I’ve recently started crossing myself again. I haven’t been religious for many years and still don’t believe in a god, but I’ve always had the instinct to make the sign of the cross when ambulances or fire engines pass, a holdover from my Catholic school days. All of us rushing to the window while our teachers told us to pray for whomever that screaming machine was hurtling towards. Even during my radically atheistic years, I could never shake off the impulse to give off some physical token of hope and pity towards the world. Even though I believed religion was a deceptive sham, I also felt ashamed that I would not give my fellow sufferers even this slight act of empathy, uncomfortable with feebly concealing my internal sense of community.
Similar phenomena have been playing out across my generation. Gen Z seeks new meaning in a digital world, as evidenced in the rise of the New Right. Last Friday, the University of Chicago’s Parrhesia Program for Public Thought and Discourse held a pair of panels dedicated to “Covering the New Right.” Parrhesia and its partner, The Point magazine, invited seven scholars and journalists well-versed in the content and history of the New Right, who were asked questions by a moderator as well as by the audience.
The first panel, “The New Right as Intellectual Movement,” consisted of Columbia University Professor of Humanities Mark Lilla, author of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right Laura K. Field, and Associate Professor of Humanities at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School Samuel Goldman, author of After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division. These three academics dissected the New Right on a historical basis, discussing its position relative to Reagan-era conservatism in the Cold War, its evolution since the 2016 and 2024 elections, and its relationship to a changing liberalism. Salient insights consisted either in lists—various strands of New Right thought, models of American national identity—or in expressions of befuddlement at a social and political movement so incoherent as to be, per Lilla, “illegible.”
On the second panel, “The New Right as Culture,” speakers included Emma Goldberg of the New York Times, Emily Jashinsky of UnHerd, Mana Afsari of The Point, and Simon van Zuylen-Wood of New York magazine. The four journalists gave their more grounded perspective of the New Right’s origins. Jashinsky, who graduated college into the stagnant Right-wing politics in 2015, identified the dissonance between the abstract economic concerns of the “decadent” Reaganite old right and the pressing cultural and structural concerns of internet-era Zoomers, who strayed away from the once-omnipotent alliance between evangelicals, libertarians, and neoconservative war-hawks. Zuylen-Wood pointed to the Left’s stifling response to COVID, shutting down vibrant Brooklyn in 2020 while rebellious young right-wing “scenesters” flaunted quarantine in then-infamous Dimes Square; such a situation was a microcosm of the post-2016 Left, obsessed with a losing culture war beyond the general public, relinquishing its youthful vitality with defections to the New Right. Afsari, who gained renown from reporting on young men’s conservatism in the wake of the 2024 election and has more recently written on dating life among young conservatives, described the New Right as more a “lifestyle brand” than a “policy course.” Goldberg concurred with this assessment, based on her experiences covering young female conservatism, which she described as being composed of less civic engagement and more instruction on “how to live their lives.”
In hindsight, it’s to be expected that younger, on-the-ground journalists would be more in tune with a primarily Gen Z phenomenon than older academics and historians. Yet what stood out even in this was the lack of direct contact the first panel made with even the idea of a legitimate phenomenon of New Rightism. When I questioned the first panel about the consequences of the chaotic online formatting of much New Right thought, Mark Lilla responded by considering its effects on policy implementation and the intellectual refinement of concepts, important from a God’s-eye view but very off-base from the actual content of these spaces. The most drawn out disagreement amongst the panelists was the attitudes on the New Right towards great-books training programs, such as that of the Tikvah foundation.
The second panel, on the other hand, talked about shared sentiments amongst Trump-infatuated New Right Zoomers. Zuylen-Wood pointed out how most campus “groypers” (a term for the followers of the far-right personality Nick Fuentes) are obsessed exclusively with a small slice of political discourse, boiling down to H-1B visas, Israel, and maybe AI. Goldberg spoke on how isolated Gen Z women during the pandemic turned away from liberal feminism and how such a seemingly repressive and regressive ideology as right-wing femininity could provide answers to big questions that the wider world was not interested in answering for them.
Now, this sort of vibe-analysis could also be held against the journalists; after all, the second panel threw around far fewer identifying ideological terms, while the first panel emphasized the importance of submovements such as “traditionalist Catholics,” “anti-Lockean[s],” or “Claremonters.” The stultifying lists the first panel employed did give a decent, if abstract, idea of what the New Right has in store for Capitol Hill. But they presented little explanation for why hordes of twenty-something men were flocking to Dimes Square or listening to Nick Fuentes. It was reasonable that the panel expressed, time and again, their confusion at such a “crazy” (per Field) coalition of movements, because many of the New Right’s expressed objectives may indeed seem incoherent, or can otherwise be boiled down to an underlying bigotry. But this is a profoundly unsatisfying account, especially for students of the generation drawn into the New Right.
The morning after the conference, I gathered with several peers to have breakfast with the four journalists from the second panel. The environment was more relaxed and the audience smaller; we discussed gender relations, the internal politics of campus groups, and the irrelevant inanity of Dimes Square. Milwaukee-area native Jashinsky talked about the frustrations she and many Midwesterners have experienced with not being taken seriously by the coastal elite in their monopoly on serious political discourse. Goldberg explained the difficulties of approaching fringe movements from the perspective of legacy media. Afsari and Zuylen-Wood advised future journalists and critics to pay close attention to the fertile ground of Middle America and avoid the burnt-over districts of New York and DC.
The attending students were grilled in turn by the journalists about campus politics, popular reading, and even their dating lives. It was afterwards, as I spoke to Jashinsky about the Catholic revival (and it being limited mostly to more elite, non-normie circles), that I came to connect the dots on the puzzlingly schizophrenic image the weekend had created of the New Right. It is probably not the case that these Zoomers got baptized and confirmed because Aquinas or Augustine argued so eloquently on issues of faith and dogma (well, maybe for some UChicago students). It is instead the ritual, the solemnity, the physical presence of history within the gilded cathedrals that moves them; in other words, it’s aesthetic.
Aesthetics really are what characterizes the New Right, for two reasons: One, the Left for the most part has no coherent, attractive aesthetic, and the New Right is, above all else, “anti-Left” (per Jashinsky). And two, there is almost nothing beneath those aesthetics. Goldberg recalled how many young women at a “Make America Hot Again” convention cared little for immigration or Israel, while Jashinsky pointed out that the hypercomplex, academic, esoteric, thermodynamics-meets-Hegelian dialects theories of philosopher Nick Land have little to no influence on the mainstream New Right.
In a similar vein, I do not avow the entire content of the Nicene Creed when I cross myself, nor am I pledging fealty to Pope Leo XIV (though I do respect him). It is a form of grounding myself in an untethered world. To move your body and thus orient your existential interest feels far more profound than the sort of sterile political engagement Gen Z was offered by the ancien régime—old people in generic suits yammering about taxes—even if those body movements and that faith are just token vestiges of habit. Because for all that Zoomers have on our ancestors, Instagram and vaccines and Sabrina Carpenter, we are starved for profound gestures. And that, it seems, is all the New Right is.
Image: William Blake, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, pen and ink with watercolor over graphite, ca. 1805 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC).