THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Among the small minority of Americans who opine about politics for a living, there are several bespoke ideological camps that despise liberals more than each other.

The Catholic integralists of First Things magazine, "post-left" Marxists of various niche podcasts, and contrarian crypto-libertarians of Substack share few policy objectives. But they do harbor a common antipathy for "liberalism" (even if they lack a common definition of that word).

More concretely, these politically homeless media personalities are united by (1) a mutual alienation from the dominant ideological tendencies of their rarified, white-collar world (i.e., liberalism), (2) a recognition that liberalism enjoys cultural power in excess of its popular support, and (3) the delusion that their own esoteric misgivings about liberalism reflect those of a silent (or latent) majority. [...]

The newly launched periodical is a joint venture between right-wing and left-wing critics of "the ideology of liberalism" and the "overclass" that perpetuates it. It was founded by the heterodox religious conservatives Matthew Schmitz and Sohrab Ahmari, in partnership with the (post-)post-left "labor populist" Edwin Aponte. This odd throuple has filled out their journal's masthead with a motley crew of commentators, spanning the ideological gamut from the authoritarian religious conservative Adrian Vermeule to the absolutist civil libertarian Glenn Greenwald. It is genuinely hard to name anything that unites this group beyond some mutual antipathies.

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