Chris Rufo and the Burger Kings

Back in mid-January, right-wing activist and self-described ​“counterrevolutionary” Christopher Rufo weighed in on X (formerly Twitter) on the generational anomie of the largely young men who make up his core audience and who were concerned about their future employment prospects. Riding a wave of conservative euphoria just before Trump’s inauguration, Rufo acknowledged there were always challenges but trumpeted Steven Pinkerseque optimism about the bullish state of the economy. Noting that young men could get a job managing a Panda Express or Chipotle franchise and soon be earning $70,000-100,000 — a high enough prospect that I felt momentary temptation myself, precarious academic and writing professions being what they are — Rufo declared that this prospect amounted to basically ​“full employment.” His argument was quickly echoed by other prominent conservatives, including far-right podcaster and influencer Matt Walsh. 

But just as quickly, Rufo and Walsh faced a noisy backlash from a number of figures on the so-called ​“dissident Right”: a hard-right movement that advocates for more overtly illiberal and counter-cultural policies and values. As a largely internet-based movement, the dissident Right consists of an array of very-online influencers and ​“anons” (posters who conceal their identity) — figures likely unfamiliar to those who don’t regularly read fascist thinkers like Julius Evola but who wield real clout in the contemporary Right. One was Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), a self-described proponent of ​“fascism or something worse,” who declared it an ​“absurd” joke for successful political commentators like Rufo and Walsh to advise young men to put on aprons and get frying while they enjoyed high-status, low-grease jobs themselves. Dissident Right influencer Auron MacIntyre likewise complained that right-wing pundits who had built careers out of ​“highlighting discrimination against young white men” — purportedly at the hands of liberal elites — were now telling the fans who’d made them stars ​“to go stuff a burrito.” One anon even insisted that Rufo was basically consigning young men like him to Panda Express ​“serfdom.”

Some of the antagonism was expressed generationally, with one wit accusing Rufo (a Millennial) of ​“spiritual boomerism.” But overall, the common theme of the pushback was that the angry right-wing white men who’d warred against liberalism on behalf of Trump were entitled to a more auspicious place in the new economic order his administration would create: in their minds, a volkish aristocracy where certain demographics are entitled to economic goodies, no matter what the market may demand. 

It’s tempting to chalk this up to a real-life version of the meme ​“The Worst People You Know Are Fighting” and leave it at that. But the argument revealed some important ideological and aesthetic fault lines on the contemporary Right that are worth considering. 

Until 2016, the U.S. Right could fairly be described, as Ronald Reagan famously put it, as a ​“three-legged stool”: war hawks committed to anti-Communism and American empire; social conservatives hostile to civil rights, feminism and LGBTQ acceptance; and pro-capitalist neoliberals and right-wing libertarians. Although these groups were defined by deep ideological tensions — over issues like military interventionism and using state power to further conservative goals — they were bound together by shared antipathy to the New Left, the New Deal and federal implementation of the Civil Rights agenda. Doctrines like Frank Meyer’s ​“fusionism,” combining fealty to free markets and social conservatism, gave a gloss of philosophical respectability to coalitional strategy. 

But the MAGAfication of the GOP has brought new, more overtly illiberal factions and ideologies into the mix, forcing fraught ideological marriages between Christian nationalists and libertarian atheists, tech-bro authoritarians and white supremacists, post-liberals and neocons. Much intellectual energy has been poured into making these marriages work; for instance, right-wing pundit Richard Hanania’s self-described ​“Nietzschean liberalism,” which defends market freedoms in the name of allowing the most productive individuals to rise to the top. But sometimes the ideological tensions — less easily papered-over once a coalition gains actual power — spill into public view, as in the appropriately stupid Panda Express controversy. 

While Rufo and Walsh may cosplay as radical counterrevolutionaries, and neither are opposed to using state power to advance right-wing goals — a fact particularly evident in Rufo’s calls to use government might to impose conservative cultural values in education — they still align with default economic neoliberalism on most issues. Their attacks on diversity initiatives are couched in familiar rhetoric around bootstrapping meritocracy and claims that the country has been softened by too many handouts to the unworthy, when what’s needed is a return to the hard discipline of the market. In an April interview with the American Conservative, Rufo doubled down on his criticisms of the dissident Right, characterizing them as propagating ​“Third World style” racial resentment by rejecting coalitional, color-blind meritocracy. Likewise, amid January’s X debate, Walsh acknowledged that ​“young men” may face an uphill battle in today’s economy, but if they considered it unbearably ​“insulting to suggest” that they ​“apply for a job at Panda Express or UPS,” then what career opportunities did the dissident Right suggest instead? There weren’t enough prestige jobs to go around, Walsh argued, and the alternatives to Panda Express purgatory — unemployment or perennial dependence — amounted to their own form of serfdom. 

By contrast, the dissident Right’s hopes for the MAGA economy are something quite different: a political economy far more comfortable with state intervention — on behalf of some; a system that still has winners and losers, but where people win or lose not as individuals but as members of privileged groups. 

As an economic vision, it’s not particularly coherent; they clearly aren’t arguing for an expansive social democratic state and BAP lauded the 2023 election of Argentina’s hyper-libertarian President Javier Milei, whose signature chainsaw motif was adopted by ​“Department of Government Efficiency” head Elon Musk this February. They still support a form of capitalism, where the ​“worthy” still get rich, and the ​“unworthy” can still get bent — but one where worthiness is defined less by personal merit than by ethnic solidarity. 

In his 2018 book, Bronze Age Mindset, BAP argued that society’s natural ruling caste shouldn’t be sullied by the dirty work of society. In a follow-up 2021 essay, he admits to being ​“indifferent” to what form of economics a country embraces, so long as ​“economic activity is subordinate to the interests of” that society’s true elite — defined, in BAP’s perspective, in fascist eugenicist terms. More recently, MacIntyre echoed this logic in arguing that the young white men who had fought to take back ​“their” country deserved a better reward than the management of a Fatburger. While neither offers anything like a comprehensive economic program, both gesture towards a volkish approach, in which society’s natural aristocracy is relieved of mundane work they feel is beneath them. And, just as importantly, where the unworthy can take on society’s dirty jobs — without rights or protections — or get deported. 

These aren’t new ideas. Nineteenth century slavery proponents like Sen. John Townsend, worried that poor whites might support abolitionism out of resentment of the master class, declared that in the antebellum South, ​“the colour of the white man” was a de facto ​“title of nobility.” While in the abolitionist North, agreed Southern propagandist J.D.B. De Bow, a white working-class man was at the bottom of the social totem pole, in the South ​“his brother” could ​“look down upon those who are beneath him, at an infinite remove.” 

In the 20^th century, European fascist movements likewise invoked ​“socialist” rhetoric, promising to replace the national disorder wrought by ​“individualistic” (read: Jewish) capitalism with a form of nation- and race-based solidarity. While in power, the Nazi Party’s economic policies were often starkly punitive — cutting welfare from the ​“workshy,” dissolving unions and actually socialist or communist parties, sentencing the poor and homeless to forced labor camps holidays and redistributed goods and businesses stolen from Jewish citizens. This flowed from the Nazi view of the volk as a kind of racial aristocracy, where a title of genetic nobility passed to and cozying up to big business. But they also initiated programs to give loyal workers cheap vacations and presented a Nazi vision of society where anyone of pure ​“Aryan” blood were members of an aristocracy, entitled the pampering due their caste. 

Likewise, many on today’s hard Right expected that the ​“Golden Age” Trump promised would quickly deliver unprecedented economic prosperity and personal opportunities for glory — perhaps young white men heroically leading the charge to seize Greenland and Panama in new campaigns of imperial expansion.

It may seem impossible to square the MAGA base’s demands for title and nobility — and their conviction that working a normal middle-class job equals serfdom — with the ​“meritocratic” ethos its most prominent pundits proclaim. Indeed, the tensions highlighted by the Panda Express debate demonstrate the trouble and I’d hoped to write a piece discussing how this ideological division might be exploited by the Left. But it’s not as ideologically fraught as it might appear. As longtime commentator on the far Right John Ganz has argued, there is a deep affinity between the individualist meritocrat who sees life as a competition the most noble person should win and the fascist who sees life as a competition the most noble race should win. Both are fixated on the hierarchical goal of accumulating as much power and status as possible and both are sneeringly dismissive of anyone who argues a more equitable system is possible. 

Whether these ideological tensions will erupt again — say, as the economic downturn Trump seems determined to unleash worsens and impacts his non-plutocratic followers — is hard to say. Some of his more opportunistic billionaire supporters seem to be frustrated at the growing risk of a recession and trillions lost on the stock market. But the true believers will likely keep faith, no matter what economic destitution Trump unleashes. 

A week after the Panda Express fight consumed right-wing social media, the conflict was squashed — at least temporarily — as the different wings of MAGAdom celebrated Trump’s inauguration, and with it, the seizure of government by plutocrats and the launch of a national crusade against DEI and foreign aid. Thus far, the Right has stuck by Trump in spite of the upheaval. Because, for all their differences, the economic worldview of the broad coalitional Right is not centered around bread and butter for all, but bread, butter and power for some, and let-them-eat-cake subordination for the rest. As long as Trump continues to deliver on this front, the Right will likely remain right behind him.