The Twilight of the Dissident Right

Online politics has shifted. What’s next?

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Mark Granza, 34, is editor-in-chief of the America-focused magazine IM–1776, which, in recent years, has helped define the Right’s avant-garde cultural movement. He’s published a wide range of pieces from authors major and minor that go beyond the repetitions of the conservative establishment. He has sought to carve out a space for the creative—and sometimes chaotic—movement known as the “dissident Right.”

Over the past year, however, the politics of this digital subculture have shifted. The fight over “wokeness” has come down from its peak, with major figures of the woke era, such as Joy Reid, Ibram Kendi, and the founders of Black Lives Matter largely disappearing from the public stage. The Trump administration has put many of the dissident Right’s ideas into practice. And the online space, which was once a galvanizing force, has splintered.

I wanted to get Granza’s interpretation of these events, and to ask him what he sees coming next. The following is a lightly edited transcript of our interview.

Rufo: We’re now almost a year into the second Trump presidency, and we’ve seen some big wins. And yet, there is a general sense that the culture on the Right is stuck. How do you assess this current moment?

Granza: Culture is stuck because it depends on action rather than discourse. What we now consider culture has become too abstract. This is largely due to social media, as I’ve been writing extensively. People are no longer present in physical space—they essentially transitioned online. Think of how many people believe they belong to a “community,” regularly hosting podcast discussions as if there are a thousand people in front of them, but really, they’re alone in their living room.

Remote work has made people less aware of their surroundings. You see this everywhere—dead-eyed young people looking down at their phones on the subway; coffee shops filled with loners typing emails in the corner by themselves; parks full of influencers and wannabes taking selfies, rather than actually spending time with their friends or loved ones. Even bars and restaurants, where culture used to grow organically, are different now. No one is talking to each other. No one knows how to hold eye contact for more than a few seconds.

Culture is best described as a set of behaviors that make us feel that we belong, and it involves much more than just artistic production. Movies, books, scripts, and paintings—these things must be inspired by an already-existing community. When I go back to Italy to visit, my mother gives me pasta to take home every time. She’s not an artist, but she’s engaging in Italian culture. How did that come into being?

If you’re alone in your living room, it doesn’t matter how many people you’re “connecting” to. Truth is, you’re alone. How do you expect to find inspiration by staring at a screen for 12 hours a day?

Rufo: It felt like the energy on the right shifted quickly after Trump’s victory. What happened?

Granza: One major change—though it happened before Trump’s second election—was Elon Musk buying Twitter. Before Musk, the populist Right recognized that prestige was necessary to rival the Left. The online Right also understood this; the elite “s***-poster” and the elite philosopher needed each other. The first contributed energy, the latter prestige. Consider how thinkers like Michael Millerman or Michael Anton made “the dissident Right,” for lack of a better term, look like a serious movement from an academic perspective.

But when Musk bought Twitter, he became the institutional prestige that the movement needed. All of a sudden, the richest man in the world was acting like an online poster. How much more prestige than that do you need? This created incentives for everyone else to do the same to rise in the online hierarchy.

Today, X is essentially a big attempt to get the Musk re-post. There was an opportunity to build a natural elite—rewarding depth, philosophy, high cultural analysis, and so forth. Instead, the platform rewarded mocking and memes.

Another issue is infrastructure. The Left has institutions: Hollywood, museums, grantmaking organizations, and so on, to which right-leaning people don’t have access. Everyone knows that people with conservative sensibilities have been cut off from the institutions that help develop craft. This has created significant resentment, especially among young men.

So we faced two problems simultaneously: a lack of institutions and an inability to escape the Twitter mindset. Mocking, complaining, gossiping—it’s all a waste of time. There’s a place for memes, but we have to move past them.

In the end, people are trying to produce culture on platforms designed to prevent culture. Computational technology was born as a tool of warfare. Social media reflects that. Ever wondered why everyone (figuratively speaking) is wearing a uniform today, and everything is organized around an enemy? How did “mother” and “father,” the most common experiences throughout human (and animal) history, turn into political identities? When everything becomes argument and abstraction—i.e., the mind—then the poetry—i.e., the heart—dies.

Rufo: Tell me about your new project, opening a high-end “speakeasy” in New York City. You’re moving from digital editor to scene-maker. What do you hope to accomplish?

Granza: Culture must return to physical space. This is the next step. It looks like a change, but it’s a natural evolution. It’s not because I enjoy the nightlife—I haven’t since I was 23 or so. The reason I’m doing this is that I know how to set the vibe of a venue.

No one on the conservative side is trying to influence the hospitality industry. We can write on hookup culture, drugs and alcohol consumption, modern dating, and things like that. But to truly influence these behaviors, you have to operate where and when they take place. How else are you going to affect them? It would be as if the police tried to stop crime by working between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.

Conservative institutions must be active late in the evening, too, just as the police are. But these institutions can’t be outright “conservative.” A social scene must be organic, tied to a physical place, to the point that you have actual “ownership” of a street or a neighborhood.

Right now, all we have is a handful of conservative networks across America meeting among themselves, isolated somewhere on the tenth floor of an office building or an underground bar, only to return online once the event is over. They are technically online scenes mimicking real life, which are not the same as in-real-life scenes.

A real community is a set of people who constantly see one another—neighbors, churches, bars, barbershops. Online, we use the same word, “community,” but remove the physical space, and we lose something essential. When you ask older people to think about community, they think of places.

Was I creating an in-real-life scene with IM–1776? I don’t think so. I don’t think any online project has yet accomplished that. Years ago, I managed high-end venues in London and Barcelona. Hospitality is about setting the vibe—owning a space, shaping behavior. That’s how real scenes are made—and that’s what I’m set to accomplish now.