Last week Compact accepted the resignation of its former senior editor Nina Power.
Power, doing her best impression of Oscar Wilde, had sued a man named Luke Turner for libel. In the process of the trial, a number of Power's private messages and pseudonymous social media accounts became public, showing that Power maintained a far right pseud account on Twitter and had made alarming comments about the Nazis, Mein Kampf, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in private messages.
In the aftermath of these revelations, Compact, quite rightly, parted ways with Power. Power, for her part, promptly recorded a podcast with a prominent dissident right figure on Substack. Significantly, however, a number of right wing figures in the UK, most notably Cambridge professor and Edmund Burke Foundation chairman James Orr and Unherd columnist Mary Harrington, came to Power's defense and attacked Compact.
There are many angles one might take in considering this story. One could lament the obvious erosion of norms that regarded far right thinking about race as being obviously bad and wrong, for example. One could also lament the ways in which far right thinkers continue to infiltrate conservative media. (Though one should also note that Compact has actually taken a firmer line than most on the new right. Michael Lind went after Richard Hanania far more aggressively than any other right wing outlet I know of and founding editor Sohrab Ahmari has written extensively on the evils of racism and against the more extreme forms of anti-immigrant sentiment currently festering on the American right.)
Another point worth considering, however, is what the saga suggests about the difference between online networks and real-world movements—and what that difference implies about the future of our politics.
As I have observed before, there is an important difference in the incentive structures between online networks and geographically constrained, legally definable institutions. These incentive structures aren't themselves determinative, of course—people can choose to go against their incentives for reasons of conscience or they might behave in ways that are incentivized but do so not because of the incentives but, again, due to sincerely held conviction. Yet we would be foolish to ignore the ways in which the structures of movements influence and encourage the behavior of individuals within the movement.
In institutions we have an incentive toward conciliation and working across disagreements because our institutions have a limited range of potential members and supporters, given their constraints due to their existence in the offline world.
For example, as a college town my hometown of Lincoln has quite a lot of coffeeshops—and as a full-time remote worker, I've gotten to know quite a lot of them. It isn't hard to tell a bit about them after an hour or two of working there. Some skew more politically left wing—off the top of my head I can think of one I'd describe as anarcho-communist, another that is more standard issue progressive millennial, and another that is more of a Democratic Socialists of America spot.
On the other hand, there are coffeeshops in my old neighborhood owned and operated by the nearby Catholic parish and another by a neighborhood evangelical congregation. There is another coffeeshop near campus that is owned by evangelicals, but is close enough to campus that most of its clientele are Christians working on campus—Catholic and Protestant alike. The oldest local coffeeshop, meanwhile, tends to float above all that because of its age and seniority within the city.
Significantly, none of these coffeeshops enforce their ideological markers at all. Sure, if you walk in and sit for an hour you'll pick up on the vibe of the place—you'll hear baristas making conversation, you'll see who walks in the door, what events are advertised on the walls and who is being hosted there, and so on. (I was working at the anarcho-communist shop once when Congressman Flood walked in, dressed in a suit and tie, and I'm not sure who was more bewildered—the congressman or the coffeeshop staff.) That said, I can only think of a single time in my life when a coffeeshop actively tried to alienate a potential bloc of customers for political reasons. That was when the DSA-type coffeeshop refused to serve a staffer from the Nebraska Family Alliance, whose offices are nearby. (It went badly for them, if you're wondering.)
So why is that one could reasonably guess the politics of the staff at virtually every coffeeshop and yet it is practically unheard of for any of those shops to actively seek to alienate customers who don't share their politics? Well: Lincoln isn't that big a town. And if you want to have a successful business, you mostly can't afford to alienate potential customers, otherwise your business is likely to fail. So the baristas, for example, are incentivized to patient endurance of customers they don't especially like because the alternative is being out of a job because the business will fail. Existing in the brick-and-mortar world incentivizes bridge building, patience, and a degree of broad mindedness.
On the other hand, online networks can draw from a far larger pool of potential members. Whereas the neighborhood coffeeshop is drawing from a potential clientele numbering in the thousands (maybe), an online network can plausibly reach and include literally anyone with an internet-enabled device. Because of that, the need to tolerate those one disapproves of or disagrees with disappears altogether. What one finds instead is an incentive running in the opposite direction. Whereas one stands out in an institution for being a bridge builder, in networks one stands out for being uniquely devoted to the cause, for being more extreme in one's commitments. So while institutions incentivize conciliation and moderation, online networks incentivize extremism and tend to radicalize their members.
This shows up in the distinct reactions to Power's endorsement of far right ideologies. For an online writer like Harrington, the incentives run toward demonstrating one's refusal to be "intimidated" by the left. A similar incentive goes for someone on staff at a think tank like the Edmund Burke Foundation, whose National Conservatism event is already friendly to figures like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, to say nothing of their past platforming of figures like Amy Wax.
Because right-wing media has mostly embraced the morally indifferent strategy of "no enemies to the right" it means that Harrington's incentives are to punch left and coddle right, even when that means defending someone speaking positively about Mein Kampf. In showing yourself to be strong, you can help gain a reliable online right wing audience and for online writers "success" is chiefly about having an audience. If you can pull traffic, you can make it as an online writer.
On the other hand, Compact plainly has real-world political aspirations. To use an antiquated metaphor, they want to be the in-flight magazine of the post-liberal right. As such, they want (need, really) to publish figures like Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley. But once you're needing close associations with elected officials, you are no longer working in networks; you're working in institutions, especially when it comes to the Senate. For figures like Rubio and Hawley, to be credible as senators, they still need to have some kind of boundaries on their right flank both because they run in state-wide races (rather than in gerrymandered districts which in some ways actually behave like online networks) and because one misstep early in your term can make for a miserable six years. (The senate allows a certain degree of boundary pushing, of course. But it still is more constrained than the House.)
The danger of failing to understand institutional dynamics is demonstrated by Christian nationalist darling Oklahoma State Sen. Dusty Deevers. Deevers behaves like he still is operating in the world of networks even though, as an elected official, he actually works within the institutions of Oklahoma state politics. His failure to understand that is why he can't even get any of his bills out of committee, even committees controlled by Republicans. His persistent network-style behavior makes him highly ineffective in institutions.
This is one of the primary sources of tension between figures on the right who actually want to accomplish things legislatively on issues like technology, porn, abortion, and so on, and media figures on the right who might say they do but whose behavior plainly says otherwise. These media figures are chronically unwilling to police their right flank, even when that flank completely undermines and discredits them. They refuse to think strategically about policy. And their posture and style shows no evidence of understanding how politics actually work or any desire to actually work within existing systems to create change. Rather, their style is suggestive of people keen to stand out in networks where extremism is naturally encouraged.
If there is to be any sort of constructive socially conservative voice in American politics going forward, that voice will have to be rooted in the real world of institutions. That means a politically effective social conservatism will be one which polices its right flank, which is strategic in selecting its battles, and is willing to work with a wide range of people to obtain specific, achievable goods. If socially conservative Christians choose instead to run with the terminally online world of self-indulgent right wing media, they might enjoy some transgressive vibes and lib owning, I suppose, but that's a poor substitute for actual real-world effectiveness at realizing worthy goals that serve the good of our neighbors.