance uses a version of that in that speech.Archived clip of JD Vance: And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas like the rule of law and religious liberty, things written into the fabric of our constitution and our nation. But America isn’t just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.I want to go back to the question of what this fight is actually about. Because, in a way, I think it’s about Barack Obama.I don’t think it’s in any way an accident that Donald Trump arises as a main pusher of the birther smear — and his movement and what powers him arise in response to Obama.Because there is this question of what Obama represents. Is his ascendancy to the presidency a triumph of our ideals over our actual history?And then there’s this whole part of the country that does not feel good about this at all. That gets talked about as racism, and certainly some of it was. But there’s something else where they have to describe why they don’t like this. And they come up not just with heritage Americanism but also this idea that what the meritocracy is getting you now are people who aren’t the best in America — but people who want to take over America.So this is actually a war for control. And the people JD Vance represents, they’re being screwed in this war for control. Not necessarily because they’re white or they’re Black, but because it’s really a class war, and equality has become a cudgel in the class war that the globalists are using to beat you down.I think back to the 2008 election and how things might have gone differently. And I’m actually not sure.You could hear in Appalachia — as I did, somewhat to my shock — Dr. Ralph Stanley, one of the great bluegrass luminaries, doing radio spots in Appalachia for Barack Obama.At that time — and I’m not saying this was shared by everyone, but — there was a feeling there that Barack Obama actually cared about some of this reindustrialization stuff. I put this to JD once: He was almost the localist candidate in the 2008 race. And I think it was a really powerful part of how he was able to win some of these states.So the question that then comes due is: Why was that sense lost?I think there’s some way to look at what happened with Obama and think: Oh, so he actually didn’t do all the labor stuff. He didn’t actually do all the populism stuff that perhaps people thought he was going to be able to do. He did not reorient things toward this dispossessed working class that he actually was able to speak to pretty compellingly.So if you’re trying to absolve Bannon of why he would now be where he was, that would be the argument. I think, in a much darker way, what you’re saying is completely true. And I think Donald Trump tapped into that force of: There’s something really off here.And there’s this idea on the New Right that, somehow, it wasn’t racist to talk about the birtherism stuff and, oh, that was such a liberal media reaction. And you’re like: Come on, this is ridiculous.So the backlash now is, I think, pretty purely racial. It’s racially tinged with this idea that Obama is the end-stage representative of this meritocracy that they hate — of this thing that elevated this worldview that was so lockstep, so overwhelming that you almost couldn’t not speak to it.And you see Barack Obama wrestling with this when he’s recommending Patrick Deneen’s book, and when he is talking — very delicately — about how changes have caused people to get very upset. Changes are threatening the liberal order that has existed for hundreds of years. Even he wrestles with these questions.One of Obama’s great talents as both a politician and a thinker is that he’s very deeply a pluralist. He holds a lot of conflicting tendencies in America inside of himself, and he balances them. And look, if Obama could have run for a third term against Donald Trump in 2016, I think he would have won.So these things always tip a little bit on the margin. But to what you were saying a second ago: It’s strange because I am quite far on the other side of this movement. There are things like the big-tech stuff I’m sympathetic to, but in my idea of America, I’m deeply, emotionally pro-immigrant.But there’s this difference endlessly between what presidents do and what their cultural meaning is. What Donald Trump did in office from 2017 to 2021 is very different from his cultural meaning. Some things connect, like tariffs on China. But he means something much bigger than what was, from a policy perspective, a fairly modest presidency.And Obama also means something very different. The way his meaning is taken up by the institutions and culture around him is as a kind of wave of power change. The meaning was interpreted and communicated in Hillary Clinton’s campaign, in cultural things like “Hamilton,” as the idea that this country is changing. And the people who are going to be on top of the change are people who won the meritocracy and who have the culturally polite and right ideas. And ideally they’re not white, and ideally they’re not men.There’s backlash that is simply racism. And there’s also backlash — or response — I think you see this in a bunch of places, including in the gender dynamics right now: The future is female? No, absolutely not — it’s male.There’s what Obama did, what he thinks. And then there’s the culture of Obamaism, which was always actually, I think, quite different from his personal politics.The way I look at it is: Essentially, Obama was the end stage of the end of history. There was a promise, with Obama, completely independent of actual stuff Obama did, where it was the achievement of a worldview that essentially we, a technocratic society, have figured all this stuff out and that we’re going to build a more interconnected, diverse society forever now.And everything was going to get solved by this Thomas Friedman idea of, you know: Now there will be a McDonald’s in every country, and there will be no incentive to fight, and the world will be flat.And what Donald Trump, when he took office in 2017, represented above everything else, was the end of the end of history. And it really shocked people. If you look at what Donald Trump did in 2017 — am I too harsh in saying that it was virtually negligible, with the exception of a tax cut that worked entirely against the stated goals of his entire project?But it opened, for the people around him, this sense of a coming dawn — that suddenly all of these things that they really wanted to get back into the conversation were legal to say again. Like: Wait, why is the future female? What was good about that? All of a sudden you started hearing at cocktail bars people who are working in government going: Wait, are you sure women are equipped to run the country?Under the air of Obama, I don’t think that sources of mine would have dared even say that at a bar with a recorder off. It was too far outside of the shared worldview that was shaping the entire Western project.This brings us back to the story about Trump. There is always a lot of debate and disagreement about what Donald Trump represents. And Trump is not himself reading these Substacks and participating in a lot of this discourse.But then he picks JD Vance, the MAGA ideologist. Not Doug Burgum, the business-friendly moderate. Not Marco Rubio, the compromised candidate between the different wings. He picked the guy who read the Substack.People took that as a signal that these ideas and this thinking are the future of MAGA. Is that how you interpreted his decision to pick JD Vance?Yes. Picking JD, first of all, represented a desire on Trump’s part to build a legacy. Because there probably isn’t a comparable figure who could be expected to go forth and win one or two terms after Donald Trump and carry on a true MAGA project other than JD Vance —Well, that depends if Donald Trump agrees on what the MAGA project is. That’s my question.Well true. But with JD, what you saw was the first bit of the coalitional politics forming. Because Trump had already figured out he’s going to bring the Doug Burgums and the Nikki Haleys along. They were going to bend the knee. They bent the knee in 2016. This wasn’t hard to him.The question was: Are all these guys with crazy names on Twitter, who are really driving the energy of this thing, going to stay with him? Are they going to ride this carnival all the way to the election?We forget this in liberal society, but you win politics by tapping into animal forces sometimes. Barack Obama did that as much as anybody. There was something spiritual about watching Obama in later stages of even 2012, I felt. So I think JD was a way to tap into that.After JD got the nomination, I had to take a step back. Because I had seen him right before, just privately. And I had this fear of becoming JD Vance’s amanuensis as he rises. [Laughs.]So I didn’t watch the Republican National Convention. I just couldn’t watch him accept the nomination. I felt too strange, and I felt too wrapped up in it. And I thought it would be better for my reporting to just watch football replays.I may turn out to be proven wrong, but I thought that what his vice-presidential candidacy meant was that JD’s wing was ascendant. And not to make it far too simple here, because I think JD does bridge the worlds a little bit — but that would be the Tucker Carlson side of things. That would be the Bannon side of things. That would be the real hard-core MAGA thing. That would be his friends who talk about heritage Americans and this kind of thing.I assumed that was a signal from Donald Trump saying: This is the force that is going to get me into the presidency, and these are the people I’m going to listen to.What transpired, and what we’re seeing now, is this kind of — as Marc Andreessen calls it — I always quote this because I don’t know how else to describe it — this “preference cascade” among people who are much more on the fringes of this kind of thing.Even people like Sam Altman — who not long ago was just pretty clearly a liberal — is exposed to all of this stuff in his own way. You had this preference cascade of people coming and saying: You know what? We don’t really share all that stuff with the real nationalist populace, but we’re not repulsed by it.So if you’re Donald Trump, the natural alliance becomes the really rich guys who you actually just completely depend on for your political dollars and for your staffing decisions. So I didn’t really anticipate that, actually.This feels like the emergence of this other strain that, in some ways, is competing in the background and then flowers.And I feel like the key people here are Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Thiel is more connected to the parts of the movement you’re talking about. He’s a funder of parts of it and much more of a fellow traveler inside of it.But then Musk comes in, and he clearly becomes the other pole. If JD Vance represents this more traditionalist New Right, Musk represents — I’m not sure it’s well defined yet, but between the money he has and the attention he controls and Trump’s obvious affection and interest in him, all of a sudden Vance, who seemed like the future of this, begins to get pushed to the side — at least visually. There’s the Ultimate Fighting Championship fight that Musk and R.F.K. Jr. are at. And where’s JD Vance?What is Musk to you, and how has he been greeted or understood by the people you talk to on this New Right?I would put some nuance to the idea that Musk represents a genuinely opposite pole for the simple reason that Musk is so visibly Twitter-brained and so responsive to the whims of — shall we call it the mob on Twitter? — that if you look at what his priorities are: Yes, he wants to do his technologist grand future and go to Mars and all of this. But meanwhile he’s talking about the Alternative for Germany, the German far-right movement. He’s backing Tommy Robinson in England, who is widely viewed there as the white nationalist celebrity, their version of what Richard Spencer used to represent back in the day.My distinct impression of Musk is that he really needs people to like him in a big way. And he’s ultraresponsive to the whims of people who are in a pretty tight bubble on this thing that he’s created — this vast talking chamber of X that, to some degree, actually does shape policy in this administration. Because everybody is doing it. They’re having it out in a public forum that just never existed in the previous history of American politics — if for no other reason than it wasn’t technologically possible.So I’m not convinced he ideologically does represent an alternate pole, if only because his views are too inconsistent and malleable.He may not represent an ideological pole — at least to JD Vance, who’s a more protean figure than some of the New Right ideologists we’ve been talking about. But I think what Musk does create is two things:One is an alternative pole of power. If the idea was that JD Vance would be the person who is organized and knows how to hire staff and is going to be running policy as Donald Trump acts as the ceremonial king of his own administration, that’s no longer the case.And then the second thing is that Musk starts the preference cascade of rich C.E.O.s and tech billionaires and attention oligarchs, in particular, moving toward Trump.And this is where it does seem like there’s a tension. You can say all you want that you don’t like big tech modernity, but if your top adviser is the guy who owns X and is, as you say, quite Twitter-brained, it doesn’t seem like you’re that against it.And if now Mark Zuckerberg is in one of the front rows of the inauguration with Sundar Pichai and Jeff Bezos, and the TikTok C.E.O. is a couple rows back — for a movement of intellectuals who a couple months ago seemed to think that they were the ones who are counter-regime and counterestablishment and hate what big tech has done to the world — this doesn’t seem like the inaugural visual that they were promising.A couple of things here. My girlfriend was at the inauguration. She covers Trump full-time. And, to quote her, people read a lot into the seating chart. [Laughs.]And I think she means that people read a little too much into the seating chart, and we do have to make clear to people who are not following this stuff at a granular detail: Mark Zuckerberg is not popular, by any means, in this movement at this time. Nothing has changed about that.And Donald Trump loves it when people come to bend the knee. He loves to get a million dollars from people to support his inauguration and then toss them an invite and have them come see him rise in his pomp and seize power again. So we might be over-reading the presence of some of these people around it.In terms of whether or not Musk represents politics that are really opposed to JD’s worldview, we have to keep in mind: JD is not anti-tech. That’s not where he’s coming from. He’s skeptical of what tech has done. He’s skeptical of what you might call the complex of big tech, such as we have known it in the last 10 years. All of that is true.But he’s not Bannon. He’s not one of these people who is thinking that technology itself is somehow a truly detrimental force in American life. That’s not anything I’ve ever gotten from him. And as myself a tech skeptic, I’ve tried to push him on this a little bit.I think you’re right, as well, to look at the somewhat confusing question about Peter Thiel, who didn’t back Trump this time and has taken a step back from politics in a really extreme way. And that is because Thiel is skeptical that the political movement we’re seeing now can actually do the kind of stuff that they’re talking about. He’s very skeptical about whether or not we can actually handle the debt. He’s very skeptical about the idea that America is not going to face a gigantic fiscal crisis in a very short period of time.Thiel is a bit of a doomer, actually. So he’s an outlier. And I don’t want to repeat stuff from off-the-record conversations, but you can get a very distinct impression from him that he doesn’t necessarily share a lot of the views that you’re getting from some of these public figures who are coming to bend the knee. And he doesn’t need to bend the knee — he’s Peter Thiel.The person who I would say actually has a thought-out philosophy that he articulates in serious ways and that is fundamentally opposed to a lot of what the MAGA movement wants is Marc Andreessen, who is very popular in these worlds. Andreessen is the author of something titled “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.”We should probably keep in mind that, yes, Musk was the big one who made it look like suddenly there was a massive shift in tech to run toward Trump. But Andreessen was already there. David Sacks was already there — the famous co-host of the “All-In” podcast and a big skeptic of American involvement in the backing of Ukraine.So there were a lot more of these people who were in the Trump head space before Musk officially made his grand jump onto the train and gave the money and put on the dark MAGA hat. This was already happening.I take your point that, ideologically, there’s probably a lot of common ground between people like Vance and Musk.On the other hand, Steve Bannon — who is on the outside, and it’s never clear to me exactly how much influence he still wields — hates Musk. He gave this interview where he said that Musk is evil, and he was going to put all of his energy into purging him from the movement.And there is this question of: Does Donald Trump want to be the counterestablishment? Or does he want to be the establishment? Is the problem he had with the establishment not its ideas but that it was not on his side and did not pay enough fealty? And as long as it’s instrumentally backing him, he’s fine with it and will flip from counterestablishment to establishment in an instant?People like Andreessen and Musk — I think it’s very hard to say that the richest man in the world and the best-known venture capitalist in the world are not the establishment and do not represent power. There is a difference between being the Mos Eisley Cantina and being the Death Star.In regard to the counterestablishment versus establishment question — to sort of set up how Donald Trump would view this: We saw a real process of, frankly, people who are truly in the American establishment — people who have offices on Billionaires’ Row, who are looking out over Central Park, who know all the right people there and that kind of thing.Bill Ackman, the hedge fund manager, is a good example. We saw Ackman contort himself into very strange places trying to say: I don’t really like the direction of the country. I don’t like where this is all going. So we’re going to try to get an alternative to Biden. And I’m not a Trump person, but I agree this is all really crazy. That sort of thing.Whereas Musk, insomuch as we’re talking about this counterestablishment, his worldview, the worldview of these people coming from tech is actually just different. He doesn’t need to be explained. He doesn’t need to contort himself in anything. He gets it intuitively, just because he is exposed to the cloud of ideas on Twitter at all times.But I would argue that, yes, the counterestablishment thing is a little bit real. Even if these are the most powerful people on Earth, which they are, and even if they do represent perhaps a new establishment, they’re not coming from a place where they understand the world in the way that the establishments of finance and energy and industries that funded the Republican Party for a long time shared.So I do think it’s very important to Donald Trump to surround himself with people like that. I also think it’s very important for Donald Trump to just surround himself with people he likes and with people he knows well and with people who are really rich and can help him.This always surprises people when they hear it, but among people I know who cover Trump pretty intimately and are really there in the inner circle talking to people all the time, he’s a very loyal guy.So we have these back stories of Roy Cohn being abandoned in the early days, of Michael Cohen falling out, that kind of thing. But for the people who look like they share the idea of the project that is Donald Trump, he’s extremely loyal and likes to keep them around.So I think with Musk, it’s a pretty natural pairing. Because Musk just really likes being around Donald Trump. You can kind of see it. There was a statement, I believe, where Donald Trump was tweeting: Elon’s been gone from Mar-a-Lago. Where’s Elon?It’s almost like he misses him —I think he tried to send him a message on Truth Social and accidentally posted it, if I remember this moment. It was sweet, in a way.Yeah. I mean, that is a very Trumpian thing that I think a lot of Americans don’t understand.The flip side, of course, is that frequently Donald Trump falls out with the people he’s closest with because they challenge him or they get too close or they fly too high.We’re talking around this nuance, but it’s frequently hard as a reporter to explain this. No, Donald Trump doesn’t really know that much about any of these grand plans, whether it’s to remake a heritage America where people remember Appalachian ballads and we’ve reestablished this land where we can have our children buried in the same plots as our grandparents.I don’t think he has a great sense of that. I also don’t think he has a great sense of what Stargate means for America —The big artificial intelligence data center energy project.Right. And I think he thinks both are directionally pretty good and directionally pretty aligned with what he’s trying to do. But as long as you’re demonstrating loyalty and it’s not causing friction within the coalition, he’ll be fine. He doesn’t really care.What will end up mattering here? It’s always a little bit tricky to tell. Are you watching a really new ideological impulse announce itself in American life and get translated into policy? Or are you watching a normal transition that is going to do things that are pretty normal within the context of American politics?When you look across the Trump administration: Scott Bessent is the treasury secretary — a kind of normal finance guy, used to work for George Soros, in fact. Pete Hegseth is a “Fox & Friends” anchor who Donald Trump likes and feels aligned with. Susie Wiles, a longtime Republican operative, is going to be the chief of staff.Elon Musk shares a lot of wild ideas on Twitter. But what is he actually directly involved in and responsible for? Well, in the executive order, D.O.G.E. is about software modernization. And that’s a very different expression than the more wild, ideological impulses that he’s become associated with.Stargate is interesting. There are very much A.I. accelerationists around Donald Trump. But Stargate was happening before Donald Trump. This big set of investments was already underway. It didn’t take Donald Trump’s election for Microsoft and OpenAI to realize that they were interested in A.I. dominance.You were covering all these people in 2022 and before. Do they matter?I think that’s why you see the intervention from Steve Bannon on some of this stuff at an early stage — so that he can get in there and say: Hey, we are the ones who hold power.And this is going to sound very ironic, but I actually genuinely think this is true.There’s a pole that we’re not talking about per se, because it’s more interesting to talk about the tech billionaires. But there’s also a — I don’t want to say centrist but a normie Republican wing of all of this that is frankly just larger. They already live here. You don’t need to vet them in the same ways. They’re just around. They’re on Fox News. One might even say they’re in the establishment.I think it’s OK for me to say this in public: In my last New York Times piece, I wrote about attending the Coronation Ball hosted by Passage Press, which was billed as the outsider ascendancy ball. And I talk about it in the piece because it was explicitly set up as: Last time, the outsider ascendancy ball was this deplorable — it was goofy, and it was insane. It had all these white nationalists and all this, you know, blah, blah, blah.But the Passage ball was black tie. Steve Bannon spoke. There were tech people there. Curtis Yarvin was there. The “Red Scare” girls were there. This is the cool-kid thing.And Bannon gave a speech where he offered an outstretched hand to the “tech bros” in the audience. He did not go to war there. He said: We all need to be together because if we’re not all together on this, this is all going to get lost in another failed charge up the hill to conquer the deep state.So ironically, in all of this, my guess would be that if the tech right and the New Right can actually stay together and get their people in and form a coalition that feels powerful to Donald Trump, then we really are going to have a pretty intense change in how American government works. And we’re going to see a lot of pretty intense stuff.There is also the possibility that they dissolve into nonsense, and we get something that looks a little closer to 2016. And I would just add to this — as much as people might talk and think about the ideological differences between these people in terms of the social world, when you go to a party at a tech billionaire’s house in the Bay Area, when you go to a party hosted by Palladium Magazine, when you go to the social spaces where this new, aspiring counterestablishment socializes, you’re having people from both wings. They know each other better than the more normie Republicans.Are these ideological currents we’re talking about much stronger and more dominant at the 20-something-year-old staffer level than at the 50-year-old principal and cabinet secretary level? Is that fair?Yes. This seems to me to be what young Republicans are now.The interesting test case would have been if Matt Gaetz had gotten confirmed. Because I have leftist antimonopoly lobbyists and activists texting me going: Wow, whatever you think of Gaetz, if he gets confirmed, he’s going to go hard on anti-big tech, antimonopoly, things like that.So there are some people who are exposed to these worlds, who are in the inner circle and in the potentially cabinet-level echelon. I actually don’t know at this time what position, if any, Blake Masters will get. But he probably will get something.Even someone like Thomas Massie, who we talked about earlier, who’s a very traditional libertarian congressman, can speak these languages very well.But you’re still talking here about the boldfaced names. I want to drill down a bit. Because, to use Biden as an example here: If you look at the Biden administration, here you have one of the oldest national Democrats still in public life.And beneath him, you have a lot of names you would recognize from the Obama administration: There’s Brian Deese at the National Economic Council, Jake Sullivan as the national security adviser. You could just kind of go down a list like that. So you might say: OK, average out Joe Biden and the Obama administration, and you can predict this administration.But at least economically, this looked like an Elizabeth Warren administration. And the reason that happened is because the staffer level was very Warrenite and was coming more from that wing. And that’s where the ideological trends were among 20-something and, to some degree, young 30-something ambitious, smart Democratic policy staffers.Now people can debate whether or not that was good for the Biden administration. There are a lot of fights over that. But if you had just been looking at its top level, you would have completely misunderstood it because administrations are run by staff, and Washington is run by 20-something and 30-something-year-olds who can work 14-hour days. So what ideological and policy world they’re coming out of often matters even more than where the principals come from.I’ve talked to several people who you would think sort of would be in the world of feeling like their kids, so to speak, are ascendant and are going to take these positions. And candidly, it’s less clear to me that that is happening at the scale that I thought it would than I had expected.So I talked to the head of the Claremont Institute, which I think we could justifiably say is going to replace the traditional Republican think tanks as the shaping ideological shop going forward in this administration. And he said: Yes, I think that’s true. And I said: Are you placing people? And he said: Eh, some.I talked to the new editor in chief of The American Conservative on election night, and I said: So you’re the new house organ for the golden dawn future empire. And he looked at me a little confused. He was like: I don’t know if that’s going to be the case.So I think you actually do raise a good point. In JD’s office — yes. But in the vast structure of the federal government — that is going to remain vast, however much they want to trim it. Is this ferment going to reshape everything? I don’t know.In terms of rumors — I don’t want to name the person, but I know a guy who was saying: Yeah, I’ll probably be doing Latin America policy. And there’s a bunch of Twitter anons who go to El Salvador all the time and are friends with the president down there. And if you call someone up and you fight for a job, those people are getting jobs, as far as I understand.So as far as scale goes, this social world is still not that big. At the Passage ball, there were a few hundred people. They’re not setting the tone in the sense that they actually have the bodies and the mass to be like: We are the big team. Our boys are the ones that get to go.But in terms of the ones who are here and around and get invited to the right parties — yes, if they want a job, they’re coming in.I want to end close to where we started. We talked about how the New Right has this deep concern about character formation, about how our people, our kids, our Americans, growing up in a world and in a culture that is going to correctly build the virtues that antiquity so correctly honored.But I’m the kind of person who would say that’s an odd fit with Donald Trump, who has certain virtues but lacks others. But just more broadly, for these kinds of concerns — concerns about the fertility rate, this sense that we have lost some fundamental humanists and things are breaking down — it’s very hard to legislate any of that.When you talked about the despair that people like JD Vance and Blake Masters have, looking at modernity and looking at where we’re going, what do they want to do about that despair now that they have power?A friend of mine — who’s not even particularly right-wing — said something in a group chat right after the election: The first thing that has suddenly happened — and that will happen — is that the cultivation of virtue, and displaying public virtue as good, is cool again. It’s coming back now. And he may, in fact, be right about that.And I agree with you — it’s a very difficult thing to square with the figure of Donald Trump, who does not seem to cultivate any of that. But Napoleon becomes a symbol beyond Napoleon’s behavior and actual activities. And that’s very much sort of the role that Trump occupies right now.In terms of the stuff where you’re trying to get to the point of family formation and, for example, have men be rewarded in public and seen as honorable and good for what they do, for being family men and fathers instead of for being, like, a cool D.J.: You do have to do policy to make that happen. You do have to do some kind of policies in the JD Vance realm of: How do you remake family formation? What I find to be a little bit of a horror vision: Do you have to remilitarize society? Do you have to invade Mexico — which I know plenty of people are advocating right now — just as a reason to send young men to go defend their communities from fentanyl exporters? People are talking about that.When you say “people” — who is talking about that? [Laughs.]I have to be very careful about not revealing off-the-record stuff. But intellectuals in this general space of New Right-ish heterodox.I know this is going to sound funny because we’ve spent this entire time talking about the divisions between the nationalist populace and the tech right, and this kind of thing. But it really is true that it’s a pretty small world, and people know each other. And there are people who swim in this stew.So some of it is jokers who are trying to make a name for themselves by saying we have to invade Mexico. But in this particular case, there’s demonstrably been some influence from that because Donald Trump has refused to deny the possibility that American special forces will go attack cartels. So you can see it.And there’s a sort of return of — I think people are talking about it as expansionist, but I actually think in a cultural sense it’s more this warrior masculinity. The way they’re fastening on questions like the Panama Canal and Greenland. Men conquer.I think you can understand what is happening much better if you think about the idea that men conquer than if you think about critical minerals or shipping lanes. There are a lot of things we could do about critical minerals or shipping lanes. I’m a neoliberal technocrat. [Laughs.] I hear a lot about this stuff.But you get very interested in the Panama Canal and sending special forces to Mexico and getting Greenland if you are trying to recapture an older ethos of muscular nationalism that you think America grew soft on and abandoned.In a certain way, this is all connected. If you’re Blake Masters or JD Vance, and you want to be able to have a man on a single income raise a multiple-child household with your wife living at home — OK, well one way you get there is you have this superdynamic, tech-driven revitalization of the American defense base. And then eventually, when all rising powers come to conflict, these men do get to conquer and go do their thing. And it’s pretty hard for families to raise a ton of kids while the man is off working without the benefit of community. So suddenly probably people are going back to the Catholic Church way more. And the whole thing kind of fits together in this beautiful puzzle that will just rise if we can just adjust our value structure.It’s so hard to explain to someone who’s not a part of the head space. Because they go: Well wait, how does invading Panama have anything to do with family formation?But if you are in the head space, it’s almost sort of Marxian or millenarian, because everything explains itself. It all fits together. It all works. And I think for better or for worse, people are going to actually start to grasp how that vision fits together because it is going to be, at least in part, America’s new governing vision.I think that is a good place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?I’ve been thinking about this.My first recommendation is a square one. But for people who are new to this, I think it’s pretty important. I would recommend Patrick Deneen’s book “Regime Change.” I like to think of it as Curtis Yarvin for normies. But it explains this whole idea of elite replacement and what you’re trying to do and what Deneen calls a constitutional regime change that I think a lot of people on that side of things are now hoping we’re living through.I’m going to recommend next something that I hope doesn’t get me in trouble and that some people might find very distasteful but is book-length: the work by Martyr Made, or Darrell Cooper, who did — perhaps most revealingly — a history of Jim Jones, the Kool-Aid guy —When you say “Kool-Aid guy,” you don’t mean the guy who made Kool-Aid, but —[Laughs.] I do not. I mean the guy who led his followers in the Peoples Temple down to Guyana and eventually had them all commit suicide.Martyr Made does an extremely long podcast series that essentially does a counternarrative of the entire history of post-1960s progress. And it’s a really revealing way of seeing how the right thinks that everything actually went wrong.And it’s something that I think if you kind of can get into it — and some people will violently, violently disagree with a lot of what he’s saying and they’ve probably seen little snippets of things that he said on Tucker Carlson about World War II that really blew up and made this guy look very anathema.But if you want to understand the worldview, that Jim Jones series really helps people get into the head space of how a lot of these people on the New Right think we got to the point that we’re at. And it really helped me in understanding this whole thing.My last book would be a little disconnected, but I do live in Los Angeles, and I’ve been very disillusioned by some of the rancor and lies and idiocy around the fire policy stuff. And there’s a great, fat, really boring way-too-detailed but really revealing book called “Between Two Fires” by Stephen Pyne that is a history of American fire. It really teaches you a lot about the American landscape, and I think people might benefit from it.James Pogue, thank you very much.Thank you. I really appreciate this.You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and Threads.
