From Power Diagrams to Settlement-Construction: What we may be missing about the New Right..

I’m increasingly frustrated with a specific failure mode on parts of the intellectual left: analysis that performs insight while refusing to touch the real object. It oscillates between two shortcuts. The first is a kind of diagrammatic power-critique — tracing who funds who, which networks influence which narratives — as if mapping influence were equivalent to explaining why a new constituency is forming. The second is the speed with which it collapses that constituency into a moral category — “Nazis,” “fascists,” “deplorables” — as if labelling were a substitute for understanding. Both moves give you the feeling of clarity while avoiding the harder work: diagnosing the political economy of the present.

The deeper problem is not that these tools are always wrong. It’s that they become evasions at exactly the moment we need realism. If you treat the current shift as primarily elite orchestration, politics becomes exposure and denunciation. If you treat it as primarily moral pathology, politics becomes excommunication. But what is actually happening is more difficult: a successor settlement is assembling in the open, because the old one is failing to hold continuity. And if you won’t name the conditions that are producing that — non-delivery, volatility, status injury, institutional illegitimacy, felt vulnerability — you will keep mistaking the symptom (the coalition’s surface ideology) for the cause (the human experience it is metabolising).

This matters because the political moment has shifted. For a long time, the implicit settlement in much of the West was: growth provides surplus; the state mediates distribution; institutions deliver continuity; rights expand alongside provision; legitimacy is sustained through predictable improvement. Even where that settlement was uneven or unjust, it had a core operational claim: we can deliver a rising baseline and a liveable future. That claim is now failing in too many places, for too many people, too consistently.

Wage stagnation alongside asset inflation. Housing as a rent-extraction machine. Debt-based consumption as false stability. Precarity in work and care. Public capacity thinning. Infrastructure ageing. Volatility compounding through energy shocks, climate disruption, geopolitical stress, pandemic aftershocks — and now machine-accelerated labour substitution anxiety. In this context, aggregate indicators become less persuasive than lived experience. People do not experience “the economy” as GDP; they experience it as fragility: the sense that a single shock can unmake their lives and that institutions will not catch them.

When delivery weakens, legitimacy migrates. Politics stops being organised primarily around “who gets what share of growth” and reorganises around “who will protect me from decline.” This is the regime shift that too much of the left refuses to metabolise. It continues to speak as if the master variable is redistribution inside a functioning delivery state, while the ground has moved toward continuity, protection, and strength under constraint.

This is where the right has been strategically sharper — not morally superior, but structurally more attuned. It is not “winning” primarily through policy detail or better arguments. It is winning because it is building a constituency around a different anthropology: a thesis of what it means to be human in this moment. Exposed. Unheld. Unprotected. Disoriented. Economically insecure. Culturally unmoored. Epistemically overwhelmed. Vulnerability becomes the substrate — but not framed as mutual care and solidarity. Framed as fear, humiliation, perceived weakness, status loss, and the feeling of being quietly dispossessed while elites moralise. Those feelings are then made legible, given targets, and translated into alliance.

The left often reacts to this by classifying the coalition: “libertarians,” “reactionaries,” “fascists,” “Nazis.” Sometimes those labels capture real ideological currents. But they don’t explain why the coalition coheres. They mistake taxonomy for comprehension. They substitute condemnation for explanation, and explanation for construction. And because they fail to name the underlying attractor — the demand for continuity under volatility — they keep losing to the political formation that is addressing it, however crudely or dangerously.

At a deeper level, the emerging right is engaged in settlement-construction. It is behaving as if we are in a legitimacy transition — from a rights-and-welfare legitimacy (dependent on institutional capacity and surplus) to a strength-and-security legitimacy (dependent on continuity under constraint). It is offering people a story of themselves inside that transition, and then supplying a set of operating moves that convert insecurity into coherence.

One move is epistemic: attack the old legitimacy engines — universities, media, credential regimes, expert institutions — not only as “biased,” but as self-referential monopolies that no longer justify their authority through performance. This is not simply anti-intellectualism. It is a wager that the current knowledge order is degraded and captured, and that legitimacy must be reopened through disruption and replacement.

A second move is to change the master variable from wealth to strength. In a world of compounding shocks, wealth looks like a weak proxy for security. Strength — resilience, optionality, capacity to absorb volatility, ability to act — becomes the organising value. It resonates because it meets the lived sense that money is not protection and institutions are not shelter.

A third move is coalition technology: belonging as infrastructure. Where liberal frameworks often treat belonging as dangerous because it can slide into exclusion, the right treats belonging as the mechanism that enables commitment when transactional society fractures. In a complex system, coordination is scarce; identity becomes a tool to produce coherence. It converts diffuse anxiety into a “we.”

A fourth move is material anchoring — a kind of economic homesteading logic. Freedom is not framed as abstract liberty but as having a base: land, housing, tools, energy access, local productive capacity, reduced dependency. This lands because the existing settlement increasingly offers freedom as rhetoric while structurally intensifying rent, platform dependence, and the erosion of household sovereignty.

A fifth move is executive decisiveness: the claim that complexity produces paralysis, capture, and endless process; therefore legitimate power must be concentrated enough to act. This is the most dangerous move — it can slide quickly into authoritarianism — but it is also a response to a widely felt condition: institutions seem unable to decide, unable to build, unable to respond.

A sixth move is to treat intelligence — sensing, feedback, learning velocity — as the core resource of governance. When the world is moving quickly, the scarce asset is not moral language; it is epistemic quality. The right’s hostility to inherited institutions often rests on a belief that they have become low-signal systems: high status, low learning.

Threaded through all of this is an attempt to invert status from consumption to discipline, contribution, and control — to delegitimise passive consumer identity and replace it with a moral economy of toughness, production, and sacrifice. Again: politically combustible, often scapegoating — but aligned with the felt exhaustion of consumerism as a substitute for agency.

None of this is easy. We are in a genuinely challenging event-space: contradictory needs, real scarcity, eroding institutional capacity, and demands that cannot be simultaneously met inside the inherited settlement. That doesn’t justify cruelty or scapegoating — but it does require a fundamentally different politics: one capable of naming trade-offs, recognising limits, and constructing alternative settlement pathways rather than performing moral purity. If we can’t even say these issues out loud, we remain trapped at the level of name-calling and counter-name-calling. And at that level there is no pathway to build the politics that could actually work — no way to earn legitimacy through delivery, no way to design shared protection, no way to hold continuity under volatility.

Seen this way, the right is not only a set of bad ideas. It is an adaptive response to a real institutional condition: non-delivery, exposure, and legitimacy decay. It is building a constituency around protection. It is offering coherence under volatility. It is constructing a successor settlement — one that may be exclusionary, punitive, and authoritarian, but which is responding to the question people are already asking: who will hold me when the system doesn’t?

This is why the left’s power diagrams and moral labelling feel like evasions. The diagrams imply the problem is coordination among elites; the labels imply the problem is reducible to moral pathology. Both moves avoid confronting the deeper regime shift: the old settlement is failing to deliver continuity, and politics is reorganising around strength.

The task, then, is not merely to “debunk” the right as if this were primarily a misinformation event, nor to retreat into the comfort of denunciation. The task is to build a better successor settlement — one that can meet the underlying conditions without scapegoating and without tyranny.

That means treating protection as a legitimate demand and designing it differently: material security through housing, energy affordability, care infrastructure, local economic continuity, and credible pathways for dignity; epistemic security through institutions that learn in public and earn trust through performance; belonging as civic infrastructure without enemies; strength as resilience and capability rather than domination; decisiveness through accountable architectures rather than concentrated power.

If we cannot offer a political economy of shared protection — continuity that people can actually feel — then the politics of fear will keep winning, because it is answering the master question of the era. Not “who influences who,” but: how do we hold human lives steady inside degenerative volatility?

Until that question is met with credible institutional design, the field will remain open to whoever can promise strength most convincingly — even if the promise is ultimately paid for by exclusion, cruelty, and the shrinking of freedom.

That is the argument. And it requires something more demanding than the lazy comforts of diagrams and labels: an updated anthropology, an updated political economy, and the courage to build a successor settlement in full view.