Conservatives Follow People, Liberals Form Institutions

A lot of the optimism and steam that the right wing was gathering in the early 2020s with the regime’s failure to address the COVID pandemic, Biden’s growing unpopularity, and the massive drop in institutional trust has… Almost completely evaporated. Pundits are now lamenting the right wing’s lack of elites, low intelligence, and growing derangement — I share this skepticism of most of the American right, but the different ways the political parties form power networks must be taken into consideration.

If I were to describe the landscape of the dissident right, I would name networks based on their leader: the ‘BAPsphere’, the ‘Tatesphere’, the ‘Nicksphere’, and so on. There are a few prominent exceptions - the “tech right” doesn’t have a definitive leader among Elon Musk, <redacted>, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Richard Hanania, and so on. Neither does the Intellectual Dark Web, though I’m not sure if they can even be called “right wing” at this point. Organized left wing movements do not have leaders, instead they have institutions, like The New York Times and Harvard. The same applies to the way the main political parties organize - the Democratic party is more important than Joe Biden, but Trump is more powerful than the entire Republican party.

The most clear explanation for this is Consquest’s (or O’Sullivan’s) second law of politics: any organziation that is not explicitly right wing will eventually become left wing. Of note is that right wingers have more confident personalities than left wingers, so it’s possible that their higher levels of confidence enable them to be willing to act independent of intitutions as well.

Attempting to argue that the right wing have a severe deficiency because they are not within large institutions would be inaccurate, as they do not form networks that way. That said, the right tree is being barked at: right wingers lack the institutional power and political elites that the left has, though the situtation is not as dire as it appears on paper.