Why are we ruled by barbarians?

Author: Noah Smith (Noahpinion) URL: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-are-we-ruled-by-barbarians One-line: “The core belief of the New Right is that Western Civilization is being invaded by barbarians — people from non-Western civilizations, who come to the West under the guise of immigration and then proceed to try to overthrow the West from within.”

Key claims

• The Trump administration proposed staging a public televised execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan by firing squad — polling showed every demographic except MAGA Republican men opposed this, after which Trump cancelled the livestream. Noah Smith uses this as the opening exhibit for the New Right’s embrace of premodern, atavistic norms.
• The New Right’s conception of “Western Civilization” is new in American history: the Old Right of 1910–1935 was isolationist toward Europe and viewed South and East European immigrants as racially alien. Today’s New Right views America and Europe as a single civilizational entity united by European racial descent, Christian heritage, and reverence for both.
• Key New Right figures — Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, JD Vance — repeatedly invoke European immigration from Muslim-majority countries as the central civilizational threat, framing it as an invasion parallel to the one American soldiers repelled on D-Day beaches in 1944.
• “The Flight 93 Election” by Michael Anton is identified as the founding manifesto of the New Right: it argues that conservatives have been “meeker than fearful, beaten dogs” and must abandon the liberal rules of engagement to survive.
• The New Right’s romance with Putin’s Russia is explained ideologically, not just financially: rightists see Russia as the living instantiation of Western toughness — savage, unconstrained, unwilling to be soft — even as Ukraine inflicts far more casualties on Russian forces than vice versa.
• American rightists have begun rehabilitating historical right-wing authoritarians — Francisco Franco, Augusto Pinochet, and increasingly Adolf Hitler — not for their ideology but as proof that savagery works where niceness fails.
• The New Right’s embrace of brutality is also a coping mechanism for demographic unpopularity: rightist figures are deeply unpopular with the American public, and the “diamond-hard vanguard” fantasy of a tiny ruthless minority defeating any number of soft enemies substitutes for broad coalition-building.
• Elon Musk actively supports Germany’s AfD; JD Vance has met with AfD leaders and campaigned for Hungary’s Viktor Orban; Trump has repeatedly voiced support for France’s Marine Le Pen — forming what Smith calls “a Western Civilization Internationale.”

Notable quotes

“The core belief of the New Right, in other words, is that Western Civilization is being invaded by barbarians — people from non-Western civilizations, who come to the West under the guise of immigration and then proceed to try to overthrow the West from within, with the aid of local leftists and progressive elites.”

“When I say ‘Western civilization’, I don’t mean it in the Cold War sense of ‘the free world’. It doesn’t include Japan or Latin America, and it very much does include Russia. The Western Civilization that the New Right believes in is defined by three things: 1) European racial descent, 2) Christian heritage, and 3) veneration of the previous two things.”

“Donald Trump Jr. told a gathering of evangelical Christians: ‘We’ve turned the other cheek, and I understand, sort of, the biblical reference — I understand the mentality — but it’s gotten us nothing. OK? It’s gotten us nothing while we’ve ceded ground in every major institution in our country.’”

“Rightists view Hasan — a Palestinian American who served in the U.S. military but murdered his fellow servicemembers because he was angry about America killing Muslims in Afghanistan — as typical of the invading anti-Western barbarian horde. By executing him on live TV, they probably thought they could demonstrate that the West can be equally savage in its own defense.”

“Republicans have been oohing and ahhing over Russia’s hypermasculine military recruitment ads for years, despite the fact that the Ukrainians inflict many more casualties on the Russians than vice versa. Push-ups and big biceps don’t win wars — nor do massacres and war crimes — but they comfort American rightists with the knowledge that somewhere out there are White, culturally Christian men who can match the hordes of the Middle East in savagery.”

“The only way for rightists to sustain the illusion that they would have the upper hand in a post-democratic America — that they would triumph in the climactic civil war that suffuses their perfervid daydreams — is to imagine themselves as a diamond-hard vanguard, a small fist of ruthless men who can defeat any number of effeminate, emasculated enemies, ‘the three percent’ who are willing to pick up a gun and kill.”

“A successful movement needs broad popular appeal, not just the willingness to out-barbarize the enemy. But the New Right appears set on pursuing the strategy it has laid out for itself, and all we the rest of us can do is to understand how they think, and prepare for their next mistake.”

How it connects

• Noah Smith — author; this is the sequel to his March 2025 “Understanding America’s New Right” piece in Noahpinion / The Free Press
• Donald Trump — central figure; Smith argues Trump is not ideologically “of” the New Right but became its vessel and standard-bearer
• Authoritarianism — the ideological core being described: embracing brutality as a political strategy
• Populism — the factional-minority strategy Smith describes (majority-of-a-majority-of-a-majority) as the New Right’s operating model
• Immigration — the animating grievance; European Muslim immigration is the central threat in New Right worldview