In the days preceding and following the president’s decision in June to strike Iranian nuclear facilities, the ensuing discourse within right-wing circles splintered with startling predictability. The usual chorus assembled itself into two camps: On one side stood the aging Cold War generation, whose instincts remain tethered to a Reaganite foreign policy; on the other, the ascendant national conservatives, eager to present a posture of studied restraint, declared their opposition to the strike in tones no less derivative and stylized. Naturally, the rhetoric of “non-intervention” and posts about the folly of “endless wars” materialized.

Thus, we had another episode of Republican infighting and the reflexive execution of familiar scripts, likely rehearsed long before the first strike was authorized.

The conservative movement today is hopelessly divided into manifold factions. These divisions are deepened by the algorithmic clashes on social media, where digital provocateurs perform their ideological pantomimes in memetic displays of sophistic vacuity. If the right is to defeat the left—and winning this battle is what matters—it must scorn the performative white noise and hollow sloganeering of online discourse. It must abandon the habitual reflexes of ideology that divide it from within.

Ever since President Trump assumed office, every contentious decision—be it a targeted strike in the Middle East, the extension of legal status to select migrant workers, or the imposition of aggressive tariff schedules—has excited a great many passions across the right. Taking these episodes together, one is left with the impression that these diverging schools of thought, though principally distinct, are equally imprisoned in a kind of repertory theater.

To get a sense of the deep divisions within the right, one need only recall Mark Levin’s thundering against “Western European Marxists” and “Islamist death-cults,” in a monologue that could have been broadcast in 1983 without alteration, and then to contrast it with Tucker Carlson’s rebuke of Levin’s hawkish stance, branding him and his cohort as “warmongers” eager for unnecessary conflict. Naturally, Levin met this accusation with swift indignation, labeling Carlson an “anti-Semite.” It is a dispiriting spectacle in which the substance of the argument becomes almost irrelevant.

In more ordinary company, the same mechanized reflexes of cognition manifest themselves with equal vigor. Even among younger people on the right who are inclined to scroll through X for the information neglected by Fox News, one finds they lapse into conspiratorial refrain, lamenting the president’s supposed collaboration with the deep state in relation to the Epstein affair. To the neutral observer, each faction appears as a mirror of the other, reflecting the same distortions from slightly different angles. The substance of their chatter may shift with each occasion, but the form is ever-constant. Each performs the same tragicomedy to an ever-dwindling audience, perpetuating the very rhetorical pantomime they would decry when exhibited by the left. In so doing, these ideologues undermine the very movement they claim to defend.

With every cycle of outrage, this strange automation of speech becomes more pronounced. In attempting to assert one’s distinctiveness, language is deployed less as an instrument of reasoning than as a semaphore of tribal loyalty; premises remain unexamined, alignments are carefully maintained, and the same reflexes fire on cue. The result is an impoverished discourse in which both factions retain an appetite for shock and awe but very little for restraint, calibration, or discovery.

The result is a kind of political theater of panic—feeding a group the president once called “panicans”—something felt more acutely among the generations raised on the internet. Many confuse that agitated state for reality itself, as if being anxious and inflamed were proof of being politically serious. It would be easy to frame this as merely a generational critique, but the problem runs deeper.

Thinking is painful. For many, cognition rarely amounts to more than the recitation of prefabricated views. It is far easier to surrender to the brain’s lazy manufacture of semi-lucid, inchoate notions—an internal playlist of borrowed opinions shuffled at whim—than to strain oneself in conducting a proper internal monologue, rousing order from the capricious, mechanical, and tumultuous torrent of fugitive ideas. And most media serve chiefly as accelerants for the diffusion of thought-terminating clichés. Regardless of whether they peddle a left- or right-wing line, they exist as a force multiplier for those compact automatisms of thought, which substitute moral posture for prudential judgment.

While the left-wing media has long performed its predictable function—amplifying its friends and caricaturing its foes—the right has contrived to disable itself through its own media organs. Precisely at the hour when prudence demands depth, patience, and scale of reference, the garden of the conservative imagination is trampled flat.

The result is a discourse at once dry, predictable, and strangely pre-chewed. One of the right’s enduring flaws is that many of its supposed “core beliefs” are little more than slogans, optimized for bookings, retweets, and clipped soundbites to be emailed to donors. The spectacle has antecedents. One is reminded of the Jacobins and Girondins locked in a grim pantomime, each mirroring the other’s excesses; the same ventriloquism Dostoevsky mercilessly lampoons in Demons, where characters like Pyotr Verkhovensky speak in a ceaseless litany of prefabricated aphorisms, their mouths producing noises yet constantly saying nothing. Herein lies the curse of the intellectual so consumed by sophistry that he loses the ability to discern when he is lying to himself.

Tocqueville foresaw how the tyranny of fashion in ideas can masquerade as consensus; Burke pleaded for a “moral imagination” capable of judging things in proportion to reality; Aristotle dignified this proportion as phronesis, practical wisdom. Against such venerable standards, the internet has not so much introduced a novel peril as it has perfected the defects of its predecessors at something approaching hyper-speed.
Every successive technological shock has stirred its own unique set of anxieties. Each innovation has carried this double edge, just like every communicative medium—the telegraph, the radio, the television—inspired its own prophets of doom. The internet, merely the latest accelerant of this phenomenon, chokes citizens on a glut of information while starving them of all wisdom. With its unimaginable speed and scale, it flatters our vanity in granting the illusion of omniscience at a keystroke while robbing us of the humility that true wisdom requires.

Discernment is drowned in an endless tide of words and symbols divorced from their substance. Habituating itself to these digital and rhetorical patterns as they circulate in a closed loop, human cognition, startlingly, begins to resemble the very machinery with which it engages. The mind, processing stimuli as a sequence of discrete signals and programmed responses, rather than as objects of sustained reflection and judgment, loses both subtlety and courage.

Under such conditions, individuals instinctively optimize their speech for social advantage. This, of course, is not inherently bad. The primary function of The New York Times, for example, is not the transmission of information but the definition of elite consensus, as decided by the literati, the policymaking class, and cultural tastemakers: it signals when well-established realities may be acknowledged publicly. The Times, for all its storied reputation, is read less for the precise details of its reporting than for what it communicates about membership in a particular cultural and intellectual milieu. There is no virtue in expending effort to rebut the idiocies of the Times’ writers; the words themselves matter less than the signals they emit.

Conservative media outlets have begun to replicate this performative function: a host’s exclamation, a guest’s quip, a provocative headline—these are calibrated to mark alignment with a defined community, reassuring viewers that they occupy the “correct” side of prevailing norms. The audience, in turn, internalizes these cues, regurgitating them less as considered judgments than as signals of loyalty.

These reflexes, functionally indistinct from the operational logic of a networked black box, may possess a certain social utility, yet they are fatal to the capacity for surprise, for the diffusion of knowledge, and blinding to the subtleties that render the world far more complex than our ideological frames allow.

In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates recounts the Egyptian myth according to which the god Thoth presents to King Thamus his invention of writing, boasting that it is an “elixir of memory and wisdom.” Thamus, unimpressed, rebukes the god: the device, he insists, will have precisely the opposite effect, “for this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn it, because they will not practice their memory.” Writing, he warned, would furnish only the outward show of knowledge, while eroding the inward discipline of the mind. Thus, from its very inception, the written word carried with it the suspicion of being less a liberator than a crutch.

The lesson is perennial: abundant words do not yield abundant wisdom. For most of human history, after all, literacy belonged to only a narrow clerisy. Artificial intelligence, for all the fear it invokes, may only be returning us to that default condition. If so, it is not democracy that will be overthrown by the machine, but only the faulty premise of universal knowledge upon which its legitimacy has long depended. Were democracy ever to falter, it would do so not because of this novelty, but because our liberal institutions were teetering well before the algorithm delivered its final shove.

The real revelation then is not technological but anthropological. Anxiety about technology is always misplaced anxiety about human nature.

Men are inherently social and conformist; our cognition is calibrated to the expectations of the collective, and we are prone to defer to consensus. Massification—whether of print, speech, or digital content—inevitably transforms instruments of communication into engines of conformity. And mass culture, for all its power to shape perception and behavior, cannot sustain a person, a community, or a movement. Just as the democratization of politics ensures its debasement into spectacle, the democratization of discourse guarantees its vulgarization.

This lament is hardly new. Mass literacy was once hailed as emancipatory, yet in practice it has proven a cruel joke, giving rise to a deluge of ideologues guzzling content with the haste of a tavern drunkard. The discipline of cultivated judgment—always the privilege of a select few—becomes a casualty whenever letters are loosed upon the masses. Yet the experience of reading and learning properly, much like sipping a rare French vintage, is not designed to be downed in one gulp. It requires a soundness of mind and a patience that is sharply at odds with the cognitive shortcuts the mind imposes when overwhelmed by a deluge of signals.

Ideology may furnish a set of ready-made heuristics, off-the-shelf explanations, and reflexive responses to complex questions; and yet, every ideological frame has an edge where reality frays it. Our present model of discourse resembles the intellectual equivalent of fast food: efficient, standardized, and emotionally gratifying in the moment, but ultimately incapable of sustaining the mind that feeds on it. The media misinforms and frames relentlessly, but until the right can cultivate habits of judgment that resist the pace of the dopamine cycle, we will continue to imperil ourselves. Those who are patient, attentive, and willing to wrestle with complexity are the rare few capable of elevating discourse beyond the mere exchange of the reheated slogans of the late Cold War.

For better or worse, this is the world we inherit. No Promethean gift can be returned; once fire is stolen, it cannot be extinguished. Fantasies of retreat belong to romantics and nostalgists. Just as the painters of the Renaissance learned to transmute the technical contrivances of linear perspective into instruments of beauty, so must we summon the proper nerve and discipline to insist that these new tools be made to serve old standards of judgment.

Within the right, a small circle of lettered men may sit round in deliberation of Pareto’s circulation of elites, an impressive assemblage of superior minds swathed in cigar smoke. Beyond that intellectual elite, however, sprawls the digital agora that operates according to the imperatives of viral content. Most of social media’s participants do not seek subtlety; few can read past a rudimentary level, and still fewer care to think for themselves. Here lies the great irony of the Enlightenment.

Confident in our democratic pretensions, we presume our neighbors to be as reasoned and self-directed as we fancy ourselves. Yet the vast majority will accept what they are told without question, content to be guided by external forces, partly because they lack the cognitive infrastructure to do anything else, and partly because they simply prefer not to exert the effort. Even as they admit that most men lack intelligence—or at least lack it in relation to themselves—they still place their faith in the masses to perform the correct calculations necessary for a functioning liberal polity. To lament this as a corruption of reason is to mistake human nature for an ideal; it is precisely because we are not all rational actors that the game proceeds as it does. Democracy has always depended on a slave class in one form or another. To ignore that reality, however indelicate its expression, is to cede agency to our adversaries. To master it is to participate in the game on terms of our choosing.

Upon realizing this fact, the only appropriate response is to win.

Practical adaptation to changing circumstances need not mean the abandonment of principle. If the right is to free itself from the habitual reflexes of ideology—those oft-repeated Boomer-era clichés about universal progress, abstract rationalism, and moral certainties—it must ground itself in a set of distilled observations that consciously reject Enlightenment dogmas. We might begin with the recognition that life is oriented toward transcendent meaning, that virtue demands cultivation beyond the mere exercise of free will, and that human collectives are always shaped and restrained by moral frameworks that bind generations.

We should temper our faith in scientific or technological advancement with a sober understanding of costs and benefits. We must acknowledge that human behavior and societal forms are never uniform but always particular, patterned, and hierarchical. Political governance, likewise, must be attentive to the character of those it rules and the particularities of place, aligning the interests of ruler and ruled, and preferring long-term development of the mind and spirit over ephemeral satisfactions. These are not abstract prescriptions, but a disciplined framework for transcending the habitual shortcuts of ideological reflex, a method of cultivating measured judgment within the very habits through which we apprehend the world.

While such prescriptions may not generate clicks or sell books, they are the simplest means of restoring rigor, depth, and sober thought to the conservative mind.