When the Right Rejects Rules

The Collapse of Institutional Trust and Its Consequences

The Fragmentation of the Right and the Crisis of Truth

Much ink has recently been spilled on the so-called recent “split” on the Right. Depending on the outlet, this fracturing is framed as MAGA versus America First, conservatives versus the far Right, institutionalists versus populists, or another competitive effort between two groups with different visions of the good. I offered my own analysis a few weeks ago and concluded that there is essentially a three way split between traditional conservatives, classic liberals, and emerging post-liberal dissidents, with hybrids in between. However, it is very important to recognize that this fragmenting concerns far more than teleology. These divisions are being driven by a civilizational crisis over epistemology that is appearing in the mainstream for the first time.

There were foreshadows of the times we are in now during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential run. The term “fake news” was originally a legacy media dig on Donald Trump’s supposedly incorrect opinions. Trump then turned the term back on them for their own hypocrisy. Milo Yiannopoulos, whom the mainstream media associated with what they called the “alt-right,” remarked, “We live in a post-fact era. It is wonderful.” He was referring to the way the general population no longer trusted the mainstream media to perform even basic fact checks. It is undoubtedly good that people do not trust legacy outlets that lie and tip the scales toward destructive political ends, but has the Right offered any serious alternatives? This is the most important question right now.

Media, Standards, and the Erosion of Authority

Like other cable news networks, Fox News tends to appeal to older viewers, as their commercial content demonstrates. After the network called the 2020 election for Biden and dismissed their top host Tucker Carlson, its reputation suffered among more conservative viewers who were already skeptical of its commitment to honesty. The Daily Wire is perhaps the most visibly successful alternative, with actual reporting in addition to its opinion shows, but even it is increasingly viewed with suspicion for being too pro-Israel and for letting go of some of its most popular personalities.

As a traditional Christian and paleo-Conservative, I have differences with Fox News neoconservatives and Ben Shapiro’s social libertarianism, but I recognize something extremely important about what these institutions represent. Despite their recent origins compared to legacy companies, they attempted to create a genuine alternative to institutions captured by the Left. To provide such an alternative requires several elements that a simple talk-show host is not incentivized to offer. They must abide by the rules of the discipline, including measures to prevent bribery, primary source research, objective reporting, and a peer review process. These are the factors that ought to produce institutional respectability.

Unfortunately, a large portion of the political Right is now inoculated not only against legacy institutions, but also against the very rules those institutions failed to uphold. If slogans such as “fair and balanced” or “democracy dies in darkness,” meant to convey legitimacy, merely served to cover for illegitimacy, then perhaps the rules these institutions claimed to follow contributed to their failure. They created a false sense of security that their work was accurate when, in reality, they were patting each other on the back in pursuit of access and prestige.

Revolutionary Voices and the Market for Sensationalism

Add to this the fact that younger millennials and Generation Z are primed for revolutionary solutions to their own dilemmas, and we arrive at the current situation in which often erratic personalities, claiming to be on their own quests for truth, are able to connect with younger audiences as one of their own. They present themselves as victims of the same systems and as people able to call foul on the standards of older generations who drove the cultural car into a ditch. I have noted this in the way younger right-leaning Christians have increasingly adopted sexually perverse language and profanity, but it appears in many other arenas as well. Professional degrees and certifications are becoming meaningless. Financial affluence makes one suspect not successful, as Tucker Carlson recently discovered when he reacted angrily to a student who suggested he was worth fifty million dollars.

The “trusted” brand no longer wears expensive suits in state-of-the-art studios or collects professional awards from recognized institutions. It no longer must answer to peers, face ostracism from polite society for unethical shortcuts, or explain itself to a chief executive. It is now found in independent voices that can vindicate popular sentiment through curated images and entertaining, often edgy, drama. The comedians, shock jocks, and self-styled edge lords of yesterday are the opinion-shapers of today. The market now demands the transgressive, the juvenile, and the amusing over the responsible, the mature, and the professional. Obviously, if this continues it represents the demise of all standards and excellence.

Candace Owens now hosts the largest podcast in the world. Her message is that we are being lied too by virtually everyone, which may be true, but her escape hatch from this epistemological prison seems to be her own intuition, not a process of adjudication that journalists used to represent. For example, she claims that Scottish Rite Free-Masons founded the United States based on her conversations with Catholic priests and Nicholas Hagger’s 2016 book The Secret Founding of America, where the author posits that even concepts like “federalism” were “taken from Freemasonry” by the Founding Fathers for the purpose of establishing a “New World Order” (Hagger, 153).

It is true that we have been lied to, our leaders have failed, and many of our institutions cannot be trusted. However, that does not mean Scottish Rite Masonry, which had hardly any influence in the United States until after the ratification of the Constitution, is where things went wrong. Yet most people are not going to fact-check Candace on freemasonry, especially if they have already moved on to following her shifting insinuations about who killed Charlie Kirk, or questioning whether the United States even went to the moon, or suggesting that Jewish bloodlines rule the world, even though they cannot seem to deplatform the world’s largest podcast.

Gasset and Le Bon

Why is this sensational content attractive? Two books that, a century ago, at least partially predicted the world we live in now offer some answers.

In José Ortega y Gasset’s 1930 work The Revolt of the Masses, the philosopher envisions a future Europe shaped by the “mass-man,” who prizes averageness and harbors an “empty negative attitude” toward the liberal world he inherits, even while feeling entitled to its blessings, which he takes for granted (25, 63–64, 104). Even experts join in this “mass-man” posture, for they are often little more than specialists who behave ignorantly toward anything outside their narrow field of knowledge (124).

Gasset wrote:

A characteristic of our times is the predominance, even in groups traditionally selective, of the mass and the vulgar. Thus, in the intellectual life, which of its essence requires and presupposes qualification, one can note the progressive triumph of the pseudo-intellectual, unqualified, unqualifiable, and, by their very mental texture, disqualified. (16)

In pre-modern times, Gasset explains, the vulgar operated by “beliefs, traditions, experiences, proverbs, [and] mental habits, but it never imagined itself in possession of theoretical opinions on what things are or ought to be—for example, on politics or literature” (77). Yet, now they have “decided to consider as bankrupt that system of standards which European civilisation implies, [though] they are incapable of creating others, [and] do not know what to do” (146).

These conditions led to a situation where “the citizen no longer feels any respect for his State” as represented in Parliaments or for the standards that were supposed to uphold them such as “courtesy, truthfulness and . . . respect or esteem for superior individuals” (161, 202).

Gasset saw both bolshevism and fascism as modern retrogressions that promise salvation in “a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions. This is the new thing: the right not to be reasonable, the ‘reason of unreason’” (80, 101).

Gasset predicted the rise of totalitarianism as the State absorbed the influence of every social institution. He also saw a future Europe consolidated by market forces. This is why his work is considered prophetic today. Yet, his solutions are lacking. The work reads as if “liberal democracy, scientific experiment, and industrialism” will simply bring about this brave new world of ignorant masses, superficial personalities, and a lacking foundation (61).

When I hear someone say that Nick Fuentes is brilliant simply because he does not use filler words and has a good memory, I think of Gasset. How does one begin to critique someone who operates according to his own rules, which may shift with the occasion? This does not mean that everything Fuentes, Owens, or other personalities say is untrue. It means that the basis upon which we evaluate their claims—whether they align with our friend–enemy bias, push a perceived Overton window, appear convincing, or enjoy popularity—has become unstable.

This is where Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 book, The Crowd, comes in. Le Bon allegedly had an influence on both high-ranking Nazi officials and American advertisers. He observed that “reason and arguments are incapable of combating certain words and formulas” since crowds think in “grandiose and vague images” filled with emotional sentiment and religious devotion (124). In other words, actual truth is not part of the value-system masses think in.

Therefore, “Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim” (132). Individual people in a crowd operate with anonymity as “a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will. (52)” The French Revolution was one of Le Bon’s chief examples of this dynamic where the great popular leaders were “those whose intelligence has been the most restricted” (218).

Le Bon attributed these revolutionary conditions to the death of civilization itself.

He stated: “After having exerted its creative action, time begins that work of destruction from which neither gods nor men escape. Having reached a certain level of strength and complexity a civilisation ceases to grow, and having ceased to grow it is condemned to a speedy decline. The hour of its old age has struck” (230).

Le Bon did offer a solution though. He recommended education reform by replacing “our odious text-books and our pitiable examinations by industrial instruction capable of inducing our young men to return to the fields, to the workshop, and to the colonial enterprise which they avoid to-day at all costs” (115). I’m sure Mike Rowe would have approved.

To draw some conclusions from Gasset and Le Bon, what they witnessed taking shape in Europe is now unfolding in the United States. Their societies lost a sense of purpose for their own existence with the demise of Christianity and continue to cycle through alternative revolutionary arrangements, even as their traditions gradually weaken under the pressures of mass migration and declining birthrates. Their utopian prophets have all been wrong, and paradise remains unrealized.

Communism has run its course in Russia, and it remains to be seen what alternative will emerge. Liberal democracies have miserably failed to govern effectively across Western Europe, and no religious body holds the power to challenge them—except perhaps Islam, if one waits long enough. Of the three quintessentially modern political approaches—communism, liberalism, and fascism—fascism is the most tempting to anyone in Europe who hopes to see their civilization restored.

We now seem to inhabit the world Gasset and Le Bon foresaw. It is not merely the resurgence of “The Political.” It is also the concurrent decline of standards and the absence of a grounded, trustworthy elite to fill the resulting void.

Rebuilding in Faith and Local Communities

My concern, however, is not Europe but the United States. I believe the nation’s strong religiosity delayed the outcomes that afflicted Europe decades earlier. We have maintained a purpose rooted in sustaining Christianity and its blessings. Now, that purpose has been perverted into spreading “democracy” or promoting “equality.” Christian concepts as simple as neighborly love and environmental stewardship have been secularized, and in this secularization we have lost our guardrails. Our professional standards, grounded in morality distilled through our unique traditions, are eroding.

In their place is a new class of leaders, wandering through the wilderness with a clear sense of what they, and their constituents, oppose, but with little capacity to rebuild what they inherited. It is to this rebuilding that we must devote ourselves in our local communities. We ought to reinforce the valuable standards we have inherited, rather than discarding them along with the institutions that failed to uphold them. We ought to prioritize the education of our children, so that they can think independently and resist the pull of mob mentality. We ought to support efforts to build institutions and platforms that prioritize accuracy, do not view retractions as weakness, and employ mechanisms of accountability. We must look to leaders with virtue even if they are not as popular. Above all, we must look to God.

The philosopher, focused on grand narratives, often examines past conditions as if they were inevitable given what came before. The historian, in contrast, is more likely to focus on the specific events and individuals who shaped the world they passed down. I would suggest using both approaches: observe where trends are leading, but also, as a person with responsibilities before God, see yourself within the grand tapestry as occupying an important role—securing a future for your children and bearing witness to the truth of Christ for your neighbors. The future is not written except in the mind of God, who will judge all in the life to come. This reality will never change, even as political currents shift.

The bottom line is this: the political Right is splitting for multiple reasons, but the abandonment of traditional standards rooted in a once-Christian civilization is one of them. This occurs even as the mantra “Christ is King” is sung, perhaps like Lakota Ghost Shirts, in the hope that what comes next can be prevented. The difference, of course, between the Wakan Tanka and Jesus is that the latter truly is King. A slogan alone will not save if it is empty. As Jesus said of those who honored Him with their lips while their hearts were far from Him (Matt 15:8), true devotion is more than words. But if the Spirit of God is at work, it will be evident, and it will restore more than just the American Right. It will restore the standards of our country as well.