Grieving a loss, when the loss is the hell-bird site you weren’t supposed to love.
On the evening of November 17, news reports swept across Twitter that the platform had lost so many employees it likely no longer had the people behind it to keep its most vital services running. To commemorate the occasion — not unlike violins on the Titanic — longtime internet culture reporters Katie Notopoulos and Ryan Broderick hosted a massive Twitter space to discuss the demise of the service.
At publish time, Twitter had yet to splutter to a stop, and it’s not a given that it will shut down. Still, the changes made by new owner Elon Musk — both structural (like firing thousands of employees) and cultural (like breaking the verification system, reinstating banned users, and reinstating former President Donald Trump) — have contributed to a feeling that something has fundamentally changed.
At one point in the discussion, a speaker confessed that he was “ashamed” to feel as angry as he did toward Musk for decimating Twitter. The implication was that the “cursed bird site,” as it’s so often called, was just a place for shitposting and internet drama — not a place you’re supposed to feel devastated about.
Then again, human nature just doesn’t work that way. Yes, people loved to hate Twitter, and hated loving it, but the love was real, nonetheless. Telling ourselves it’s dumb to feel bad about Twitter belies the human impulse to build bonds and connection — which Twitter users spent years doing. We’re a species that forms unhealthy levels of emotional attachments to robots. Did we really think we weren’t gonna feel absolutely wrecked about the apparent abrupt destruction of a social media platform that has been a digital home to millions of people for more than a decade?
We have a hard time grappling with internet spaces as being “real.” We think of them as less important or significant than real life. But the truth is that for many people, the connections we make online are just as significant to us as the ones we make offline. A 2017 study found that online friendships can enhance feelings of companionship, while a 2015 study of digital emotions (albeit one conducted by Twitter’s marketing team) found that reading, tweeting, and interacting with your Twitter feed can dramatically increase your emotional engagement. And that was well before the pandemic relegated many of our most precious relationships to screentime and virtual messaging, making Twitter matter more, to more people, than it had in a while.
Even solely in terms of its content, the loss of Twitter as an archive feels overwhelming to contemplate. Jack Dorsey co-founded the site in 2006, so that’s 16 years of 200 million users churning out tweets, hashtags, gifs, memes, videos, art, stories, DMs, group chats, threads, debates, subtweets, quote-tweets, and all the other content that the Library of Congress briefly deemed worthy of preserving. That doesn’t even touch the intangible stuff — the myriad human connections made, the professional networks cultivated, the innumerable moments of collectively experienced joy and humor and tragedy; of life, narrated in real time, for years, as it happened to each of us.
Because internet culture is steeped in irony, however, the most extremely online of us have become rigorously conditioned to couch our sincere feelings about internet community in sarcasm and condescension. After all, as Broderick noted in his Twitter postmortem, “the online spaces we spend time on matter to us, but are also full of dumb bull shit.” Perhaps, he argued, the appropriate expression of grief is a paradoxical one: “This era of Twitter is over and it’s ok to be sad about that, but it’s also ok to feel silly that you feel sad about that.”
Feeling silly that you feel anything at all tends to be the default, especially on the internet; in the era of cringe culture, to be overly sincere about something is to court derision and ridicule; sincere emotionality must be glanced at sidelong, especially if it’s about anything occurring online. That might mean, for example, coupling your Twitter feelings with a disclaimer about how you were high, or observing that Twitter “wasn’t just a hell site, it was a hell home.”
This is all understandable; after all, it comes inflected with more than a little gallows humor. But the sarcasm can also result in a sense of disenfranchised grief — a psychological term for when you’ve suffered a real loss that society doesn’t recognize as a real loss. The stages of real grief and mourning remain, but without the confidence that you should be feeling sad to begin with.
And yet, if any internet space deserves our sincere respect, it’s Twitter, which has functioned more like a “real” public square than any other social media platform. This is the platform that gave birth to the hashtag, with all its infinite and often surprising uses. It has aided the rise of countless social movements, from the #ArabSpring resistance to #BlackLivesMatter to #MeToo. Not all of them have been good — see Gamergate, Pizzagate, QAnon, et al — but they have all, unequivocally, mattered. Twitter, with its intermingling of celebrities, verified professionals, politicians, journalists, trolls, bots, normies, alts, extremists, and everything in between, was where the hoi polloi broke bread with the blue checks. It gave us K-pop stans trolling racists with their own hashtags. Its transparency and networking ability lent Twitter’s Black community a profound public presence, a cultural prominence that not even the much-missed Vine (another gift we owe to Twitter) could bestow. It gave us covfefe and dog rates and horse ebooks and Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend’s testicles and dril.
There’s nothing like Twitter, nor will there ever be again.
That’s also why it’s difficult to know what to replace it with, if that’s even possible. Many of us who’ve been on the internet for a couple of decades have witnessed the implosions of multiple sites that at one point seemed like they were always going to be around. (AOL, Myspace, LiveJournal, Vine, Flickr, everything Yahoo ever touched, the list goes on.)
Nothing on the internet is permanent, though, not even the websites that feel closest to stodgy old edifices. Building on this assumption of impermanence, community experts, including academics who study community migrations across internet platforms, argue that the best way to ensure stability is to own your own servers and make multiple backups, and to accept that your internet environment is a fragile habitat and not just a bunch of websites. When one part of your habitat gets destroyed, you have to rely on the whole ecosystem to recover, and it can take a while. But even as an experienced internet Old, I’m stymied by the thought of what would make an effective Twitter replacement. Twitter’s “public square” holds less and less appeal in an era where harassment has grown but moderation hasn’t always grown alongside it, and so users have also increasingly retreated to semi-private spaces like Discord and Telegram, private group chats and WeChat.
These siloed spaces make it harder to find friends across platforms and interests; without Twitter’s transparency and searchability, it will be harder to stumble across people who share a cross-section of your passions or to dive deep into your highly specific interests: For example, to forcibly befriend everyone who also loves James McCardle’s leg-twitch during the “Democracy in America” monologue from Angels in America, leading you to create a vociferous groupchat of like-minded leg-likers, not that I speak from experience.
Not everyone desires sustained and intimate interaction with strangers, but even among friends, replacing Twitter won’t be easy. The worst thing about Musk’s gutting of Twitter is that if it really collapses, whole communities will be uprooted and displaced. Subcultures like fandoms, kink communities, sex workers and educators, and queer and trans spaces, rely heavily on the freedom of pseudonymity on Twitter. But that also makes it harder to reunite with all your pseudonymous friends across platforms, considering the difficulty of trying to converge on a single agreed-upon substitute platform. For groups that gather across language barriers, the loss of Twitter’s easy “translate tweet” button means further separation from people who share your interests, if not your native tongue.
So, yes, there is a reason to mourn. The reality is that this is a hard time: Even if Twitter doesn’t collapse, it is changing, and you will likely lose friends, content, and the ability to retrieve memories. It’s okay to be sad; it’s even okay to be angry and devastated — both for what we’re losing and for the fact that we even had to lose it to begin with. After all, we, the end users who are left holding this bag of weird grief and even weirder guilt about it, aren’t the ones who ever dismissed or discounted Twitter. We were right there — we still are there — doomscrolling the wretched bird app until the end.
What else should we value on the internet if not the spaces like Twitter that have given us so much joy and frustration and slices of humanity? What else even matters in the digital landscape if not fighting for the integrity and importance of people coming together, even on platforms as broken and in need of an edit button as this one?
The real loss isn’t that you spent too many hours of your life scrolling this hell-bird app instead of touching grass.
It’s that the people who destroyed it won’t consider it a loss at all.
The New Right emerged to theorize Trumpism’s rise. Can they explain its defeat?
In the heady days before the 2022 midterms, conservatives looked out at America and saw a country on the verge of inflicting a major blow in the culture war: rewarding Republicans despite the end of Roe and punishing Democrats for embracing allegedly radical positions on race and gender. The New Right, a loose grouping of conservative thinkers who advocate aggressively wielding state power to promote a more conservative culture, smelled blood in the water.
“Political horse-race types are predicting a GOP blowout in today’s midterm elections, and if it comes to pass, Democrats won’t have much to blame beyond their own insanity,” Sohrab Ahmari, a leading New Right figure, wrote in an Election Day piece for The American Conservative magazine. Democrats, he argued, had alienated the mass public through the spread of “drag queen story hour,” masking in schools, the accommodation of “gender ideologues,” and permissive immigration rules.
“There is only so much of it the nation could tolerate,” Ahmari predicted.
Two days later, after the voters rendered a different verdict, Ahmari penned a piece in the New York Times blaming the defeat on the GOP’s failure to embrace true populism: blasting the party for “ginning up outrage over ‘woke’ sensitivity trainings in the workplace” while remaining “indifferent to issues like wages and workplace power.”
Ahmari’s pivot reflects the difficult spot that the New Right finds itself in the wake of the midterm results. The faction, which rose to prominence after 2016 to put meat on Trumpism’s intellectual bones, believed that the future of Republican politics rested in a vision of relentless, aggressive cultural warfare. When the voters seemed unmoved by their cultural preoccupations in 2022 — and clearly sided with Democrats on abortion — New Right thinkers didn’t have easy answers.
In the weeks following the election, some incipient cleavages have started to emerge inside the New Right and its many subfactions, with the most interesting debates falling into three distinct, but interconnected, buckets.
The first bucket is the question of how best to prosecute the culture war going forward. Some on the New Right sound surprisingly open to some tactical moderation in light of the midterm results — most notably by bracketing abortion or even softening the GOP’s position on the issue. It’s a debate that directly parallels the “popularism” conversation happening on the Democratic side, and one that speaks to deep sociological divides in the post-Trump coalition.
The second bucket centers on 2024: whether Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis represents the movement’s future, and what reasons there are to prefer one over the other. Interestingly, the battle lines do not necessarily line up in the way that one might expect (DeSantis shoring up the relative moderates and Trump the radicals).
The third and final bucket centers on democracy. A minority of New Right thinkers responded to defeat by suggesting the electorate is too far gone for conservatives to ever triumph — and even questioning the value of democracy itself.
“Democracy did not end slavery, and democracy will not end abortion,” declared Chad Pecknold, a self-described “postliberal” theologian at Catholic University.
What we’re seeing, through all these arguments, are the fissures splitting the Right’s most vibrant intellectual movement — fault lines that could divide conservatism in the coming years.
Cutting abortion out of the culture war?
There is no set definition of the “New Right,” no list of who belongs or strict criteria that one can use to assess whether a particular figure is a member. Sam Adler-Bell, a leftist writer who profiled the movement in The New Republic, described it as being “cohered as much by temperament as ideology — and by certain fiercely held enmities.” This amorphousness can make it hard to identify who’s “New Right” and who’s just plain vanilla right.
But broadly speaking, New Right members share a foundational belief that American institutions — including the Republican Party — are rotted, and that a certain cultural degeneracy has taken root in society writ large. They believe that the right’s traditional commitment to limited government stands in the way of waging an effective counterrevolution; the culture war can only be won by jettisoning libertarianism and using the levers of policy to roll back the left’s cultural victories. Out with tax cuts, in with bans on critical race theory in schools.
Abandoning the culture war, on this perspective, is not mere folly but national suicide. For some on the New Right, the idea that their approach to these issues might be unpopular is unthinkable. But after 2022, some on the New Right are starting to see the case for a little bit of selective moderation.
Take Richard Hanania, the president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology think tank. Hanania is by no means a squish; he recently wrote that “if I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post.”
Yet in his election postmortem, Hanania put the blame squarely on the party’s pro-life commitments. “Abortion itself was on the ballot last night in 5 states, and the pro-choice position universally ran ahead of Democratic candidates, sometimes by a very wide margin,” he wrote. “As with Democrats and affirmative action, Republicans have been pushed by a small group of noisy activists to take an unpopular position that isn’t even a top issue for their own voters.”
An essay in City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute think tank, goes even further. The piece’s author, Jesse Arm, argues for what he terms “conservative popularism” — for Republicans to pick and choose their cultural battles based on what polls well. On these grounds, he argues that the party should tone it down on abortion, abandoning no-exception prohibitions in favor of 15-week bans, while going hard on crime and “anti-wokeness.”
Why might some of the most ardent culture warriors consider an abortion compromise? There’s a helpful clue in the post-election episode of the NatCon Squad, a podcast that represents the so-called “national conservative” subfaction of the New Right. National conservatives aim to build a conservative nationalist vision of American identity, leading them to be harshly critical of immigration, multiculturalism, and untrammeled free trade. While some of its leading figures are religious, like the Israeli political philosopher Yoram Hazony, abortion is not one of its central ideological preoccupations.
On the podcast, host Inez Stepman argues that abortion is politically distinct from the debates over critical race theory and LGBTQ education in schools that preoccupy the national conservatives and the broader New Right:
The culture is the big tent [but] I want to split abortion off from that. I think that’s a new issue reintroduced in 2022, but has more “traditional” sides in the culture war from the Moral Majority in the 1990s. But issues like the differences between male and female, indoctrination in schools, crime, immigration…those are all issues that I think can be cobbled into very successful campaigns that do reach across the aisle.
The argument here is that abortion represents an older, pre-Trump generation of culture war — one that, by implication, hurt the GOP in 2022. By contrast, refocusing on newer issues like “indoctrination in schools” can appeal to moderates and even conservative Democrats, creating an emerging Republican majority.
The extent to which this last bit is true is open to debate. The 1776 Project PAC, an outfit that spent millions around the country supporting school board candidates concerned with fighting LGBTQ education and “critical race theory,” only won a third of its races (per an AP report). But Stepman’s move speaks to something important about the New Right: It’s not as religious as the old one.
Some of the most prominent figures on the New Right, like Ahmari, are Catholic conservatives. But many are not, reflecting the fact that the New Right is a post-Trump movement — and that Trump managed to win over an unusual number of non-religious voters in his 2016 presidential bid. It’s a point that Nate Hochman, a writer at National Review and one of the New Right’s young stars, made at length in the New York Times this summer.
“The conservative political project is no longer specifically Christian,” Hochman wrote. “That may seem strange to say at a moment when a mostly Catholic conservative majority on the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. But a reversal of the landmark 1973 ruling would be more of a last gasp than a sign of strength for the religious right.”
Events afterward seem to have borne out Hochman’s suggestion. Not only has abortion clearly emerged as a losing issue for the right, but at least some conservative culture warriors are willing to say that out loud.
Trump or DeSantis?
While the New Right remains committed to its secularized culture war, if not necessarily the old-school variant, there is still an open debate over who it wants to lead the charge. Like the GOP faithful more broadly, the New Right’s thinkers are increasingly divided on the question of Ron DeSantis versus Donald Trump.
The arguments among the New Right about 2024 are roughly the same as those among the right writ large: DeSantis supporters say he is a more competent and popular upgrade on the former president, while Trump supporters argue that he has a unique ability to connect with the GOP base. On balance, it seems like the DeSantis supporters are more vocal and more prominent among New Right thinkers — at least for now.
Christopher Rufo, the New Right’s most influential activist, is emblematic in this regard. Rufo worked with Trump on his executive order banning so-called “critical race theory” in federal agency trainings, and went on to advise DeSantis on some of his prominent culture war initiatives (like the STOP WOKE act targeting higher education, which was recently ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge). In theory, you could imagine Rufo supporting either man in 2024.
But his election postmortem, published in City Journal, is practically a DeSantis press release. Rufo describes DeSantis as “a master at picking and choosing his fights,” praises his “keen mind for public policy,” and claims that he “backstops his culture-war agenda with capable governance.” This is in contrast to the way that “many conservative leaders stoke the culture war to generate media attention and fundraising dollars” — a line that looks a lot like a shot at Trump, among others.
Rufo’s endorsement is notable not only because of his outsized prominence on the right, but because he’s no one’s idea of a moderate.
Last year, he declared his intention “to clean house in America: remove the attorney general, lay siege to the universities, abolish the teachers’ unions, and overturn the school boards” (all through legal means, Rufo later clarified). He has argued that “reform around the edges is not enough” to protect America from the progressive “revolution,” and that conservatives should embrace a “defund the left” political strategy in which they “strangle new identity programs in red tape” and “accelerate the student loan Ponzi scheme [and] make universities partially responsible for defaults.”
This is a wonkish blueprint for cultural revolution, a New Right long march through America’s institutions. Rufo has thrown in with Team DeSantis not because he’s more “moderate” than Trump in any sense, but because he’s seen as a better bet to deliver on radical ends.
Interestingly, DeSantis’s willingness to compromise on abortion — after Dobbs, Florida enacted a 15-week ban on abortion rather than a full prohibition — does not seem to count against him on this front. In fact, abortion goes entirely unmentioned in Rufo’s piece; it is simply not the kind of culture war at the top of his mind.
But not everyone on the New Right is ready to give up on Trump.
Shortly after the election, Ohio Senator-elect JD Vance penned a piece in The American Conservative defending Trump against the allegation that his influence sunk the party. Vance, perhaps the New Right’s favorite candidate in the 2022 midterms, argues that Democrats won not because of poor endorsement choices by Trump, but because of the Democratic Party’s structural advantages (primarily its superior fundraising network). Any Republican effort to counter this advantage, he argues, depends on the party’s ability to activate Trump and his supporters: “Our party has one major asset, contra conventional wisdom, to rally these voters: President Donald Trump.”
It’s easy to dismiss this analysis as self-serving: Vance won Trump’s endorsement in the primary and went on to dramatically underperform compared to the more moderate Governor Mike DeWine. He is living proof that Trump may not, in fact, be picking the most electable candidates — in part because he has elevated the New Right to new political heights.
In 2022, the New Right’s favored candidates — Vance and the defeated Blake Masters in Arizona — both won their primaries thanks in large part to Trump’s endorsement. But the midterms showed that these candidates’ radicalism turned off normie voters; their use of New Right ideas and language, like describing the American government and social system as a hostile “regime,” was part of the problem.
This is a point that Stepman, the NatCon Squad podcast host, acknowledged in her analysis. “I think chaos really is unattractive,” she said. “A lot of the voters who may be persuadable on some of the cultural messaging … are really turned off by, frankly, a lot of the things that we talk about, that I talk about, that I think are really important and true about the country,”
If DeSantis wants to consolidate support from the GOP establishment in his bid to topple Trump, he may need to tone down his own employment of New Right tropes — and certainly should avoid endorsing statewide candidates like Vance and Masters who embody the party’s “candidate quality” problem.
The New Right today may soon find itself in a strange situation: Its intellectual center of gravity shifting toward DeSantis and his veneer of normalcy, while Trump’s patronage remains a better bet vaulting its people into the upper echelons of power.
Is democracy doomed?
But not everyone on the New Right is willing to countenance moderation, either on policy or rhetoric. Declan Leary, the managing editor of The American Conservative magazine, argued that none of the usual — abortion, Trump, or the GOP’s “candidate quality” problems — should bear the blame for defeat.
The GOP’s problem wasn’t too little moderation, he claims; it was too much.
“The red wave didn’t fail because the GOP leaned too hard into the MAGA movement [or] because of Dobbs,” he writes. “The Republican Party lost this week for the same reason it always loses: it’s soft. Up against the party of infanticide and child mutilation and carnage in Ukraine, the best attack it could muster was ‘…Inflation!’”
Leary hails from a particular element of the New Right: the so-called “integralists,” Catholic arch-conservatives who believe that the United States government should be replaced with a religious Catholic state.
Integralists are a part of a broader “postliberal” trend among right-wing intellectuals that traces the cultural decay of American society back to its ruling liberal political philosophy: the doctrine that government should liberate people to pursue their own visions of the good life. Liberalism, they argue, promotes licentiousness and a corrosive individualism: It is the root cause of social ills like drug addiction, “deaths of despair,” and family breakdown.
Postliberals believe that instead of protecting individual freedom, government should aim to promote the “common good” or “highest good”: to create a citizenry where people live good lives as defined by scripture and religious doctrine. This leads them to support an even more active role for the state than even the national conservatives, endorsing not only aggressive efforts to legislate morality but also expansions of the welfare state.
From this point of view, the 2022 elections are a particularly bitter pill to swallow. Abandoning pro-life absolutism is not an option for them like it is for some national conservatives. For those integralists unwilling to engage in Leary’s denialism, the dominant reaction to 2022 has been to blame the electorate — and even democracy itself.
Take this tweet from Adrian Vermeule, a law professor at Harvard and the country’s most formidable integralist intellectual. In his view, Americans are hopelessly in hock to liberal philosophical ideals; the New Right’s attempt to overthrow liberal cultural hegemony at the ballot box is essentially hopeless.
It’s funny to see GOP types debating which candidates or issues would have made a difference, when the simplest hypothesis is that there is a critical mass of voters who will support left-liberalism on essentially theological grounds, regardless of the conditions it produces.
— Adrian Vermeule (@Vermeullarmine) November 9, 2022
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