Who Is We?
I learned a simple truth while in Basic Combat Training at beautiful Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
The tasks there are simple. Walk sixteen miles with some weight on your back. Set up all your tents. Organize a fireguard schedule and sort these duffle bags. Those tasks aren’t really the point, though. Basic training is teaching you how to follow.
The subtext of all of this is leadership, and many people try to be the leader.
There’s no real mechanism for this, save a drill-sergeant-appointed platoon guard who is often switched in and out on a whim. Really, it’s based on who people follow. And when you get a half dozen competing ideas for a simple task, with half of the group motivated by finding the best solution and the other half motivated by being seen as “the leader” you can turn a twenty minute job into an hour wasted.
The simple truth I learned was that the specifics of a plan matter less than unity. Learning to be a follower, remember? A bad idea with everyone behind it gets the task done. A great idea that splits the group into factions leaves you worse off.
In politics, we talk about unity constantly but rarely practice it. Every faction has its own media ecosystem, its own patrons and donors, and its own set of principles and unforgivable ideas. Indeed, most factions are already running purity tests, but selectively. Enforcing them sometimes, relaxing them others, with no defining parameters. Usually poorly.
The Old Right tests for institutional loyalty and procedural conservatism. The New Right tests for cultural combativeness and populist instinct. The libertarians test for ideological consistency. The national conservatives test for civilizational seriousness. The tech-right tests for whether you're building or just talking. Each faction shouts its principles but engages in inconsistent policing. Well, unless you’re toxic to donors.
Some figures are frozen out of the factions ecosystems, banned from its platforms, and lose friends and allies overnight. Others survive the same heresies unscathed. The purity tests are happening but are uneven. That gap is where our dysfunction lives.
But what if we leaned into it?
Not necessarily endorsing this, but purity tests are already happening and they’re not going to stop. The inconsistency is causing more damage than the purity tests themselves. So, what if we stopped hedging, let each faction solidify, and they were enforced consistently? Right now, no large faction has actually done this well.
The closest thing to a unifying principle is “America First,” which at least defines a heuristic: are you pro-America or not? The question itself has real power, but it’s not a faction. Indeed, multiple factions fly the “America First” banner yet mean different things by it. They share a slogan, not a movement, yet the same fragmentation and selective enforcement takes place underneath.
Despite America First’s power as a heuristic, it hasn’t produced the thing that the right actually needs, which is a faction with a clear identity and full commitment from its members.
I think part of the problem is structural. People are wired to follow Great Men, and that instinct has always been the fastest path to factional cohesion. But too many figures and even journalists are wired like influencers now, treating the attention marketplace like a mercantilist system where everyone is competing for eyeballs and attention spans—even potential leaders. I personally think that many of them deeply wish they could be The Leader themselves but lack certain abilities. They have the audience, but don’t have the authority or capability to act on it. Therefore our true emerging leaders aren’t elevated and are instead treated as rivals. An instinctive gatekeeping that sorts for the worst influencers and leadership simultaneously.
The last time truly generational factional leaders broke through: Obama, Trump, both did it by largely bypassing this class of tastemaker entirely and reformed the ecosystem by sheer magentism. Those gatekeepers were forced to adapt or become irrelevant. But the tastemakers learned from this, and the ecosystem is developing antibodies against the next great factional leader, and our wordmongers are better than ever at platforming figures just enough to be useful while denying them a dominant platform.
The result is a movement full of followers and an infrastructure that prevents anyone from rising high enough to be followed. Most people on the right aren’t diehard loyalists for their chosen faction, they just picked the one closest to them (or just picked the winner.) Conviction drives a select few. The first faction that can produce a leader capable of going around the gatekeepers will pull everyone in.
This question matters because I want to see a winner. I founded a magazine because I believe the arguments on the right are worth having. Instead, what I see is every faction fighting hard enough to wound each other but not committing enough to win.
If no one wants to win, then we aren’t building anything no matter how many times we ask of ourselves “What are we building?” We’re just arguing stupidly amongst ourselves in a rhetorical parking lot.