In a recent essay, Aaron Renn pointed out an interesting contradiction within America’s coalescing new right; they like to glorify things which they also do not seek as a lifestyle. ‘The actual conservative culture in much of America is not about the things imagined by the online “RETVRN” crowd,’ Renn writes, adding that ‘to the extent that any such aesthetics or lifestyles are actually practiced today, it’s usually by liberals, not conservatives’. That is true. Any New England college town, for example, would look like a fever dream of a new right online account. Except, it is almost overwhelmingly liberal and cosmopolitan in taste, culture, and politics. What gives? Renn only partially addresses the causes of such a disparity. ‘It’s much more about a lifestyle oriented around consumption of products and activities that are thoroughly modern and industrialized. The people who want to preserve or recreate those retro elements are mostly on the left.’

There is some truth there, but there is also perhaps a bit more to it than that. This is not idle academic speculation. We have all seen the deluge of online slop from the Victorian era or the Gilded Age, or sartorial and lifestyle aesthetics that usually reflect the heavily liberal small towns of New England or the equally liberal parts of Oxbridge. There is no such equivalent on the right. Some, if not most of those online accounts could be attributed to far-right engagement and rage bait. But there is an interesting discussion to be had about the lack of art patronage, or grand institution-building on the right in general.

The new right, in particular, has a giant gaping cultural hole. It has, however, little to do with material causation, such as spending habits. The causality rather stems from a deeper philosophical angle. The new populist right in America, and increasingly in parts of Europe as well, are structurally or philosophically not designed to be imperial, cosmopolitan, or institutionalist: traits that are required to mirror the late 19^th– and early 20^th-century aesthetics and life they glorify. Incidentally, it is the cosmopolitan liberals, currently hopelessly politically adrift, unmoored from their traditional (and often benevolent) imperial instincts, due to a combination of demographic change and self-loathing politics of the last two decades, who are a much better defender of both progress and patrimony. This is not a judgment, simply an observation.

The aesthetic desires of the new right lack any coherent philosophical instinct. It is mostly vibe: crusades are good, so is the Enlightenment. The historical aptitude of the ‘Tech-Right’ elite of our times, for example, is shallower than the first two paragraphs of any Wikipedia page. In a bid to defend and preserve what it claims to be ‘western civilisation’, it peppers over the centuries old deep cultural, ethnic, and philosophical divisions within the West. It is temperamentally Huntingtonian and civilisational in essence, and therefore intensely ideological and ahistoric. It charts a single continuum of Judeo-Christian ‘European’ heritage that defies any actual historic record.

The reality is different, the intra-ethnic rivalry within Europe is not in any way similar to what a dissident new right ‘online historian’ might imagine. Culturally, the Romans had a lot more in common with Tunisians and Egyptians, or even the early Ottomans, than they ever had with Germans, Danes, Gauls or Anglo-Saxons. Medieval catholic architecture and philosophy, often highlighted online in dissident right-wing social media, had little in common with the High Renaissance-infused Scuola di Atene of Raphael, a cause of deep dogmatic fissure and clerical heartburn even then. The Ottoman elites were taught in their courts by upper-class Venetian, Persian, and Hungarian teachers and courtiers; Serbian Christian princess Mara Branković was considered the chief diplomat of Mehmed the Conqueror. The globetrotting Victorian or Edwardian upper-class Englishmen were more comfortable – as chronicled in the memoirs of imperial English officers – in the social surroundings of an upper-caste Bengali Brahmin Raibahadur, than they perhaps were in the proximity of a peasant in the north of England or in Ireland.

An interesting display of such class dynamics can be seen in the ‘Statesmen of World War I’ portrait in London’s National Portrait Gallery, with the Maharaja of Bikaner featured prominently among a group of the Edwardian-era elite. High European imperial culture and politics can be explained from the lens of class solidarity a lot more than race or ethnicity, a revelation that might shock the ‘new right’, who tend to be otherwise more proletarian in their instincts.

Likewise, in the Gilded Age United States, the dynamic was somewhat similar, albeit a little unique given that the US is a republic. The Gilded Age was an interesting time, which saw the birth of the United States as a great power (and indulge in its own progressive imperialism abroad), and resulted in a politically nationalistic but culturally cosmopolitan elite, who wanted to import European tastes. The Carnegies and the Vanderbilts wanted to emulate European imperialists such as Cecil Rhodes, and replicate their institutions in America.

It is also the time that defined the United States as we see it now, in the hagiographic social media posts of the online new right. Washington DC’s hidden Hillwood Manor is the home of Marjorie Merriweather Post, then the richest woman in the US, who went to post-Bolshevik Russia, and bought all the Tsarist treasures that were on offer for cheap, brought them back and created a private museum in Washington DC, for Americans. In New York, JP Morgan invited Bell de costa Greene to curate one of the finest personal libraries and museums in New York. It is so diverse and erudite – some of Greene’s and Morgan’s finest art collection are Mughal paintings acquired from Oudh in British India, Arabic Qurans from the Ottoman Empire, and calligraphy from Persia; according to Greene a collection from a most interesting school – that it would put the semi-literate and perpetually online jungvolks constantly boasting about returning to the Gilded Age, to shame.

The reality is that there is no such interest or taste among the current right-wing American oligarchs like Peter Thiel or Elon Musk, much less the proletarian online new right, unlike their Gilded Age forefathers. There is no evidence of any new institution-building or universities that are meant to last, or of a desire to indulge in deep pursuit of foreign art, ethnography, archaeology and literature, as imperial era oligarchs did. The current aspirational counter-elites are therefore neither good nationalists nor competent imperialists. That the Morgan Library in New York has some of the best Persian and Mughal literature, woodcuts, and paintings, curated from all over the Middle East and British India, by tenured librarians like Belle Greene, a mixed-race woman in the 1920s, is precisely because of that European-style ‘civic-nationalist but race neutral’ liberal cosmopolitanism; an instinct despised to the core by the new populist and localist right, who simply do not care about any of that.

No American small right-wing college in their ‘Great Books’ programmes has so far dedicated a portion of their funding or expertise to study the Arthashastra or the Mahabharata, alongside the Iliad or the Aeneid. One can, however, find such interest and persuasion in the New England Ivies or liberal schools. Some of the best antique stores and open-air antique markets are in arch-liberal cities and regions (my favourite ones being in New York, and northern Virginia), which demonstrate their thriving demand in such spaces.

It is not that academia and art is definitionally left-wing and cosmopolitan, nor should it be; it is that the populist right in particular has a disadvantage as it is by temperament either disinterested or dismissive and lacks an appreciation for anything it considers remotely foreign to its taste, thereby somewhat cocooning itself. The new right’s gaping cultural and institutional hole is therefore by design.

The newly ascending American populist right’s cultural instincts, reflected in their social media posts, are fuelled more by ‘vibes’, than anything else. But for a group of aspirational counter-elites who are at least partially motivated by Europe’s three-century spanning lost imperial glory, they might do well to learn a couple of key lessons about long-term global influence.

The European empires of the 19th century, which the Euro-American new right wistfully longs for, were built categorically on inviting and assimilating a cadre of upper class, intelligent and westernised elites from the peripheries – Macaulay’s ‘English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’ – to govern their empires across the globe. Incidentally, it was also a system that worked fairly well and was stable for a long time, extracting resources and providing order and plenty of jobs in regions that were sometimes considered historically ungovernable. It also served a different tacit purpose. Providing jobs and order in far-flung corners of the globe, it kept rapid and mass working-class migration in check, and never rapidly destabilised core societies. The 19th century was mostly a borderless world, but one where only the elite or the educated could roam and mingle across the globe. Naturally, the taste of that class of elite was more appreciative of genuine intellectual diversity.

Facilitating a free movement and mix of the elite brains and infusion of foreign culture, manpower, and resources, and channeling them to European imperial causes and enrichment, both material and cultural, was a model so successful, that it was emulated even by the sole major non-European power of that time, the post-Meiji restoration Japan: an empire that categorically dismantled its own ethno-nationalist feudalism, changed culture, dress codes, and the higher-education system of a deeply inward state, and encouraged Japanese students to go to Anglo-American universities to learn Western science, and art.

Tragically, however, at the same time, European decline also started with the growth of populist nationalism, from 1848 onwards. Ultimately, every major European empire in history collapsed due to either war abroad, overstretch and insolvency, or because a form of ultra-nationalism replaced a coalition-building and uniting civic-nationalist movement with something hideous and alienating. In an irony of fate, European ultranationalism became incompatible with global European dominance, and the ultranationalist-romanticism of the 19th century planted the seeds of the disintegration of European continental empires, eventually culminating in one middle-class ultranationalist with a major chip on his shoulder assassinating an archduke in a whim; and one small protectorate then chain-ganging all great powers to a war, wrecking nearly 300 years of European global dominance from which it never recovered. There is a lesson in that tragic and permanent loss of power, prestige, and influence.