The author argues that paleoconservative rhetoric—viewing politics as existential struggle over borders, demographics, and elite betrayal—has become the dominant language of the right, even as its actual policy program hasn't fully won out. This shift stems from "enrabblement": a growing conviction that major institutions are hostile foreign powers rather than imperfect shared foundations, which has fractured the conservative coalition and made meritocracy itself suspect when its winners aren't "your kind of people."

• The right's estrangement from universities, media, and professional institutions correlates with three decades of educational sorting—Democrats increasingly college-educated, Republicans increasingly non-college—but this isn't about intelligence; it's about one's concrete relationship to civil society institutions.
• Hegel's distinction between poor and rich rabble explains the current coalition: the poor rabble feels excluded from civil society's rewards, the rich rabble resents its obligations and restraints (Trump exemplifies this), yet both demand recognition and security without reciprocal commitment to the institutions that make those goods possible.
• Enrabblement isn't irrational or external—it's the competitive logic of civil society stripped of its civility, an endogenous product of the system itself, which raises the hard question of whether institutions can be repaired without making the underlying social competition itself less barbarous.

Heritage president Kevin Roberts is aligning the think tank with Paul Gottfried’s Chronicles magazine and its paleoconservative network, signaling a shift toward figures tied to white nationalism. The article chronicles Samuel Francis’s praise for David Duke and extremist groups, and Gottfried’s defense of those views, to show how paleo ideologies are gaining influence in mainstream conservative institutions.

• Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts is publicly partnering with Chronicles magazine and Paul Gottfried after Gottfried defended Roberts over the Tucker Carlson/Nick Fuentes controversy.
• Samuel Francis, a leading paleoconservative writer once published in Chronicles, urged David Duke in 1991 to build a nationwide movement and praised his "respectable racism" as potentially more effective than mainstream GOP messaging.
• Francis also expressed admiration in 1985 for neo-Nazi group The Silent Brotherhood, praising their "determination to act" as a model for mobilizing right-wing revolt.
• Francis was fired from The Washington Times in 1995 after calling for whites to unite "in explicitly racial terms" and had defended the Southern Baptist Convention's refusal to apologize for slavery.

The author reports on Hungary’s election where Viktor Orbán faces a strong challenge from Péter Magyar amid rising economic hardship, linking today’s campaign to 19th-century American enthusiasm for Lajos Kossuth. He then examines how Nick Fuentes and other online paleocons have revived extremist ideas that William F. Buckley long tried to exclude from mainstream conservatism.

• Péter Magyar's Tisza party has pulled roughly even with Orbán's Fidesz in polls, driven by inflation that hit 25% and €17 billion in frozen EU funds, making this Orbán's toughest election in 16 years.
• American enthusiasm for Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth in the 1850s (drawing figures like Lincoln, Whitman, Marx, and Engels) prefigures today's cross-border fascination with Hungarian politics.
• Nick Fuentes and other online paleocons have repackaged extremist ideas that William F. Buckley deliberately excluded from National Review, successfully mainstreaming them for a new audience.