Suzanne Schneider in Strange Matters:
When John McCain selected former Alaska governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate in 2008, it was the gift that kept on giving to the United States’ media and entertainment establishment.
For the mostly liberal chattering classes, her folksy mama bear affect, ignorance about basic geopolitical facts (the existence of two Koreas among them), and possible illiteracy were far more interesting than John McCain’s platform. Fifteen years later, Palin’s candidacy is far less amusing than it was to noughtie-era Daily Show writers, recognized instead as a pivotal moment in the emergence of movements that today constitute the New Right. From the Tea Partiers and Obama birthers to Trump stans, white nationalists, and anti-vaxxers, Sarah Palin walked so they could run (into the Capitol).
Outside observers peering into the abyss that is the New Right often envision it as a coherent force. The real divide, we hear, is between the conservative establishment – “respectable” Republicans of the George W. Bush type – and upstarts like J.D. Vance and lunatics like Marjorie Taylor Greene. If you’re able to forget the War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq, CIA black sites and the routinization of domestic surveillance, one might indeed prefer the oil-painting ex-president to Greene’s fleet of Jewish space lasers. But this divide is not the only fault line that runs through contemporary right-wing politics. Indeed, we find that the coalition of New Right Forces – a motley crew of techno-libertarians, America Firsters, post-liberals, economic nationalists, monarcho-fascists, vitalists, social conservatives, conspiracy theorists, incels, racists, and anti-Semites – is hardly proceeding in lockstep formation. In the words of one of its leading funders, Peter Thiel, the New Right is “a very ragtag Rebel Alliance. It’s like we have diversity on our side.”