At his peak, Peterson was a true force to be reckoned with: one of the first Anglosphere academics to stand up to the madness not only of gender ideology, but of the excesses of wokeness more generally. When nearly everyone else was too afraid to speak up, Peterson planted his flag against the crybullies. Following his resignation from the University of Toronto, and ejection into the wilds of self-employment, thousands of frustrated people began discovering Peterson’s psychology lectures on YouTube.

That space, far from the petty tyranny of campus HR officers and faculty subcommittees, is one many still believe offers the ultimate balance between freedom of thought and financial gain — especially when combined with social media fame. Peterson’s trajectory, alongside that of others in what came to be called the “intellectual dark web”, suggests otherwise. More than that, far from providing the space to explore new and challenging ideas, social media fame demands a brand of conformity every bit as anti-intellectual as its progressive mirror.

The intellectual dark web, as a phrase if not a movement, emerged from an unlikely source: The New York Times. The term was coined in 2018, by then-columnist Bari Weiss. The Free Press founder would, of course, go on to have a varied and dramatic career herself, but in those early days she looked to others for inspiration. That included Peterson, but also Bret Weinstein, Christina Hoff Summers, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt.

In her piece, Weiss praised Peterson and the rest’s willingness to “disagree ferociously, but talk civilly about nearly every meaningful subject”, as well as their readiness to be “purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought — and have found receptive audiences elsewhere.” Weiss wasn’t wrong there. But what she didn’t anticipate, a pattern reflected in her own trajectory too, is how those “receptive audiences” would ultimately constrain these same “heterodox” thinkers.

To understand Weiss’s enthusiasm you must first appreciate the political context of 2018. With Trump’s first term riven by liberal angst and pussy-hat protests, there was much talk of a new heterodox movement that could finally question the assumptions of the emerging woke orthodoxy. By its very nature, the concept of “heterodoxy” entails something almost Marxian in the sense of the theorist’s famous call for a “ruthless criticism of everything that exists.” And while that might seem odd coming from intellectuals on the Right, in those early days the idea of building new, fearless institutions, ones that encouraged a relentless criticism of all sides, seemed not only necessary but possible. That possibility has since evaporated.

In the same way it’s now clear that Trumpism amounts to little more than a corrupt, less competent version of Bush-era neoconservatism, it’s equally obvious that the heterodoxy once promised by Peterson, Weinstein, and Weiss amounts to little more than a reaction to the social excesses of Obama-era wokeness — echoing, in a thinner and much less serious form, the communitarian philosophical movement of the Eighties.

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Like today’s heterodox push, communitarianism’s campaign against the narcissism of the Sixties “me generation” was quickly co-opted by both the establishment Left and establishment Right. But while communitarianism never amounted to much policy-wise, it at least produced volumes of serious scholarship. Philip Selznick, for instance, warned that market logic was eroding the moral foundations necessary for democratic life, while Michael Sandel’s critiques of hyper-individualism challenged the notion that people could be understood merely as atomized consumers.

More recent heterodox enthusiasts simply lack these insights. Just look at Peterson. Over the last few years, he has devolved from an earnest Toronto professor to an archetypal over-tanned Arizona snowbird, one who claims that Marx was summoning the power of the Devil. Or else there’s Weiss, who first rose to prominence criticizing the feminist Left’s embrace of antisemites — but whose brand of “viewpoint diversity” now leaves little space for thoughtful critiques of Wall Street, tech monopolies or Israel.

It’s clear, at this point, that the intellectual “heterodoxy” movement died on the vine. ​​Whatever promise heterodoxy had is now long gone, with Peterson most recently becoming a podcast host on Ben Shapiro’s shamelessly partisan Daily Wire operation.

Peterson, then, is no Galileo — and that’s a pity. After all, he was an elegant example of Canada’s Tory tradition, a brand of conservatism largely absent from US politics since the Revolution. Unlike the American Right’s fixation on radical individualism and market absolutism, the Canadian Tory tradition emphasized social cohesion, moral order, and the idea that communities and institutions possess obligations that transcend pure economic efficiency. Its greatest modern theorist was the philosopher George Grant, whose 1965 classic Lament for a Nation warned that American-style capitalism was dissolving older forms of communal life.

Introducing Daily Wire fans to ideas of a Grantian hue — or even Burke or Oakeshott — would have been a genuinely heterodox accomplishment. How frustrating, then, that once the professor became an American media personality, he did little more than mimic the wealthy libertarian mentality that punk rock critics like Jello Biafra once dubbed “kill the poor”.

How to explain the heterodox crowd’s dreary lack of economic imagination? Part of the answer lies in the fact that most of its leading figures never truly departed from the assumptions of market liberalism. Peterson, for instance, has repeatedly argued that inequality is an unavoidable feature of “competence hierarchies”, while describing redistributive politics as driven mostly by “hatred of the rich”. Sam Harris, meanwhile, has often spoken about populist economics as though it were merely another form of irrational tribalism.

This is surely a marker of the IDW’s financial success. It’s easy to demean people reliant on government “entitlements” when you’re given multi-million-dollar contracts to host podcasts without any journalistic experience. If you just “clean your room,” “work hard” and “show up,” everything does indeed work out for you: assuming, that is, you’re considered a prodigy from a very young age.

Funding is important in other ways too. Much of the seed money for the Daily Wire’s initial startup came from the Texas billionaire brothers Farris and Dan Wilks, Christian nationalists in their social bent and Social Darwinists in their economics. These billionaire brothers also fund Ted Cruz, PragerU, and, of course, Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns. Little wonder almost none of the big-name heterodox critics, aside from outliers like Musa al-Gharbi, dare touch income inequality or issues of class — because even raising those questions remains professionally radioactive.

I speak here from direct experience. When I taught in one of the country’s first higher education civics departments at Arizona State University, there was plenty of talk both publicly and privately about “viewpoint diversity”. That even included welcoming “heterodoxy.” And so, for three years, I hosted a podcast for my department, one that said positive things about labor unions and which expressed skepticism that middle-class harmony could ever return without them. Then, all of a sudden, within weeks of publishing some work sympathetic to New Deal-style social safety nets, the director of the program informed me that my podcast would now have to be “supervised” by their marketing director.

This 28-year-old staffer now had to edit all my podcast interviews, without my ultimate approval, before they went live on the university’s public media platform. Otherwise, the project would be immediately stripped of all its funding. When I refused and reported the issue to the university’s faculty ombudsman, my department director refused to meet with him, then swiftly filed paperwork to cancel my teaching contract for the following year. (Yes, this type of thing is completely legal in red states).

Overnight, I went from being invited to events all across “heterodox” academia, receiving awards I hadn’t applied to, to being effectively blacklisted. I had touched American politics’ forbidden fruit — but isn’t that exactly what heterodox thinkers are supposed to do?

Apparently, intellectual heterodoxy and all its calls for “viewpoint diversity” do not include welcoming anything that challenges the economic fundamentals of our low-wage, low-benefits neoliberal order, an economic paradigm where nearly all productivity gains are funneled to the tech industry, real estate hoarders, and market speculators. All those injustices are just fine for the heterodox crowd, it seems, so long as we get rid of DEI schemes and gender pronouns in email bios. Economically speaking, it’s the same arrangement with different branding.

Wokeness has always been a convenient distraction from the fact that the middle-class equilibrium that once underwrote liberal democracy has vanished and shows no signs of returning. In its place we have credentialed serfdom, institutional capture, and a cultural caste system dressed up in platitudes about “equity” and “inclusion.”

Of course, we cannot talk enough about the damage done when higher education institutions across the English-speaking world abandoned the pursuit of truth in favor of fashionable concepts of “social justice”. Yet a broader development is that contrarian thinkers — no matter their political bent — have been forced out of the academy entirely. The right to put forth unpopular ideas, which tenure was meant to protect, is simply no longer possible inside higher education, while the disappointments of the “heterodox” gang prove that social media stardom provides no sanctuary either. If anything, it just imposes a different kind of conformist pressure.

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As Andrew Keen presciently argued a decade ago, social media not only produces but practically demands what he called the “culture of the amateur”. After being cast out of their academic positions, Peterson — as well as Weinstein, who left a job at Evergreen State College under similar circumstances — had almost no choice but to lean into their fame among the online Right and make the best of it. Whether by hook or by crook, they both ended up becoming little better than any other podcast talking head riffing on contemporary political topics and international affairs, subjects neither man studied nor worked in professionally. The result? Embarrassing displays like Weinstein’s cringe-worthy 2020 proposal for a “unity” presidential ticket: pairing a center-left and center-right candidate selected through online polling to run jointly for the presidency. The problems with such an idea are too obvious to dwell on. But that’s just the culture of the amateur running its course.

For scholars to pursue knowledge without the audience pressure that comes from journalism and modern mass media, they ultimately need three things. First, the space and time to pursue their studies. Second, a community of knowledgeable and earnest interlocutors who can sharpen their ideas and push back on pitfalls. Third, a stable income independent of random funders with political axes to grind.

Academic peer review was designed for just this purpose, but it long ago broke down. It’s simply far too easy for journal editors to “desk reject” ideas they don’t like, flatly refusing to send work out for review — or else purposefully sending undesirable research to reviewers who’ll reject it — based on cherished orthodoxies or to protect the reputation of favored colleagues.

This doesn’t mean peer review is unnecessary, nor that a genuine heterodox movement couldn’t prosper. It just means that, as with so much else in contemporary politics, we were promised one thing and delivered another. The communitarians, for their part, benefited from doing their best work at a time when peer review and academic hiring were still mostly non-ideological. Their heterodox successors, of course, enjoyed no such luck. And if that led to an intellectual collapse, I’d also argue that the unhealthy incentives foisted on the IDW have led to a striking degree of personal suffering.

Whatever demons Selznick or Sandel may have faced, their far gentler milieu meant they could easily slip back into obscurity. Unfortunately for Peterson, his health struggles have become a punchline on both the online Right and Left. But this bipartisan fixation on the oddity of his condition — armchair diagnosing it, mocking it, politicizing it — obscures what Peterson’s sad trajectory actually reveals. The Canadian’s fall from grace is not just a personal failing, nor merely a story of fame gone wrong. It reflects, rather, how the absence of any stable, supportive intellectual home reduces heterodox thinkers to circus acts, dancing for the nickels of the donor class and moronic reply guys.

Inside academia, heterodox work is still very much constrained, if not actively punished. Outside it, the incentives of audience capture, donor pressure, and constant performance distort it to the point that those attempting to sustain heterodox thought become caricatures of themselves — unstable, unreliable, and easily dismissed by the institutions they once challenged. And no wonder. Wokeness was never a glitch in the neoliberal order, instead reflecting, as the communitarians understood, the natural outgrowth of instrumentalist reasoning and deepening inequality. Both are part and parcel of liberal capitalism pushed to its functional limits. What a shame that heterodoxy as currently constituted leaves all of this untouched.

Anna’s cancellation story does not stop there. Her new outsider status gains her an invitation to a fashionable “dissident soiree,” at which canceled scenesters and edgy podcasters privately sympathize with her plight. She is courted by a publicist who wagers that “cancellation was about to become cool.” Above all, she becomes comically obsessed with the writings of Ayn Rand, raving about the ultra-libertarian author’s crap prose and ghoulish ideas with all the intensity of an extroverted teenager who has just found God. If Anna had previously been an orthodox member of the literary mainstream, her subsequent revolt against orthodoxy ends up being no less conformist. 

Academia, too, has lately witnessed a similarly conformist revolt against conformity. Over the last decade, a new and vigorous “heterodox” movement has emerged, with its own scathing diagnosis of the failures of mainstream academe. Beyond advocating greater viewpoint diversity within existing institutions, heterodox figures have established new institutions that aim to compete with the traditional university system, and launched new fields that attempt to challenge progressive ideologies. These efforts are now a few years old, and assessment of their record is timely. 

As to their success, there are reasons to be doubtful.  

The heterodox critique points at an undeniably real set of problems. In the current ideological climate on campus, scholars can feel pressure to distance themselves from texts, authors, and arguments that could be seen as “problematic.” Ideas once confined to the activist fringes of the social sciences have spread to the humanities and hard sciences writ large. And as the ideological climate on campuses tilts ever more progressive, so, too, has the makeup of the people who teach there. Conservative scholars now make up an ever-tinier share of the academic teaching workforce, vastly outnumbered by those with liberal, progressive, and Left-wing views. Public confidence in the value of universities is declining sharply, in part reflecting the sense that academia refuses to even consider the opinions of half or more of the electorate. 

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Of course, there are many ways to be heterodox. On an administrative level, one may advocate for greater pluralism within existing academia. Parallel to established academic structures, organizations like the Heterodox Academy work towards this goal. On a scholarly level, one may produce work that investigates developments in progressive ideologies through the lens of established disciplines and fields. In recent years, several excellent books have taken such an approach, including the groundbreaking work of Jonathan Haidt, Yascha Mounk’s 2023 book, The Identity Trap, and Musa Al-Gharbi’s thought-provoking 2024 book, We Have Never Been Woke. At its best, work like this can demystify developments inside academia, both for those on the outside and also for those within, who have been quietly searching for explanations for the rapid ideological changes of the past 10 years. 

But the heterodox movement hasn’t focused simply on fixing what is broken. At its most ambitious, it has aimed to put academia back on track by creating whole new institutions. The most prominent example is the University of Austin, or UATX, conceived by the hawkish journalist Bari Weiss and the tech billionaire Joe Lonsdale, among others. Announcing the new school in 2021, its founding president, Pano Kanelos, observed that “many universities no longer have an incentive to create an environment where intellectual dissent is protected and fashionable opinions are scrutinized.” (Kanelos has since departed the institution, as have a number of faculty and advisers.)

If other universities were no longer in the business of seeking the truth or promoting a diversity of ideas on campus, then UATX would do this. Newly founded scholarly outlets like the Journal of Controversial Ideas work in parallel to the new institutions, playing host to key debates within the community. There have lately been attempts to establish new academic fields to hold mainstream scholarship to account. The University of Buckingham’s Centre of Heterodox Social Science, for instance, aims to incubate what it terms “critical wokeness studies.” 

These new developments pose an existential question: if mainstream academia has been “captured,” does the future of real scholarship lie beyond the established institutions? But actually creating these new institutions — rather than merely sloganeering about the dire need for them — is proving more difficult.

The first obvious challenge is that of scale, resourcing, and critical mass. Compared to established brick-and-mortar universities, “heterodox” startups like UATX and the Jordan Peterson Academy are tiny. They can’t offer anything approaching the range of courses or the in-person research facilities of a traditional university, nor indeed can they provide secure employment for academics. Even when the seriously rich invest in heterodox institutions, as in the case of UATX, these kinds of disparities persist.  

The diffuse focus of the heterodox community compounds these challenges. The Journal of Controversial Ideas has a much wider subject remit than traditional academic journals — after all, there are controversial ideas in every discipline. But this diluted focus makes quality assurance difficult to achieve. If one has a controversial idea about (say) geriatric psychiatry, one needs to engage with other experts in the field to assess its validity. Heterodox scholars in other fields simply don’t have the knowledge to comment fruitfully on such an idea. One can be “heterodox” in relation to other scholars in one’s field. That “heterodoxy,” though, has no automatic relevance to heterodox work being done in another field. “Heterodox studies,” in other words, isn’t a coherent concept. 

To succeed, modern academic fields need to have a critical mass of scholars working in specific areas. Without this, expertise is too thinly spread. Even in areas in which heterodox expertise is more concentrated — for example, the study of Left-wing authoritarianism or the new “critical wokeness studies” — this problem still rears its head. What if expert reviewers can’t be found? What if the field lacks researchers who are expert in specialist research methods? All new fields face challenges, but they are easier to navigate within established institutions with adjacent expertise and generous funding. Potentially, heterodox startups might work with existing academia to develop capacity, but burned bridges and skepticism about the worth and relevance of traditional academic networks can make this more difficult.  

To be fair to those in the heterodox movement, one might regard the issues of scale and resourcing as inevitable growing pains along the path to maturity. Traditional academia, after all, is centuries old, and the task of building alternative institutions will take more than a day. While it is true that the heterodox movement’s resource base may well expand in the future, deeper questions remain about its foundations and likely trajectories. 

In the best academic fields, incentive structures promote careful and rigorous scholarship. To achieve standing, one must convince expert peers of the value of one’s work. What about the scholarly foundations of the heterodox movement? Owing to its weakly institutionalized profile and the popularity of anti-woke writing on platforms such as Substack and X (formerly Twitter), the field can end up being dominated by the attention-economy logic of those platforms. Often, thinkers pioneer new ideas on Substack (rather than academic journals) and publish heterodox or “anti-woke” books with popular rather than academic presses. This is consistent with the movement’s zeitgeist. After all, they say, traditional academia is broken. 

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But what about these new platforms? Audiences on Substack and X aren’t experts; they yearn for anti-woke red meat. In the heterodox community, the surest way to advance is to provide this (and to do so often). In turn, this skews incentives within such networks and gives excessive influence to “anti-woke” celebrities with slim academic credentials but undeniable skills in self-promotion and churning out repetitive content. 

In the heterodox space, Gad Saad, with his 1.2 million X followers and more than 360,000 YouTube subscribers, is hard to miss. Saad is a genuine academic, a marketing professor at Canada’s Concordia University. However, the kind of work for which he is best known, such as 2020’s The Parasitic Mind, simply doesn’t meet the same standards of evidence that would be demanded of him in academia. The Parasitic Mind claims that “an epidemic of idea pathogens are spreading like a virus and killing common sense in the West.” It is hard to know where to start with such a claim. What is an “idea pathogen”? Is it a virus or just “like” a virus? Is this not all just a simile or an analogy masquerading as a scientific concept?  

A reluctance to gatekeep and a desire to maintain a “broad church” mean that heterodox conferences and festivals can end up being dominated by these sorts of figures. This, in turn, can have a detrimental effect on the reputation of heterodox scholarship within mainstream academe. Any movement that can’t find a way of excluding figures who produce consistently low-quality work — no matter how popular they might be on social media — is going to face uncomfortable questions. Historians of science use the term “rogue scholars” to refer to academics who attempt to port their credentials from their actual areas of expertise to fields in which they are decidedly not experts. Without proper standards, the problems of rogue scholarship can proliferate, undermining scholarly credibility.

Funders can present similar problems. Whatever the issues with publicly funded research, such a model guarantees neutrality (at least, in theory). When funders are rich individuals or conservative political foundations, however, this breaks down. What if heterodox scholars take positions contrary to those of funders? There may be formal guarantees of independence, but these can disintegrate in the heat of the culture war. 

Recent developments at UATX are instructive. Following President Trump’s return to power in 2024, management has made extremely aggressive attempts to position the university on the Right — including enforcing compulsory oaths in anti-communism, anti-Islamism, and anti-identity politics; and dissenters have been pushed out or left of their own accord. 

These developments gesture to wider problems of coherence. Who is in, and who is out? Does heterodoxy actually represent an independent political position, or is it implicitly an anti-progressive (and thus, for all intents and purposes, conservative) force? Trump’s proposed new “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which would effectively compel universities that receive federal funding to comply with his administration’s policies, illustrates the dilemma. The compact draws on some of the language used by the heterodox movement in directing both universities and their employees to adopt a strict position of viewpoint neutrality in relation to “societal and political events.” 

Superficially, recognition at this level looks like victory of sorts for the heterodox movement. However, such a strict and all-encompassing definition of neutrality would obviously impede the academic freedom of those who want to speak out on these issues. This is a problem compounded by the controversial actions currently being taken by the Trump administration. Some of these actions — such as ICE detentions of international students pursuing graduate degrees in the United States — are highly relevant to contemporary academia. These are surely issues that it is appropriate for universities and their staff to take a public position on. Academic freedom, in other words, cuts across party political lines. Enforced viewpoint neutrality can look very much like an attempt to preemptively muzzle critics. 

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In the late 2010s and early 2020s, there was much talk about an “ideological realignment” as figures from the Left and Right came together in common cause against perceived illiberalism in progressive-dominated institutions. However, as the case of UATX shows, these coalitions have proved hard to sustain. Temporary Left-Right alliances tend to be unstable. Some associated with the heterodox movement have been unable to withstand the various pressures and incentives at play and have ultimately aligned themselves with the wider establishment Right, rather than maintaining their own independence. Others have taken their contrarianism in extreme and conspiratorial directions. Many scholars who entered heterodox circles in the late 2010s did so in protest against what they saw as the politicization of their fields by the progressive Left. Now, they face a heterodox movement that increasingly seems to have trouble distancing itself from a different brand of politics.

Ironically, the heterodox movement is now characterized by some of the same problems it once took issue with in activist and mainstream academia. In heterodox circles, cancellation has become its own form of “lived experience,” and researchers make regular appeal to their own experiences of it, with these accounts having their own wounded and subjective character. 

Naturally, scholars will have private views on politics, but the airing of these subjective traumas merely brings us back to the heterodox movement’s own objections to “grievance-studies” disciplines and subjectivity-centering concepts like standpoint epistemology. When such complaints begin to dominate the literature and overshadow analytic and empirical motivations, one has simply adopted a new flavor of the subjective and politicized “woke” academia one claims to be rejecting. 

In both Britain and the United States, the recent political success of Right-wing populist parties hostile to universities poses its own challenge to the heterodox movement. When it emerged in the mid-2010s, the movement was able to raise a credible challenge to what appeared at the time to be a progressive stranglehold on the institutions. But time has moved on and progressives are no longer in the ascendancy. As we have seen, the second Trump administration has targeted American universities on unabashedly ideological lines. In Britain, Reform UK promises to reduce undergraduate places in British universities and, mirroring Trumpian policy in America, proposes to cut funding to universities that undermine free speech. The heterodox movement needs to ask itself whether it is prepared to offer critiques of these sorts of policies. Has the movement been offering a sincere and constructive internal critique of academia, or has it simply served to provide a set of talking points that could ultimately justify Right-wing cuts to university funding and attacks on academic independence? 

Lexi Freiman’s Anna rejects woke orthodoxy only to fall victim to the new moral certainties she finds in Ayn Rand. Contrarianism, in other words, can become its own kind of straitjacket. Similarly, the heterodox movement risks losing sight of its early principled stance against the politicization of academia. This is a shame. Certainly, there is great potential for heterodoxy within existing academia. As heterodox critics have demonstrated, established academia certainly does have major problems with conformity and groupthink. At its best, the movement has worked as an internal check against these tendencies. Scholars associated with heterodoxy have produced genuinely insightful work examining some of the most pressing issues in contemporary academia. A new AI-powered discussion tool, for example, Simon Cullen’s “Sway,” aims “to foster rigorous, evidence-based dialogue among students on controversial topics” and model the kind of free exchanges we all want to see taking place in class. 

However, there is reason to doubt that any of this provides a basis for a genuine alternative to academia. Without more, the heterodox movement risks becoming a parody of the academy it decries. 

To put this in stark terms: somehow Vice President JD Vance, a fierce Trumpian critic of the neoconservatives, ended up in government at the highest levels, only to help implement the foreign-policy preferences of, say, John Bolton or Elliott Abrams. The Vance who once sharply critiqued a foreign policy of “moralizing” is overseeing strikes explicitly aimed at freeing the people of Iran.

In 2016, as it became clear that Donald Trump represented the future of the GOP, three paths presented themselves to respectable conservative intellectuals, such as those at the Wall Street Journal’s comment pages, where I was working at the time. The first was the path of slow, cynical accommodation: having opposed Trump to the last, as a heretic from foreign-policy hawkism and free trade, the accommodators slowly began to wonder: well, what can we get out of this guy?

Then there was the path of unbending Never Trump defiance. A subset of conservatives, especially those of a hawkish bent on foreign policy, resolved that they would sooner become politically homeless and embrace liberal media organs than bow to the vulgarian from Queens, who railed against “globalism”, called the Iraq War a “disaster”, and dunked on George W. Bush-era neoconservatives.

Among those at the Journal who took this approach was an energetic op-ed editor, Bari Weiss, and her mentor, the columnist Bret Stephens, both of whom decamped for the Left-of-center opinion pages of The New York Times soon after Trump’s first ballot-box triumph. I, too, belonged to this group initially. I endorsed Hillary Clinton in the paper and traded many an email with Bari and Bret venting our disgust at the institution’s leaders for choosing what we saw as accommodation.

But not all of the hard-line Never Trumpers would stay that way forever. There was also, finally, the path of the converts. These were right-wing intellectuals who, overcoming their disgust at Trump’s antics, tried to understand why the Republican base had elevated a populist former reality-TV star who challenged our conventions and orthodoxies. What had free trade and decades of a hyperactive foreign policy wrought for “flyover country”?

I was one of the Trumpian converts. Having endorsed and voted for Hillary Clinton, I would go on to conclude that the old, pre-Trump consensus had been a disaster. It had left American power overstretched abroad and hollowed out its domestic foundations: visible in the abandoned factories of the heartland, its streets now littered with the needle-mark-strewn, opioid-addicted bodies of the sons and daughters of once-proud manufacturing workers.

I spent much of the first Trump administration as the op-ed editor of the New York Post, a more populist tabloid and a favorite of the President, who would often clip columns I’d commissioned and mail them to their respective authors, signing them with a thick Sharpie pen and adding words of encouragement: “Attaboy!”

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In my extracurricular hours, I served as the principal drafter and organizer of “Against the Dead Consensus,” a 2019 manifesto for the so-called New Right that blamed the Old Right — my comrades of just a few years earlier, figures like Bret and Bari — for failing to “retard, much less reverse, the eclipse of permanent truths, family stability, communal solidarity, and much else”. Conventional conservatism, my cosignatories and I charged, had “surrendered to the pornographization of daily life, to the culture of death, to the cult of competitiveness. It too often bowed to a poisonous and censorious multiculturalism.”

Conventional conservatism was scarcely different from liberalism. And it had allowed “an ideological liberalism seeks to dictate our foreign policy” — meaning we’d too often gone abroad seeking autocratic monsters to slay and freedom-seeking peoples to emancipate. Many of the signatories were converts: to the Catholic faith, but also the Trumpian one. Another convert who might as well have signed but didn’t (because we didn’t think to ask him) was JD Vance.

A Yale Law-educated venture capitalist, Vance was also the author of a best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which soon became a go-to guide for coastal journalists figuring out what made Trumpian America tick. Although he poignantly described the miseries of Trumpian America, Vance was by no means prepared to throw in his lot with Trump in those years. On the contrary, his book’s diagnosis of what had gone wrong with his Appalachian kinfolk was very much aligned with that of the respectable conservatives: what ailed his people, Vance concluded, was a failure of bootstrapping self-help — not the GOP’s neoliberal trade policies and neoconservative defense policies. Trump himself, meanwhile, was a latter-day “Hitler,” as Vance told a friend in an infamous leaked text message.

Yet a few years later, just as I would strive to lend intellectual coherence to the Trumpian project (don’t laugh), Vance would emerge as a democratic tribune of Trumpian America. Eventually, he’d be elected a US senator from his home state of Ohio after a campaign that saw him crank up the Trumpian rhetorical quotient to 11.

Once in office, Vance sought to govern as a thoughtful populist, launching major legislative initiatives in collaboration with the economic progressives: a railroad-reform bill, an attempt at breaking the credit-card duopoly, a bid to lower insulin prices, and the like. While most of these initiatives would fail — falling victim to opposition not from the Democratic Party, but the Senate GOP’s free-market old guard — Vance would be tapped as Trump’s 2024 running mate. All along, he continued to sound anti-interventionist notes, not least on Iran. In 2024, for example, he declared: “Our interest, I think, very much is in not going to war with Iran. It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.”

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But here we are. Trump has now launched an all-out, and deeply unpopular, war against the Islamic Republic, with Iranian “freedom” as its primary objective. Vance, though not exactly leading the charge on messaging, has been photographed running a sort of Team B situation room in Washington (the President’s own situation room is in Mar-a-Lago). Again, for those of us who have been inside these circles and debates, the ironies are mind-boggling.

How to explain them? I’d venture four reasons.

First, there are the structural realities of the GOP. Despite the realignment of the two parties — working- and lower-middle-class voters’ shift from Left to Right beginning in 2016 — the institutional party remains dominated by the old-line foreign policy: the think tanks, the senior staffers, the octogenarian senators for whom it’s always 1983.

Yes, the party has its “restrainers” — those who favor a less expansive foreign policy — and the “prioritizers” — those who want to pivot from Europe and the Middle East to confront China — including many in the Pentagon and the intelligence apparatus. But these are typically younger, and their influence in the Trump administration is dwarfed by that of the traditional hawks in the President’s orbit. People such as the acting national-security adviser and secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles.

Second, there’s the role of anti-woke-ism as new skin for old wine. The hawks — not least Weiss, through her outlet The Free Press — championed popular grievances with the inanities of the “peak-woke” moment and successfully married this to the same old agenda. Many of the would-be populists were all too happy to go along, hailing a once-more culturally muscular and unembarrassed America as it pursued the very policies that they’d deplored just a few years earlier. As one online wit remarked somewhere: “Good thing [Secretary of War] Pete [Hegseth] purged the trannies from the military so beefy white guys can do a regime change in Iran.” Based and red-pilled!

Third, there was the reframing of regime-change wars to mean only operations that put boots on the ground. In this telling, the true hallmark of the old failed neoconservatism was not its globe-spanning scope or its shoot-first-ask-question-later reflexes, but its idealism: its naïve faith in helping oppressed peoples and the deployment of troops for nation-building. Under the new dispensation, America would simply break things and leave it to others to pick up the pieces.

As Vance told me in a 2024 interview, the new Trumpian foreign policy would be “a mixture of extreme skepticism towards intervention overseas, combined with an extremely aggressive posture when you do intervene overseas…. Don’t punch often, but when you punch, punch really goddamn hard.” But this logic — that you aren’t a neocon as long as you don’t actually dispatch ground troops — soon became a beguiling invitation to punch quite often indeed. The “extreme skepticism” soon melted away; the second Trump administration has now launched interventions in no fewer than seven countries.

Finally, and most simply, there’s Trump himself: a product of a generation of Americans for whom the Iranian regime is — not unjustly — remembered for the 1979 hostage crisis and the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing. The Islamic Republic has historical agency, after all, which it used for nearly five decades to prosecute a strategically foolish ideological war against Israel and the West. And while Tehran doesn’t loom as a menace (or bogeyman) for younger Americans to nearly the same degree (or at all), that’s neither here nor there. Trump is the commander-in-chief, and he perhaps sees himself as the avenger of those older Iranian sins.

It remains to be seen whether voters in 2026 — and, more important for Vance, 2028 — will conclude that revenge was worth the candle.