The “long march through the institutions” embarked upon by mid-20th-century leftist activists is almost fully accomplished here in the United States of America. The commanding heights are all occupied: schools and colleges, the media, federal and state agencies, the judiciary, corporations, the big old mainstream churches, even law enforcement and the military. 

Ideological orthodoxy is ever more rigidly enforced. Dissenters are deprived of professional and commercial services by the kind of “social credit” ratings pioneered by the Chinese Communist Party, which are all too easily implemented in the age of Big Data. I myself, a mild-mannered and very minor dissident, was recently deprived of service by a nationwide firm of investment advisors, likely because of the expression of my political views at VDARE and other places.

Whether through open lawfare waged against Donald Trump, the National Rifle Association, and VDARE, or by quiet pressure from federal regulators against banks, credit card companies, payment processors, and commercial vendors, organized opposition to the activist left is under ruthless and determined assault.  

Any person or organization publicly affirming the rights granted by our Constitution—most especially those spelled out in the First and Second Amendments—will be excluded from polite American society. No, it’s not slave-labor camps in the remote Arctic; there is no need in the Information Age for the brutish measures the Soviets employed. If you cannot write a check, own a credit card, publish your thoughts, or buy a gun, you are sufficiently isolated.

That is the dismal state of things wherein a bizarre, reality-defying ideology is imposed with coercive power. No such thing as race! No such thing as sex! Climate change is an existential threat! All enforced by a busy managerial elite of what H. L. Mencken called “World Savers.” Humanities departments in prestigious universities contain only single-digit percentages of self-identifying conservatives; the voices of leftist activists dominate mainstream media commentary; federal and state regulators are vigilant for signs of heterodoxy and mighty in suppressing it.

The gentry conservatism of the late 20th century offered little resistance to the Long Marchers. Eager to distance themselves from low-class attitudes on race and sex that every establishment outlet told them were rampant among pre-Boomer conservatives, they set their faces firmly against populist nationalism. Working among gentry conservatives around the turn of the century, I was surprised to hear the scorn and distaste with which they spoke about, for example, Pat Buchanan and the current editor of this magazine.

However, while today’s Uniparty was thus taking shape, new generations were coming to maturity. They grew up watching neoliberals and gentry conservatives squander their Cold War victory in futile missionary mini-wars and economy-sapping globalism: young warriors killed to no purpose, young civilians seeing their jobs exported to China.

The new generations watched, learned, and organized, with financial assistance from new-tech libertarians like Peter Thiel and intellectual support from, most notably, the Claremont Institute. 

A friend now in his seventies who is a veteran of dissident-right activism recently remarked to me that when he began organizing in the mid-1990s, attendees at his gatherings included a high proportion of twitchy older guys with bad shaves, cranky beliefs, and rustic or deep-South accents. “But now,” he said, grinning with pride, “it’s all millennials and Gen-Z-ers, well-dressed and college-educated.”

Writing at Taki’s Magazine about his recent book tour, dissident-right legend Steve Sailer similarly remarked on the youth of his audiences—“around early 30s median age”—and also on the “two or three dozen exceptionally beautiful women” who showed up at one event.

Will these post-Boomer populist-nationalists attain political power? They already have. In February 2022, a 37-year-old U.S. Senate candidate told an interviewer, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.” At about the same time that young Senate candidate said on a podcast: 

I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program … I think Trump is going to run again in 2024 … I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.

That young man was J. D. Vance. He won his Senate seat and is now, two years later, Donald Trump’s partner on the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential ticket.

Of course, their ticket might crash and burn, or succumb to establishment vote-rigging. Even if it wins, Trump might disappoint us all over again, and a vice president has no power other than to be a voice in occasional earshot of the president and his cabinet.

Still, the dissident right—a term I myself coined, I cannot forbear mentioning—has come of age. If Trump is victorious in November we shall be players in national policy and Vance a likely contender for the presidency in 2028.

If Trump loses, Boomer neoliberal globalist totalitarianism will have another four years to consolidate its control over our minds, our culture, our liberties, and our property. That is what’s at stake.