Ross Douthat: There’s been a lot of talk about a vibe shift since Donald Trump’s election and return to office — a change not just in American politics, but in American culture, a sense that right-wing personalities are suddenly driving cultural discourse, that a progressive consensus is under threat or cracking up.
One way I’ve been thinking about this is in terms of a phrase that is traditionally applied to the left: counterculture. I think the best way to understand politics right now is that the United States, for the first time in my lifetime, has a real right-wing counterculture — an edgy, radical-seeming alternative to the status quo.
I thought one way to talk about that counterculture was to invite someone who I see — we’ll see if he disagrees — as one of its representatives. And that’s you, Jonathan Keeperman, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
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Jonathan Keeperman: Ross, it is great to be here. We’ve known each other for a while online, of course.
Douthat: Purely as digital entities. Yes.
Keeperman: I’m seeing your face across from me on the screen, and I’m reminded of watching Bloggingheads from 10, maybe even 15 years ago. So we’ve come a long way since Bloggingheads.
Douthat: Oh, yeah. That’s a deep cut. That shows just how far back your online experience really goes, to the days when I had more hair and it was me and other junior varsity pundits arguing on the internet.
But I think, and you can correct me about this, I think the first time that we actually seriously interacted on the internet was after the 2020 election.
Keeperman: Correct.
Douthat: And I was arguing with Lomez, who was — is — your Twitter pseudonym.
Keeperman: Correct.
Douthat: — The persona through which you engaged with politics for a long period of time about whether Joe Biden was legitimately elected.
Keeperman: Correct.
Douthat: And at that point you had a dual identity. As Jonathan Keeperman, you were still a lecturer in English at U.C. Irvine, right?
Keeperman: Correct, that’s right.
Douthat: And then you were Lomez — a right-wing “anon” is the term that people use.
Keeperman: That’s right.
Douthat: — Who wrote pseudonymously online. That was 2020. And then in 2022, you founded a right-wing publishing house called Passage Press. That, I would say, raised your profile pretty dramatically, to the point where you were important enough to have your real name exposed by a reporter for The Guardian in 2024.
Keeperman: Correct.
Douthat: And then, by January of 2025, just recently, you were notable enough to host one of the big inaugural balls.
Keeperman: Right.
Douthat: — Which was called the Coronation Ball. Did I miss anything? How is that for an account of your trajectory?
Keeperman: Those are the highlights. That all tracks and covers ground well enough for us to get started on this conversation.
I do want to point out that in 2020, when we first were having this dialogue and debate over the election, you also had something of a pseudonym. I was arguing as much with Ross Douthat as I was with Italics Ross. As Italics Ross, you had written at least one column, maybe two, in which you made the case for why Trump might be a superior choice to lead the country, despite the amount of chaos that we’d have to endure under his leadership.
I was trying — if I remember the whole episode correctly — to get Italics Ross closer to the surface of the real Ross, the underlying Ross. We all are trafficking in certain kinds of multi-identities, I guess.
Douthat: Those were columns that I wrote where I essentially deliberately cultivated a kind of split personality and drew up out of my Jungian subconscious a version of myself that would be pro-Trump.
Keeperman: Right.
Douthat: I was never for Trump. I was part of “Never Trump” — whatever that may have been way back in the past — and I retained a basic view that it was a mistake for conservatives to lash themselves to the Trump phenomenon.
For me, Italics Ross was not the true Ross lurking below the surface. That wasn’t how I thought about it. I thought about it as a set of ideas that certainly existed in my consciousness and that were really useful for understanding where American culture was and why people supported Trump, and which New York Times readers needed to engage with.
I’m curious, before we dig into the ideas themselves, was there a moment when you felt a shift in the culture in the last few years when it seemed like you were going to exist as yourself as a public figure instead of as an anonymous arguer online?
Keeperman: Yeah, it’s a good question when that might have happened. There certainly was a shift. But what’s probably happening here is just the same old cycle of leftist excess that we’ve seen periodically over the course of American history, at least going back to the Second World War and probably even before that.
There’s a decade of leftism that takes hold and creates a counterculture. There’s a period of pushback — we saw this, for example, with the original neocons in the ’70s. We see the cycle then play out again in the ’90s with political correctness — another 10-year cycle. Then all we’re seeing is this same pattern emerge in the mid-2010s — I identify 2014 as this inflection point. That was the year of Michael Brown and Ferguson and the rise of B.L.M.
It’s also this interesting period where the academy, at least — and I think probably this is happening within newspapers and media — is coming out of this interesting transition into the digital age and out of the recession, and there’s new incentives driving the content. What happens is that a bunch of conservatives — and especially younger conservatives, who are frozen out of the conservative movement and mainstream politics and the kinds of professions where they might have a platform to express new ideas that might regenerate conservatism — go online and go underground and start developing a unique and native style of discourse all our own.
As that cycle of progressivism naturally exhausts itself — which it always does, and it takes a new form each time, but it always follows the same plot — what we’re seeing now is the emergence of this conservative counter-elite or countercultural force emerging in place of where the progressives have vacated.
We can come up with all sorts of —
Douthat: That’s a boringly respectable story, Jonathan.
Keeperman: OK.
Douthat: And I don’t believe it. I mean, I do believe it, but I think what you’re describing there is a description of the trajectory that you see, for instance, with my former colleague, Bari Weiss, and her publication, The Free Press, which has been tremendously successful and has represented a meeting place for former liberals disillusioned by progressivism and various eccentric people who wouldn’t have called themselves conservative, but have ended up on the right.
But Passage Press —
Keeperman: Yeah.
Douthat: — You’re not publishing a respectable libertarian critique of the welfare state.
Keeperman: True.
Douthat: You’re publishing fiction, weird stories, and radical philosophy.
Keeperman: Yeah.
Douthat: You published the Hardy Boys — the original Hardy Boys, before some multicultural P.C. cleanups.
Keeperman: Correct.
Douthat: You published a war memoir by a Russian general who fought against the Bolsheviks.
Keeperman: Yeah.
Douthat: You published writing by Robert E. Howard — the creator of Conan the Barbarian — and H.P. Lovecraft.
But someone like Curtis Yarvin — who is an example of an author you’ve published — thinks that the United States should become a “based” monarchy run by a Silicon Valley–esque chief executive with a dissolution and revolution of the order of government in Washington, D.C.
Nick Land is another example of subterranean, far-right intellectuals —
Keeperman: Yeah.
Douthat: — Who would not have fellowships at the American Enterprise Institute —
Keeperman: Correct.
Douthat: — Who would not operate in mainstream, conservative or centrist or center-right circles. Tell me about that stuff.
Keeperman: What are we trying to do? We’re trying to revive what is a genuine right-wing cultural and ideological — I hate the word “movement,” because it’s not quite that — but a right wing that can form an enduring and meaningful counterweight to a dominant left and a dominant progressive march that we’ve seen taking place over the course of the postwar period, certainly from the ’90s and the end of the Cold War up until now.
The premise is that the conservatism that came before — I was recently looking at a picture online of a book called “Young Guns,” featuring Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor —
Douthat: Yes, I am familiar with this cover. Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy.
Keeperman: Yes, that’s the image of the failed conservative movement that this new set of figures and cultural texts are trying to replace.
Douthat: Let’s try and get into what is an authentic cultural right. To me, Passage Press and the work you’re doing is clearly linked to a bunch of different groups. You have the Silicon Valley right of someone like Yarvin. Peter Thiel is obviously often invoked as a godfather in that zone. There is the Red Scare podcast and the so-called Dime Square scene in New York, which is basically — for those who think this is a contradiction in terms — it’s basically right-wing hipsters.
Keeperman: Yeah.
Douthat: Then you have the Nietzschean former graduate student–turned–online essayist and influencer Bronze Age Pervert, who has received interesting profiles in mainstream publications. Those would be examples that I would see. But who do you see as your allies and fellow travelers in the cultural project?
Keeperman: That’s absolutely right. I think you’ve hit the primary people and figures. You’re capturing what the zeitgeist is here, for lack of a better term. It’s still being developed, and I’d be lying to you if I said that I had some intentional project or aesthetic that I was trying to cultivate with this.
The idea is that the future is discovered. We’re not going to be able to predict ahead of time what this new culture will look like. It is throwing these ingredients out there based on a shared understanding at the highest level of abstraction, an alignment that, at least for now, is defined in opposition of both the left and wokeness — which is easy — but also in opposition to the conservatism that has come before, not because it’s antagonistic toward that kind of conservatism, per se, but that kind of conservatism is limited in what can produce creatively.
A lot of the frustration that people have had with the right is that anytime anyone on the conservative side goes to make some kind of art or do culture, it’s just bad. The left is right about this. There’s been, at least for my lifetime, this critique that the right can’t do art, that the right can’t do culture.
Douthat: Why is that? What is right-wing art missing that the right-wing counterculture is trying to supply? What are the ingredients?
Keeperman: It’s not historically true, but at least recently.
Douthat: In the last 30, 40 years, let’s say.
Keeperman: I think partly it’s fear of the unknown. It’s a lack of tolerance for artistic license and the messiness and chaos of what is entailed by the creative process. And it’s just the case that if you are going to embark on a new cultural project, you have to have some amount of taste for offense.
And OK, I’ll say this. There’s probably three aspects to why conservative art is bad or has been bad. This is reductive of course, but this might help sort of frame things.
It’s moralistic. OK? It’s much too moralistic. It’s didactic. It’s always trying to tell you a self-consciously conservative message. It’s overly sentimental.
There’s also this nostalgia thing. It’s always looking backward. Conservative art is always looking to the past because it’s familiar, it’s something that’s already been established. They already know what they’re supposed to like, what’s good and what’s not good, so there’s no risk in trying anything new.
The third thing I’ll say here is that it’s grievance oriented. This comes in two forms: it’s either “we’re owning the libs” or “here’s a story about all of the ways the libs are making our lives unbearable.”
Douthat: I want to make this just a tiny bit more concrete and say from any period, not the last 20 years, any period in American life, in modern Western history, give me an example of something you consider successful right-wing art that doesn’t fall into the traps you’ve described.
Keeperman: Sure. “No Country for Old Men” is an example, but it’s not self-consciously right wing.
Douthat: Right, right.
Keeperman: I doubt the Coen Brothers would call themselves on the right, and I don’t even know if Cormac McCarthy would, who wrote the book it’s based on. But to my mind, it is precisely right-wing art. Or David Lynch — pretty much everything David Lynch touches has a certain right-wing coding to it, certainly his major works.
Douthat: What is the coding? To a listener for whom it seems absurd to call “No Country for Old Men” right wing, what makes that right wing to you?
Keeperman: Because I like it, it’s good, and therefore I want it to share my political preferences.
Beyond that — and this is where there would be some points of disagreement —
By the way, I also call something like the TV show “Girls” a right-wing show.
Douthat: Now you’re just pandering to me because that was my consistent view.
Keeperman: Have you written about this?
Douthat: Yes, this is a hobby horse of mine.
Keeperman: Then we might share the premise here that what constitutes “right-wing art” — which is, by the way, labeling we’re grafting onto this thing after the fact, so it’s actually a very flimsy labeling, but what these pieces of work are doing is telling the truth about the world in a way that is not compromised by artistic or ideological preferences about how these events and these characters and these people, what society wishes were true about these people.
My thing is that if you are telling the truth about the world, then you are going to make right-wing art.
Douthat: Isn’t that then a little circular? Then you’re saying that all great art is somehow right wing.
To me, for instance, I feel like a TV show that I’ve enjoyed, “Andor” — one of the few “Star Wars” shows that I’ve enjoyed — I see it as left-wing art. It’s a show that uses the background of the Empire and the “Star Wars” universe to tell a story about punishing militaristic tyranny and resistance to it in ways that are left coded, but also it’s a really good show. Whereas I would look at “Girls” and say, in the end, it’s a scabrous satire of a particular kind of upper-middle-class lifestyle in a liberal city, so it is coming from a right-wing perspective.
Can be great left-wing art from your perspective?
Keeperman: I suppose, yeah. I’ll say this, I think it depends. I understand your point that it’s highly reductive to simply say, if I like it, it’s therefore right-wing art. Or if it tells the truth —
Douthat: It tells the truth, is what you’re saying. Yeah.
Keeperman: What I mean by that, though, is there are certain at least modern left-wing premises that support their worldview and their political agenda that I think are belied by someone telling the truth about the world.
Here’s an example of this. The left takes as a foundational principle of its politics the idea of equality, that there’s a flattening of people, and that through carefully managed social engineering, we can produce a society that either levels out any kind of natural hierarchy or produce a system that somehow can wrangle these natural, almost supernatural entropic forces that are constantly creating chaos and constantly requiring our maintenance and management and authority to deal with.
Douthat: OK, good. That’s what I was looking for. This takes us into one of the phrases that I think gets used to describe what the counterculture is up to. I know you’re ambivalent about this phrase — it’s the idea that gets called vitalism. It’s this term that means a celebration of individuality, strength, excellence, and an anxiety about equality and democracy as — just the way you described — as leveling forces and enemies of human greatness.
It gets connected to Friedrich Nietzsche. I think Ayn Rand, who’s a very popular novelist on the American right — whatever you make of her actual books — is in some sense in this school. That to me seems like one common thread, including in the books that you yourself have published. What links the White Russian general standing athwart the Bolsheviks to the Hardy Boys to Conan and Barbarian? It is some kind of idea of human greatness beset by mediocrity and so on.
What do you think about that?
Keeperman: I think that’s right. I wouldn’t contest that basic summary. I don’t want to overdo how we’re thinking about this word “vitality.” For the purposes of this conversation, it’s enough to say it’s something like a thymos, OK? Spiritedness, a self-will, aliveness.
I also want to say that there’s a certain eroticism to vitality that’s very important and has often been missing from the conservative view of the world.
Douthat: Yep.
Keeperman: I think that’s a mistake. I think you’re leaving something very important on the table by not grappling with this notion of eroticism and what that means and why it might be valuable, especially since the premise we’re starting from — and I think, Ross, we share this view — is that we’re reaching a phase, whether it’s cyclical or there’s a longer-term linear path, of civilizational exhaustion, decay, decadence — that’s a word I know you’ve used a lot — and this all requires rebirth. And the process of rebirth is not gentle. It can be violent and difficult.
I would say that vitality serves two basic functions right now; it’s why it’s valuable for us to take on board. One, it attracts young people. Young people — I think men in particular, women, too, though — are naturally attracted to this notion of vitality. They see it, they know it, and they want to be around it. The right has failed for a long time to attract young people. This is finally changing over the last few years.
It’s also a way of overcoming a kind of defeatism of this idea that things are past the point of saving, that we can’t do anything, and that all there is left for us in the 21st century is to merely manage playing out this “end of history” period.
This sense of vitality, I think, offers something else. It offers the human subject the opportunity to advance positively and affirmatively into the future. That’s my defense of vitalism.
Douthat: And it’s an escape from — and now I’m going to move to a second term that you yourself have used — what gets called the longhouse. You mentioned men and women as each vital in certain ways, but the longhouse is a specifically feminine-coded narrative of what’s wrong with contemporary life. What is the longhouse?
Keeperman: So I wrote this essay called, “What is the longhouse?” for First Things magazine.
Douthat: So you can answer the question, yes.
Keeperman: I would encourage anybody who wants to know the precise details to go read that article because I spell out what I mean by it. Here, I’m going to talk in more vague terms. It’s essentially an explanation, an exploration, of what I perceive as an over-feminization of society.
I don’t mean that it’s explicitly women who are taking over society, because often the longhouse is managed by men — and in some cases it’s better or more severely and strictly managed by men — but it is a feminine way of social management that is distinct from a male- or masculine-coded social management and group dynamics.
“Regime of maternal surveillance” is a phrase I’ve used before that preferences, for example, inclusion, conflict avoidance, consensus and safety. These kinds of priorities supersede things like truth finding and competition and the violent — and I don’t mean necessarily physically violent, but it can be that — but a combativeness that better characterizes a masculine way of thinking about ideas.
Why this gets back to certain other things we’ve talked about is the longhouse is essentially flattening it, it’s horizontal, whereas a masculine way of doing things in this model is hierarchical, it’s vertical. What a more combative style of discourse does, for example, is help establish those hierarchies and where the value of ideas are relative to one another.
The longhouse doesn’t allow for that because it’s more interested in making sure everybody’s feelings are maintained and nobody’s offended.
Douthat: Just so listeners are clear, this is a reference to — I’m going call it a pseudo-anthropology, because I don’t think you’re actually making specific claims about the human past — but there’s a contrast between longhouse culture of a literal longhouse of a tribe crowded together under one roof with what? The freedom of the steppe barbarian?
Keeperman: Yeah. This comes from Bronze Age Pervert: “Bronze Age Mindset,” which is one of the great texts of the 21st century, and I encourage all the New York Times listeners to read it. It’s very important if you actually want to understand this stuff.
Douthat: I agree.
Keeperman: He talks about the longhouse, and he’s got his own take on it. I borrowed the term, and actually why I think the term is so valuable is because it is an empty signifier — I don’t mean to tie it to this historical context — it’s an evocative image. It’s this big, long, literal house that we’re all stuck inside of, and you’re constrained in how you can behave, how you can act, and I think it’s hostile toward men, in particular, having a freedom of assembly with one another.
Douthat: Concrete examples would be the crusade against Greek life at universities and corporate H.R. departments and sensitivity trainings. You would see those as longhouse in action.
Keeperman: Probably the most salient example of this, precisely because it’s where you would least expect this longhouse cultural framing to take root, is the military.
Actually, Pete Hegseth has talked about this explicitly, the integration of women into the military — we don’t need to get into the politics of that. Suffice to say, though, that these traditionally male spaces, our martial culture, has been now open to women, and this introduces new norms — it has to — in order for it to work. This is going to necessarily change and, I would argue, degrade the culture of masculinity that preceded it.
Douthat: Two objections. Or responses. The second one will be more specific to my own worldview, but the first one I think is a more general one that many listeners would have.
They would say, look, what has actually happened in the last 25 years in the longhouse era, as you describe it, is, guess what? We removed restrictions on women’s advancement, and they started outcompeting men. They’re not longhousing men, they’re just getting the promotions that men used to get and succeeding in corporate America where men used to succeed.
And yes, there are specific cases like the military where physical differences between men and women matter. Maybe there you could say gender equality has gone too far because it ignores those physical differences. But when you’re talking about corporate America or political America or any of these environments, women are succeeding. Men aren’t.
Now men are complaining that women are oppressing them. Isn’t the longhouse just a long, male whine about a failure to adequately compete and you’re pretending, “Oh, for the days of the steppe barbarians!” but maybe you should suck it up and actually compete on the grounds that we have in 21st-century America?
What do you say to that?
Keeperman: Yeah, it’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask. I do think over the last however many decades there have been a number of changes in the workplace that can be attributed to women, very talented women, taking on leadership roles and succeeding in those roles, therefore introducing more women into the workplace based on that success. I think it’s perfectly fine for me to concede to that.
The point I’m making is that by introducing this new distribution of personnel into public life, it has an effect on how these institutions are run and the norms that these institutions run on. Then it becomes an empirical question: Have they changed for the better, or have they changed for the worse?
I think most people look around at the various institutions — whether it’s media, academia, or corporate boardrooms — that have found themselves in spasms over D.E.I. stuff over the last decade. Are they more efficient or are they less efficient? Are they working properly?
My argument would be that, very self-evidently, the institutions in which all of these changes have occurred are now performing worse than they used to. And that is, at least in part, attributable to this change in norms. And this change in norms in turn is attributable to this change in personnel.
Douthat: Now a more personal objection, rooted in my own religious commitments. As you say, I have a lot of sympathy for the broad view that late modern life has become decadent and some sense of possibility, of action, of human capacity is really important to getting us either out of this trench or through whatever weird bottleneck digital life and A.I. are going to create. I agree with all that.
However, I’m also a Christian. All of the authors that I’ve mentioned who are part of the vitalist tradition — Nietzsche, Rand, Bronze Age Pervert — see themselves operating in opposition to Christianity. They see Christianity as fundamentally either a religion of the weak, or a religion of women, that it’s against the erotic.
When I look at the right-wing counterculture right now, I see people who are really into traditionalist Catholicism and whatnot, but there’s also a lot of people who, in their own story about what went wrong with the right — the normie right, the boring right of Kevin McCarthy — they think, at some level, it was a bunch of weak, thin, milk-drinking Christians who didn’t understand that what is actually best in life is to crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.
Keeperman: Sure.
Douthat: I’m curious, what is your attitude toward those debates? What’s your attitude toward Christianity and religion?
Keeperman: My belief is that there’s a tremendous amount of synchronicity between these two modes of operating in the world. It’s not just my belief. My favorite author, Ernst Junger — actually, Passage Press comes from his book, “Forest Passage” — there’s a great book of letters between him and Martin Heidegger. Junger’s view is that none of this vitalism is sustainable without religion, and actually Christianity, specifically, and that our idea of poetics and the inscrutable forces of the universe — against which our individual will is being tested at all times, and which a vitalist view of the world is insisting we’re constantly pushing against — all has to live inside of this framework of Christianity. So I don’t think these things are incompatible.
Douthat: Junger, if I’m remembering his trajectory correctly, was part of the German right. He’s not a Nazi, but he serves in the Third Reich, and he’s not someone who listeners should think of as like Heiddeger, who goes Nazi in that way, but Junger remains very much on the anti-liberal right throughout that period.
My sense of him is that he did have a view of Christianity as you describe, to some degree, but it was Christianity as a useful force for resisting the degradation of modernity and so on. Then he does actually become a Catholic in very old age. So you get to be a vitalist for many decades, and then at the end, it’s time to succumb to full Christianity. It seems to me that in vitalism, there are people who are anti-Christian, like Bronze Age Pervert, like the Nazis.
Keeperman: Sure.
Douthat: And then there are people who want to put it to use. But I’m a little ambivalent about having my religion put to use in that way.
Keeperman: Your concern is that it’s merely being cynically operationalized.
Douthat: Not even cynically. It’s more like Christianity is this great mythic structure within which we can operate, and that’s not what I believe about Christianity. I think Christianity is a true myth and imposes constraints. I guess that’s part of it. The Christian doesn’t just think that nature imposes constraints, it’s that God imposes constraints as well.
Let’s talk now about Donald Trump. Trump starts as a cultural figure. Anyone who’s old enough to remember the Trump who existed before he became a politician remembers the tabloid fixture, the reality TV star, the self-creator whose life is, in a weird way, its own kind of work of American popular art.
You’ve written a bunch about Trump as a heroic figure. You’ve explicitly compared him to Aeneas, speaking of mythological heroes. Talk to me about that. Trump as hero — what does that mean?
Keeperman: I have a somewhat idiosyncratic view of Donald Trump as a man out of time. I wrote this article or essay called “Aeneas in Washington,” and the idea was that Donald Trump has revived — or assumed, really — this mythic stature. He’s a mythic hero.
Specifically, I have this concept — it’s not my concept, but I’ve applied it to Trump — of retro causality. Trump has this strange ability, in my view, to reconstitute the past. How we understand Trump and his life before he entered politics is not a strict linear thing that is unchanging in time and over the last five years in particular. Since he lost the 2020 election, this interim period where he was beset by these lawsuits and he was threatened with prison time and he was shot at and nearly killed, we can look back at his past and see a new narrative about his life that suggests the possibility of this kind of rebirth from this civilizational exhaustion that I think is really the core description of our present moment.
In this essay, I also point out this concept called charisma hunger. There was a prominent sociologist from the middle 20th century, Eric Erikson, who had this idea that in the modern world — and this has a lot to do with the loss of religious conviction and religious life — that we were in search of these figures, these heroes.
I’m very aware of the possibility that I’m succumbing to this charisma hunger that Erikson identified decades ago. Nonetheless, people’s reaction to Trump, their impression of him, I saw the other day: Did you see this wrestler who won the N.C.A.A. title?
Douthat: Yeah.
Keeperman: He’s draped in the American flag, this gladiator. And he gives this great big hug to Donald Trump. In so many ways, Trump is this great father of the American people — or a certain segment of the American people — who have embraced him. He’s not just a politician, he’s not just a president, he’s not just a TV star. To my mind, that speaks to this mythical character.
Douthat: My own view of Trump, as you probably know, has changed. I think we have each moved and shifted, and I’ve ended up closer to where you were four years ago, and you’ve gone a bit further. I had trouble from the beginning of seeing Trump as anything other than a symptom of decadence. You know, the reality TV host becomes president of the United States because he’s triumphing over all these mediocrities and failed politicians and so on. He is representing a kind of revolt against decadence, I agree — a desire for something more — but he manifests that decadence at the same time. That was my basic take.
Then over the same period that you have come to see him as a heroic figure, I’ve come to see him as someone who has a more providential place in history, who is still part of a decadent era — maybe is still more of an antihero than a hero — but is bigger than I thought. There is some of that retro causality. Once you have Trump surviving the assassination attempt, you read that back into the past.
Keeperman: Yes.
Douthat: But I wouldn’t go as far as you do. I think part of the reason maybe connects back to what we were just going back and forth about, about my Christian doubts about vitalism. To me, I look at Trump and I see someone who has more capacities than I credited him with at the start, but the capacities that he lacks are restraint, magnanimity, a sense of moral limitation. I think that lack is connected to the fact that I don’t think he’s fundamentally religious. I think maybe he believes in Providence now that Providence saved him, but not in any kind of conventionally Christian way.
I think it’s the reason why it’s both reasonable for liberals to worry about where that appetitive side of him takes us, but also to worry about, again, the chaos and mismanagement and all the things that also come in from an absence of restraint.
Keeperman: I think that’s fair. I’d also say for others who share your view in this conflict between your religious convictions and what Trump might represent, this is squarely within our civil religious tradition. If you think about the way that for most of our history, really up until the Obama years, we thought about our founding figures and the way that they’re presented in art and the way they’re written about in our political and civil religious texts, they are quite explicitly divinely guided. The hand of God is reaching down and moving Thomas Jefferson — who also was not religious in any meaningful respect — and George Washington and John Adams, etc., and placing them. The hand of fate is on top of them.
To imagine that Trump is reviving that tradition or is now occupying that same role is not in contradiction to this long tradition of civil religion that we’ve had previously. It might require more proof for you. You might need to see better evidence.
Douthat: No, I think the issue is more that, if you see the hand of Providence operating through George Washington and John Adams in the founding of America, you could see the hand of Providence operating through Donald Trump in the chastisement of America. That he is a great man of history whose role is to chastise the liberal intelligentsia and the Never Trumpers and all these groups that failed to govern America, but it doesn’t mean that at the end of the day, he’s actually saving America. Sometimes it’s just a chastisement. I feel like that possibility deserves more consideration from people who have this mystical reaction to the drama of the Trump era.
On that question of restraint, part of what Trump does, part of his lack of restraint, is a refusal to respect any taboos, to push through whatever the taboos of progressive culture are. In the same way, part of the right-wing counterculture is all about taboo busting.
Keeperman: Yeah.
Douthat: But one of those taboos — and this is something that connects Trump in some ways to the counterculture — is taboos around race. Because there is a lot of racism in right-wing counterculture in various forms. It’s there in the online memes. It’s there in the would-be Nietzcheans, like B.A.P. [Bronze Age Pervert]. Anyone who goes from this conversation and gets a copy of “Bronze Age Mindset” and reads certain paragraphs will say, well, this guy is a terrific racist.
Keeperman: Sure.
Douthat: Before you interpret this, I want to offer three interpretations — I’ll take the interviewer’s privilege. I think you could say, OK, this is just about performative rebellion. A counterculture needs to shatter taboos. The taboos of liberal culture around race and gender.
Possibility 2: You want to reclaim and relegitimize parts of the American past. The American past had a lot of racists. You’re trying to restore and reconstitute a lost pre-progressive world. OK, it’s inherent in the project that you’re basically trying to rehabilitate writers and thinkers who contemporary piety would try to rule out because they held at the very least un-P.C. opinions.
Those are two arguments that I see as justifications, complete or not, for the racist stuff. But then there’s also the possibility that there’s just a serious belief in racial inequality. And maybe it’s not relegitimizing Nazism, but if you spend a fair amount of time online, it’s not that many degrees of separation from the right-wing counterculture to the people on x.com talking about what a great artist Hitler was, such a great artist.
I wanted to offer those as interpretations, and then have you talk about, why is the right-wing counterculture racist?
Keeperman: First, let me start by saying, I don’t think, actually, Adolf Hitler was a great artist. I think he was actually technically deficient in certain ways that are very obvious when you look at his painting —
Douthat: The technical deficiencies of Adolf Hitler are definitely there in a few places in his life. Yeah.
Keeperman: So, this is a really interesting question, and of course it’s worth addressing, and I think all of the things you said can simultaneously be true. And I think there’s a fourth point I want to add here, which is historically contextual.
We started this conversation by trying to think back to where this current moment of our cultural, social, intellectual, ideological path began, and we identified somewhere in the 2010s. Now, everything I’m about to talk about has precursors, but something else happens here around 2012 — maybe you identified the Trayvon Martin case — into 2013, 2014. Certainly there’s Michael Brown, “hands up, don’t shoot,” Black Lives Matter.
Simultaneously, we have a discussion happening in this country around immigration, and what would happen to this country if we started allowing people in from all over the world. Is everybody the same from everywhere? And if we’re going to have a sort of pluralistic democracy, what does that look like in a future where it’s not a predominantly white country? These are legitimate things to think about. A lot of people didn’t want us having these conversations previously.
Then what happens in 2013, 2014, and then scales up over the course of the 2010s, is this insistence — and again, I think this is important — coming from the left, that we have our moment of racial reckoning. A bunch of people are then being asked to have a difficult conversation about race. The prevailing view, which is taken on by The New York Times and by academia, by and large, is that any differences in outcomes among people can be ascribed to this infinitely amorphous, non-falsifiable, infinitely pervasive thing called systemic racism. And this is — if not intentionally, then de facto — the fault of the white population in the country.
The question then is, is that true? Are we allowed to look at the actual causes of why these discrepancies exist? And it is the case that when you look at these differences, they are not attributable to white racism. You can actually identify causes.
I think a lot of young people online, who are finding themselves getting the short end of the stick in this new regime of D.E.I., are reacting to it in kind. A lot of this racialized conversation is an answer to the insistence that all of these differences are white people’s fault.
Douthat: I buy a version of that argument. It’s very clear just from watching the culture that the ascendance of certain kinds of D.E.I. narratives — the Robin DiAngelo stuff, where it’s white people conducting psychological self-scrutinies, and so on, to root out the hidden structural racism in their heart — all of that contributes to an emergence much more than at any point in my lifetime of a distinct white racial identity among some conservatives — especially younger conservatives, online conservatives, people in the orbit of the right-wing counterculture.
This is several different questions, though. One, that still might be bad. If it’s bad to have a tribalist view of politics among nonwhites, isn’t it potentially bad to have a tribalist view among whites, even if you’re creating a political explanation where it’s understandable?
Question 2 is more concrete. How far back are you trying to turn the dial? I want to keep it in culture, so I’m going to give a cultural example. When I was growing up, I was a big fan of the Tintin comics — the boy detective, Captain Haddock, and so on. Those were a huge influence in my childhood in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Tintin books are from about 1920 through 1960. One of the early Tintin books is called “Tintin in the Congo.” And it’s super racist. It is a set of super racist caricatures of Africans that are not friendly ethnic stereotypes the way the appearance of Arabs and Italians are elsewhere in the book. They’re more racist than that.
I’ll just be really explicit. Would you publish Tintin? Like, “Tintin in the Congo” disappeared, right?
Keeperman: Yeah.
Douthat: Was it good that it sort of disappeared?
Keeperman: I’m not familiar with this exact book. In theory, yes.
Douthat: OK, you can pick another, but —
Keeperman: Yes.
Douthat: — Is it OK that certain things from the past that were very racist, disappear?
Keeperman: No. This is a very easy question for me to answer, and the answer is yes, I would publish it, on the assumption that it has a literary value that is independent from these objections you have to these racial caricatures.
Have you seen “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”
Douthat: The movie? Yes.
Keeperman: There’s this great moment in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” where Roger is handcuffed to the detective. This is causing them all sorts of problems, and the detective is trying to saw the handcuffs off. Roger, at one point, just slips out of the handcuffs in a sight gag. It’s funny. And the detective very angrily says to him, you’re telling me you could do that at any time? And Roger Rabbit says to him, no, only when it’s funny.
The upshot of this anecdote is that if it’s funny — and “funny” here is a stand-in for “has artistic value independent of the thing happening” — then it’s worth preserving and worth participating in.
So this “tin-tin” book — or “tan-tan” — I don’t know. Is that how —
Douthat: “Tan-tan” is the snobby French way of saying it. Most Americans would say “tin-tin.”
Keeperman: You know, I’m a vulgar populist Trump supporter. I don’t know how to pronounce these things.
Douthat: Trump supporters say “tin-tin,” New York Times columnists say “tan-tan.”
Keeperman: The operating question for me as a publisher is, is it funny? And, again, does it have value? Does it have artistic merit?
Then there’s also the archival thing. The archival function is very important for a publisher. These are important texts. They tell us something, not just about who we were, but in turn about who we are, and simply forgetting that these things existed does nobody any good at all. I don’t think we need to protect people from that kind of offense.
The other point, which is, “aren’t these views bad? We should disarm on these questions” — if I understand what you’re putting to me — I would say maybe, kind of, it depends, because these views do have consequences that we need to properly address, and the only way to address them is by being honest about causes. If we’re talking about, for example, crime rates, and we see uneven incarceration rates, and our answer is “there’s overpolicing,” and our solution to that is we get rid of police — well, that creates an increase in crime.
As long as disarming on these questions and not being honest about them allows for these social pathologies to rule over how we function in life, I think it’s bad and we need to be honest about them.
Douthat: But still there’s a question beyond that, about the cultural side of this — again, the world of memes and discourse and so on. Yes, it includes some rehabilitation of traditional conservative arguments about problems with the welfare state or the necessity of policing that are familiar from the 1980s and 1990s, that the progressive consensus suppressed.
That’s different, to me, from kids online posting racist memes and saying, it’s just irony, I’m just being ironic, I’m busting taboos. OK, but at a certain point, doesn’t the mask become the face? Doesn’t the irony become indistinguishable from just being against Black people?
And then for you as a publisher, it’s fine to say, we should preserve these, we should have historical memory, we should know what the past was like. But you would have a certain audience if Passage Press pivoted further right and was like, we’re publishing Rommel, books by Alexander Stephens and Confederates, and so on.
And — I guess this connects to the question about moral restraint — wouldn’t you worry about yourself in that scenario? Even if you thought, you don’t want these things banned, but do you want to be the person publishing all of that?
Keeperman: No, not necessarily. I think there are publishers who are already filling that niche. It’s not my responsibility to do that. But also, if you’re the kind of person who’s interested in that content, it’s been there and you can go find it, and I’m glad you can. I think actually these things are important for us to be able to discuss.
I would say this. To your concern about these racial taboos in particular, don’t treat them any differently than any other kind of political or social taboo. There’s some added, maybe, vitriol or sharpness to some of these memes we’re seeing now, but that’s mostly because this is a category of conversation that has been entirely verboten for a while now, at least several decades.
The problem with this particular topic, in my view, is it starts with the supposition that it’s firstly a moral question, and any morally decent person already agrees with these basic anti-racist premises. So to even raise the questions, it’s a mark against your character. We can’t even get to the point where we’re having the policy debate, and what that creates then is this environment in which people who want to have this debate have to figure out a way to talk about it and get through these filters.
I think the abrasive meme-making that you’re identifying when it comes to racial questions is a function of the manner in which this part of the discursive landscape has been previously closed off. If we open it back up and allow for sober conversation, then it’ll lose the power to sort of carry these memes. They just won’t be as interesting or funny because they’re not as taboo.
Douthat: I guess I’m more skeptical of that, not in the sense that I think that if you allow or encourage certain debates, that suddenly the U.S. turns into the Antebellum South or Nazi Germany, but just that — and there’s versions of this on the left and issues around antisemitism that are a separate conversation, but there is some overlap — I think it is bad for people to be in a position where they are questioning not, “What is the proper design of welfare policy and policing?” but, “Do we need to give some reconsideration to Hitler’s views about Jewish conspiracies?”
I’m not accusing you of taking that position. I’m just saying, right now, when I look at these spaces, I’m a child of the 1990s: I think it was OK to live in a world where there were taboos about Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow South, and that didn’t have to preclude having honest debates about race and crime and policing and all of these things.
When I look at the moral character that is encouraged by racist meme culture, I’m not worried they’re going to take over, I’m just worried about them, I guess.
Keeperman: OK. I would just ask, what exactly are you worried about?
Let me start with this. First of all, lies are brittle. Ultimately, they fall apart. Truth is durable. And to build anything that’s lasting, it has to rest on top of truth. We have to start there, that’s my view. In order to discover truth, we need to be willing to test our assumptions about everything, and continuously test those assumptions. If we don’t continuously test those assumptions, we don’t just forget what we believe, we forget why we believe those things.
I think this is actually something the left has fallen in the trap of. The left has forgotten how to make the argument for their own beliefs because they’ve denied anybody who objects to their underlying assumptions about the world. I think it would be a mistake for us to erect a kind of discursive force field around certain categories of questions in an effort to preclude the kind of discomfort.
This concern that you’re articulating to me is very vague. I don’t actually know what you’re worried about. People have been questioning these narratives for a long time. David Irving has been challenging the Holocaust for a long time. Is it better to not have those conversations? I don’t think it is. I think we should just let it out. It can exist in the world.
Douthat: This is the last thing I’ll say. You started out talking about your sense — I think you would put it this way — that there was anti-white racism at work in progressive politics and culture in the last five or 10 years.
Keeperman: Correct.
Douthat: And that there was a critique of whiteness as this miasmic force that functionally applied a suspicion and hostility toward anyone who was white, certainly anyone who was white and male.
Keeperman: Correct.
Douthat: I wouldn’t go as far as you with that, but I don’t think that’s wrong. I think it was bad.
I’m comfortable saying it would also be bad for there to be more and more anti-Black racism or antisemitic curiosity on the right, because it affects our shared life. And, in ways that have cultural effects and political effects, I think they have effects on the Trump administration. One of the ways that the Trump administration may fail, as I said before, is that — this is not a racial issue, per se — but that it regards some of its fellow citizens with a certain kind of contempt. That’s a problem for a would-be great leader. I think contempt is bad. I think racism encourages a kind of contempt.
I don’t have a single “America is going to become Nazi” fear, but I do have a fear about the impact of taboo-busting around race on the kinds of institutions that right-wing people might build and so on.
Keeperman: I understand where the concerns are coming from, I guess. I think it’s unfounded. I don’t think it actually will materialize into something real and something we’ll have to worry about. I think actually the alternative presents a much worse possibility. We saw some of that with the “Great Awokening” or the post–George Floyd 2020 impulse to not just blame white people for this subordinate position of people of color, per se, but then make actual policy choices or institutional choices to try to level that by harming white people.
What I’d say here is, the reason that was bad was not because it pointed to racial discrepancies, but because it was wrong. It didn’t pass the test of evidence. The question is not just, does the discrepancy exist? The question is, why? And if we don’t allow ourselves to have an honest conversation about that, what fills the vacuum is the most incendiary and most harmful explanations.
It’s actually, in my view, incumbent on people in positions of prominence who can look at these questions soberly, who can evaluate the evidence and make frank statements about the explanations for these disparities.
Douthat: Let’s just talk briefly about the future. How lasting do you think that the vibe shift — or whatever else it is — will turn out to be? At the start, I introduced you as the host of an inaugural ball. You’re appearing on a New York Times podcast — very prominent position. But Passage Press is a boutique publisher.
Keeperman: Yeah.
Douthat: And we didn’t really get into this, but there is obviously a more mass market side of the vibe shift — the Joe Rogans and Theo Vonns, all the way to Andrew Tate. Vitalist. All of that is there and part of the culture. But even that still, to me, exists in a pretty separate universe from the people who make pop music or TV or who publish mass market fiction. I’m curious: Do you see that part of the culture moving rightward? Books, movies, TV — what would that look like?
Keeperman: Yeah, I do. I actually think it’s going to be a full-scale vibe shift.
Douthat: Full scale?
Keeperman: Full scale.
Douthat: Like Reagan era level? Or bigger?
Keeperman: Yeah, I do think it very well could be Reagan era level. I was alive, but I was too young to remember what the Reagan era was like.
Douthat: You were absorbing his charisma from in the cradle.
Keeperman: I’ve watched enough John Hughes movies to understand how that expresses itself in popular culture. I think we’re going to have precisely the same kind of vibe shift that infiltrates these mainstream media forms.
Here’s an example. I sit around with my family every once in a while and we watch “American Idol.” Carrie Underwood, who sang at the inauguration, is one of the judges on “American Idol.” Just the mere fact that this massive pop star — who has one of the biggest platforms in pop music — is simultaneously affiliating herself with the Trump administration is enough to suggest that there is something meaningful and enduring and broad about this vibe shift.
You also have, I believe it’s Larry Ellison’s son who just bought Paramount Pictures. He is a conservative. They’re going to be doing these “Top Gun”–esque films that really embrace a patriotic zeal, I guess you could say. Now, I warned at the beginning that it would be a mistake for conservatives to simply adopt a kind of nostalgia and a sentimental patriotism. So I don’t hope that is all there is, but that’s a perfect place for that kind of ethos and aesthetic to exist in these big blockbuster movies, and I suspect they will. People are certainly exhausted by wokeness.
It’s not just that the right and this right-coded art is ascendant. It’s as much to do with the fact that this new “Snow White” release is very unpopular. People don’t want this stuff anymore, and so there’s going to be a natural opening for newer, more, let’s just say, vitalist kind of art.
Douthat: Last question. Donald Trump calls you up. He says you’re in charge of the National Endowment for the Arts, and you’re setting up a program to celebrate America’s 250th. Part of that program is you’re going to ask every high school senior — public high school senior, maybe, use the leverage remaining in the half-dismantled Department of Education to enforce this — to read one book and see one movie. What do you recommend?
Keeperman: This is good. I’m not going to hide the ball from the audience. You put this question to me earlier this morning.
Douthat: I wanted a good answer. When you ask and suddenly you’re like, oh the God— are you going to say “The Godfather?” Because if it’s —
Keeperman: No, no, no, no.
Douthat: OK, good. See, there you go.
Keeperman: I’m not going to say “The Godfather,” although I did have difficulty spontaneously coming up with a good answer.
What one book sort of encapsulates what I’m trying to accomplish with this? The thing I’ve thought long and hard about — and what I saw when I was a lecturer at UCI — there’s been this severing of a continuity between the past and the present, and I think it’s an intentional severing. These kids, they’re not well read. They don’t really know anything. I spent half of my classes just teaching Wikipedia-tier history just so we can have enough context to have the conversation about the actual stuff we’re talking about. One thing that I think is much needed is to reestablish a continuity — a literary, intellectual cultural continuity with the past.
The book I would choose for this is “Moby Dick.” It’s a very obvious, clichéd choice, but it’s a book that everybody from all ages, if you’re an American, should know. I think “Moby Dick” is essentially American, and in particular, represents an East Coast American founding. It’s man against nature and God, and there’s also the chaos of the plurality of the cast. It’s very American in that way. It’s this industrious, pluralistic, almost democracy on the boat. It’s also transcendence through conquest, which is a very American idea.
My counterpoint to that — which I think is a nice coda — is that “No Country for Old Men” would be the movie. “Moby Dick” is conquest and it’s The Atlantic, and now Cormac McCarthy and “No Country for Old Men,” the Coen Brothers film, is the border, the terminus of the West, the border with Mexico. It’s also late epic. It’s the exhaustion of American conquest. And there’s this force at the center of the book — this inscrutable, mysterious, supernatural force. In “Moby Dick,” it’s the thing they’re chasing, it’s the whale.
Douthat: It’s chasing them.
Keeperman: Right. In “No Country for Old Men,” it’s evil. Fate is coming to exact its payback for what America has become. So it’s America at the end — this moment of civilizational exhaustion — and it’s precisely this point that we need to escape out of.
This is my hope for the future: How do we take the metaphysics of “No Country for Old Men” and create a rebirth to our national identity, our national character, our inner primordial being, and find that life force that it can once again extend beyond these borders?
Douthat: All right, on that chthonic note — Jonathan Keeperman, thank you so much for joining me.
Keeperman: Thanks, Ross. This was great.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “Interesting Times” was produced by Elisa Gutierrez, Andrea Betanzos, Sophia Alvarez Boyd and Katherine Sullivan. It was edited by Jordana Hochman and Alison Bruzek. Engineering by Pat McCusker. Cinematography by Elliot deBruyn and Wes Overvold. Video editing by Arpita Aneja. Archival images by Amanda Su and Andrea Betanzos. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Michelle Harris and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Directed by Jonah M. Kessel. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times with Ross Douthat.” He is the author, most recently, of “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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