The New Right Has Failed. What Now?

The New Right is stuck in a strategic dead end. Its metapolitics is being ground down between established realities and the circus of populism.

(Frederick the Great after the Battle of Kolin, Julius Schrade: Rijksmuseum, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The New Right is in trouble. It is trapped in a strategic bind and cannot break free. The issue is simple yet profound: while demographic and legal realities are being shaped by population replacement, the metapolitical strategy that defines the New Right is sinking into populism. These dynamics reinforce each other: because population replacement creates facts which are difficult to reverse, populists become increasingly competitive in internal power struggles within the Right compared to serious actors. Populists tailor their actions and strategies to channel societal anger over the erosion of society into votes, without ever needing to deliver. As the Right is then represented by populists, population replacement continues unabated, not even talking about its reversal through remigration.

What I write here are no thoughts I came up with in the moment. Much of it is years old. But there is a right time for everything. The New Right is no longer young. It’s time to take stock. First: what do I mean by the New Right? Its usual genealogy traces back to the French Nouvelle Droite of the 1960s. As with anything labeled “new,” the term obscures the actual phenomenon. Everything new is, by definition, “new” or “young.” When “new” becomes part of a name, it eventually sounds absurd—think of Art Nouveau, out of fashion for over a century. This genealogy is only partially helpful. It describes an intellectual history from author to author, if at all, not a continuous political movement. What we now call the New Right emerged after the turn of the millennium and solidified in the early 2010s. It defined itself in sharp contrast to what it called the “old right”, neonazism and the skinhead subculture. While “old right” became a catch-all term in New Right parlance, lumping together Gabriele D’Annunzio, Adolf Hitler, and Ronny your local skinhead from the housing block, its rejection was primarily aimed at the latter. The effects of population replacement were first felt in the lower classes, and the period until the 2008 financial crisis marked the last heyday of the middle class, leading to the proletarianization of the right-wing scene in the 1980s and 1990s. A mix of lower-class demeanor, loser resentment that used the Third Reich to bolster its own self-image, and provocateurs planted by domestic intelligence services, whose main motivation in those days was not protecting “our democracy” but justifying their budgets in a state without serious internal enemies, resulted in what internet culture later called LARPing. This wasn’t just any LARPing; it was the LARPing of political militancy and violent uprising, preferably after the third, fifth, or seventh beer. The New Right, in contrast, was largely composed of students and academics who were right-wing out of ideological conviction but didn’t want to associate whatsoever with the skinhead scene’s demeanor or crude fantasies of violence. Instead of street brawls with baseball bats, they aimed to dominate public discourse through metapolitics.

Since I already feel how the intellectual historians of the movement want to wave their collection of French essays from the mid-1960s in my face: the connection between the New Right and the Nouvelle Droite lies less in genealogical intellectual history than in the similarity of their origins. The Nouvelle Droite was also a movement of academics distancing themselves from a militant right. Beyond that, however, the differences could hardly be greater. The Nouvelle Droite grappled with the fact that it was a right with no raison d’être other than being right-wing, a trait shared by its imitators in other countries. Population replacement was not yet noticeable then. The 1968 movement and its aftermath may have been distasteful in style, but vague unease about society’s direction is enough for critical books, not the foundation of a political movement, even if that unease later proves justified. Moreover, the French militants shaped by the Algerian War, like the Organisation de l’armée secrète, were not lower-class LARPers but active and former soldiers who nearly assassinated de Gaulle, attempted a military coup, and violently occupied a district of Algiers after Algeria’s independence. This was entirely different from the beer-fueled antics of the skinhead movement.

Unlike the Nouvelle Droite’s rejection of militants and conspiratorial officers, the distinction between New Right and Old Right is one of social milieu. This may sound like condemnation in our ears, accustomed to egalitarian platitudes, but a proletarian uprising has never led anywhere in world history. Around 2010, the Right’s greatest problem was not only the absence of elite formation but an atmosphere repellent to people with triple-digit IQs. The saddest part was the handful of gifted individuals who engaged anyway, held their noses, and achieved nothing beyond ruining their own biographies.

I dwell on the New Right’s origins because understanding them is key to understanding its failure. The New Right traded the power theory of a hooligan for that of a philosophy professor. This was a worsening improvement. Instead of street fighting, it aimed to win the battle of ideas. Power was not to come from violent uprisings or a civil war on “Day X” but from successful metapolitics. Power, it believed, comes not from the barrel of a gun but from cultural hegemony. This is the New Right’s core conviction.

This was not rooted in a vague notion of nonviolent resistance, as seen in many citizen-driven, quirky, or alternative thinkers, but in a deliberate strategy based on a specific theoretical framework. The two central concepts of New Right theory are the “Overton window” and “metapolitics.” The Overton window, named after its creator Joseph P. Overton, an electrical engineer turned lawyer and policy advisor at the libertarian Mackinac Center for Public Policy,¹ describes the relationship of political positions within societal discourse: some are majority opinions, others are marginal, and some are deemed unacceptable by the mainstream. As an observation, the Overton window is undeniably accurate, one can map political positions this way for any given point in time. However, it says nothing about cause and effect. The crucial claim of Overton and his successors is not that such a discursive framework exists but that political change is driven by shifting this framework. The term “metapolitics” has come to describe the deliberate, long-term influencing of this discursive window. The core assumption of the Overton window theory, and the foundational premise of the New Right, is that metapolitics shapes politics. This is far from self-evident, as cause and effect could just as easily run in the opposite direction.

We recently witnessed sudden shifts in public opinion, for which it is hard to construct the metapolitical groundwork supposedly causing them. Those who supported mandatory vaccinations in 2022 could not have imagined this in January 2020, and today, those same people cannot fathom that such a view was once at the center of the Overton window. The COVID era may be an anomaly and is now behind us. But what about the New Right’s core issue: population replacement? “Germany is not a country of immigration” was the firm stance of the CDU/CSU, Germany’s ruling party, well into the 1990s. In 2013, Der Spiegel published a remigration plan discussed by Helmut Kohl with Margaret Thatcher in October 1982, aiming to repatriate half of Germany’s Turkish population. It never materialized, but for a few years at the start of Kohl’s chancellorship, more foreigners left Germany than arrived.² Kohl’s predecessor, Schmidt, was a staunch opponent of further immigration. Even the radical change in U.S. immigration law through the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which abolished the 1924 Immigration Act’s national origin quotas, was passed with assurances that it would not alter the ethnic composition of the United States.

If population replacement was not mainstream when it began, was it at least a project of the intellectual avant-garde? What about the 1968 movement, the great metapolitical movement of the second half of the 20th century, which the New Right took as a strategic (though not ideological) model? There, Third World inhabitants appeared as one revolutionary subject among others, but the 68ers had Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh in mind, revolutionaries expelling colonial powers and capitalists from their countries, not “guest workers,” as immigrants were then called. The 68ers and subsequent left-wing ideologues produced quirky Marx interpretations, quirky Freud interpretations, and feminist literature. When the groundwork for today’s multiethnic society was laid, immigrants played a minor role in intellectual and academic discourse, on both the left and the right.

It cannot be denied: multiculturalism as an ideology emerged only after the real-world establishment of a multiethnic society. It is the legitimizing ideology of pre-existing conditions. The New Right should recognize this, as it repeatedly emphasizes that, for decades, polls have shown a majority of the population opposing more immigration, meaning population replacement was imposed without democratic legitimacy. Thus, on its core issue, politics does not function as the New Right’s theory claims it does.

For strategy and tactics, the New Right borrowed from its opponents’ playbook, diligently studying the manuals of color revolution and regime change organizers like Gene Sharp and Srđa Popović. This led to the first fundamental critique of the New Right, published by a woman writing under the pseudonym Ozimandias. Her now-lost text, titled “The Cargo Cult Revolutionaries,” was not the same as the text of the same name I published two years ago in her memory. It was by far the best political text I’ve ever read from a female author. Ozimandias’s term “cargo cult revolutionary” alludes of course to the cargo cults of Melanesian indigenous peoples. The story is well-known: during World War II, American soldiers distributed parts of their provisions, or “cargo,” to locals. After the soldiers left and the cargo stopped, cults emerged mimicking the behavior of American airport personnel, hoping to summon back the great birds that once brought food packages. The term “cargo cult” has since become synonymous with imitating the superficial actions of others while expecting the same results. In the early 2010s, New Right metapoliticians looked to the Arab Spring and a series of color revolutions that began with the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević on October 5, 2000. They did not overlook that organizations like Serbia’s Otpor had massive Western support, but they believed idealistic commitment and the truth—and thus the greater persuasiveness of their views—could compensate for their lack of resources. Whether this was naive is secondary. Far more critical was what they completely overlooked: just as Melanesians only saw planes delivering food when ground crews worked the runway, unaware of the broader World War II or even just the logistics department which had sent those planes, the New Right’s cargo cult revolutionaries saw only the protests in Belgrade, Tunis, or Cairo, not that Milošević, Ben Ali, and Mubarak had been abandoned by large parts of their countries’ elites for reasons unrelated to metapolitics. In Libya, where significant elite factions remained loyal to Gaddafi, Ozimandias’s memorable line (paraphrased from memory) applies: “What followed was no longer called a beige revolution or desert flower uprising; it went down in history under the more prosaic name: Libyan Civil War.”

This limited perception reveals not one but two fundamental flaws in the New Right’s understanding of politics. First, it underestimates the importance of elites. Its political understanding is inherently populist, thinking from the bottom up. Change is to be achieved by shifting the Overton window in public opinion. Second, it views political action as representing opinions, not as action to advance interests. This is a critical distinction: I can try to persuade someone with a different opinion, but I cannot convince someone whose interests oppose mine. At most I can outmaneuver or deceive him. Both errors stem from the democratic ideal of the citizen contributing their opinion to the political process. Ironically, it was the romantic of democracy Jean-Jacques Rousseau who distinguished the bourgeois from the citoyen, demanding that the citizen participate in politics as the latter without self-interest, solely with his opinion on the common good.³ The irony is that this ideal applies to political activists of any ideology but not to the average citizen, the sociological basis of democracy. This ideal resonated with the New Right because they are activists who project their own mindset onto others. However, not only does the average citizen fail to embody this ideal democratic opinion-holder, but political actors with actual power positions in the system also do not fit this mold. With power postion comes position, and with position comes structurally determined interest. Ultimately, the New Right’s political understanding is based on a social studies textbook archetype that only exists among those watching the political process from the outside, banging on the windows.

One of Oswald Spengler’s key insights is that an idea and its political impact are entirely different things. An idea can be true yet unsuitable as a political foundation, while nonsensical ideas can prove remarkably effective. I have criticized the New Right’s theory to the ground. But what were its consequences?

Replacing “babo thinking” (as Martin Sellner calls it), which seeks to establish “nationally liberated zones” with iron bars and baseball bats, with metapolitical thinking not only keeps you out of prison cells but also allows you to gain some societal acceptance and build structures. This was achieved within the constraints left by increasing repression. However, the New Right was not a driving force behind the political changes in Western democracies from the mid-2010s onward but merely a peripheral phenomenon.

These changes were shaped by right-wing populism, and they continue to be shaped by it to this day. Right-wing populism never delivers what it promises. For anyone aiming to stop population replacement, it is a dead end. But one thing must be acknowledged: right-wing populism has beaten the New Right at its own game, and the New Right has, in part, not even realized this, let alone figured out how to respond.

Martin Sellner’s book Regime Change from the Right is the most thorough and clear articulation of New Right political theory. He writes:

“The guiding strategy of the Reconquista aims to achieve the identitarian main goal by conquering cultural hegemony. The conquest and securing of necessary political power occur through the buildup of metapolitical power. Through party oganization, activism, mass organization, counterculture, counterpublic, and theory-building, this metapolitical power is to be accumulated until a critical mass is reached. It should break the dominant ideology, neutralize the opinion climate control, and disable the mechanisms of democracy simulation.”⁴

In this, right-wing populism has proven far more efficient than the New Right, with one caveat: the identitarian main goal, preserving ethnocultural identity and ending population replacement through remigration, is not achieved. In everything else, conquering cultural hegemony, building metapolitical power, breaking the dominant ideology, neutralizing the opinion climate control and disabling democracy simulation mechanisms, right-wing populism is orders of magnitude more successful. Not despite, but because it abandons the identitarian main goal. The success of right-wing populism lies in not pursuing remigration but channeling anger over the consequences of population replacement into a perpetual circus.

This superiority is not simply due to voters beeing foolish and wanting to be deceived. It stems from the New Right’s errors outlined above.