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.