The new right isn't conservative. They don't want to be.

In that respect, the new right can be viewed as a negative image of the woke left. Both movements invoke a favored cohort of the truly disadvantaged. In practice, they’re more attentive to the anxieties of what George Orwell called the “lower-upper-middle class” — in updated terms, the journalists, academics, and other “knowledge workers” whose expectations outstrip their income. On the left, that encourages a fixation on symbolic diversity, student debt, radical police reform, and other issues that are distant from the actual concerns of the poor and racial minorities. On the right, it leads to otherwise perplexing obsessions with content moderation on social media, bodybuilding, and other displays of flamboyant manliness and obscure theological doctrines…

Still, the dissidents at the Orlando afterparty are both responding to a transformation of the intellectual right and helping to ensure that it continues. While they remain staples of think tank issue papers and fundraising appeals, ritualized appeals to the Founders, the Constitution, or patriotic loyalty to the existing United States have become passé among a younger generation of thinkers, writers, and readers. It’s no use to tell these elements of the new right that they’re not particularly conservative, because they already know that. With building hopes for a kind of Caesar willing to mount a frontal assault on “the regime,” the question is what comes next.