The New Lords

I. The Parallel Confusion

On the left, the terms blur: liberal, leftist, progressive, woke. Each accuses the other of misuse. The confusion serves the thing itself.

On the right, the same fog descends: conservative, nationalist, populist, fascist. The accusers and the accused alike grope in darkness. What is this thing that rises? Is it the old fascism returned? Is it conservatism restored? Or is it something new—wearing old masks, speaking old words, but pursuing ends neither Burke nor Mussolini would recognize?

Let us cut through.

II. What Conservatism Was

Conservatism—classical conservatism—was a doctrine of limits.

Not limits on government alone, as liberalism proposed, but limits on change itself. Burke looked at the French Revolution and saw not liberation but destruction—the annihilation of institutions that had taken centuries to grow, replaced by abstractions dreamed up by philosophers who had never governed anything.

The conservative said: society is not a machine to be redesigned but an organism that has evolved. Its customs, hierarchies, and prejudices—yes, even its prejudices—encode wisdom we cannot fully articulate. Tear them down and you do not get utopia; you get the guillotine, then the Terror, then Napoleon.

Oakeshott refined it: politics is not the pursuit of dreams but the attendance to arrangements. The conservative disposition is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried, the actual to the possible.

This conservatism was skeptical of power—including and especially concentrated power. It feared the radical reformer precisely because he sought to use the state to remake society. Better the muddle of tradition than the clarity of ideology.

This conservatism is largely dead. What calls itself conservative today does not seek to preserve; it seeks to capture. It does not fear concentrated power; it races to seize it. When the tech oligarch funds the think tank and the think tank staffs the administration and the administration dismantles the regulatory state—this is not Burke. This is something else.

III. What Fascism Was

Fascism was a doctrine of the state.

Against liberal individualism, it said: the individual is nothing; the nation is everything. Against Marxist class war, it said: the nation transcends class; workers and owners unite in national destiny. Against conservative caution, it said: history calls for action, for will, for the seizure of the future.

Mussolini was explicit: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

The fascist state did not wither; it grew. It organized labor and capital alike into corporate bodies under state direction. It built highways, drained marshes, launched wars. It was visible—flags, rallies, uniforms, the Leader’s face everywhere. It demanded not mere compliance but enthusiasm. The citizen was to be mobilized, not managed.

And it was honest about hierarchy. There was no pretense of equality. The strong ruled; the weak obeyed; the nation was a body with the Leader as its head. You knew where you stood. You knew who commanded. You could resist or submit with full knowledge of the stakes.

Fascism was defeated. Not by its own contradictions, like Marxism, but by force of arms. It overreached, made war on the world, and the world destroyed it. Its corpse was displayed at Nuremberg. Its name became the universal term of political abuse.

And yet—the defeat was so total, the discrediting so complete, that fascism became impossible to repeat. Any movement that looks like fascism, sounds like fascism, organizes like fascism, will be recognized and opposed. The antibodies are too strong.

So: if you sought power today—real power, lasting power—would you repeat the forms that guarantee resistance?

Or would you find new forms?

IV. The Mutation

The new right does not seek to strengthen the state. It seeks to hollow it.

Not to abolish—that would be noticed, opposed. But to transform: to maintain the external forms of democracy while draining them of substance. Elections continue; they merely do not decide anything important. Legislatures convene; they ratify decisions made elsewhere. Courts rule; their rulings are rendered moot by those who control the infrastructure of daily life.

The state retains two functions: the projection of force outward (military, borders) and the protection of property inward (police, contracts). Everything else—education, health, communication, transportation, the organization of work and leisure—migrates to private hands.

Private hands. Here is the crux.

Fascism said: the state directs capital. The state tells the industrialist what to produce, at what price, for what purpose. Volkswagen builds cars for the Volk. Krupp builds tanks for the Reich. The businessman is a servant of the nation.

The new right inverts this: capital captures the state. The state becomes a service provider to private power—maintaining the conditions for accumulation, suppressing threats to property, lending legitimacy to decisions made in boardrooms. The politician is a servant of the investor.

This is not fascism. It is feudalism—but a feudalism beyond anything the medieval world knew.

V. The Thiel Vision

Let us name the theorist of this transformation: Peter Thiel.

Thiel understood—from Girard, from Strauss, from decades of political economy—that direct confrontation with the democratic state is futile. The masses will rally to its defense. The antibodies will activate. You will be named fascist, and you will lose.

The alternative: capture the state through capital, then hollow it from within.

First: achieve monopoly. Competition is for losers. The goal is not to win the market but to escape it—to achieve a position so dominant that you cannot be challenged. Google in search. Amazon in e-commerce. Facebook in social graphs. These are not companies; they are territories.

Second: become infrastructure. Once your platform is essential, you govern by default. You do not need to pass laws; you set terms of service. You do not need police; you have content moderation. You do not need courts; you have dispute resolution. You exercise sovereign powers without sovereign accountability.

Third: hollow the regulator. The state that might constrain you must be weakened—not destroyed, but captured and defunded. Staff the agencies with your allies. Cut their budgets. Overwhelm them with complexity. Mock them as “bureaucrats” while ensuring they cannot function. The libertarian rhetoric provides cover: you are not seizing power; you are liberating the market.

Fourth: preserve democratic ritual. This is essential. The elections must continue. The speeches must be made. The flags must wave. The appearance of self-governance must be maintained, for legitimacy depends on it. But the actual decisions—who may speak, who may transact, who may work, who may travel—are made by those who control the platforms.

This is not fascism’s coercive tyranny. It is contractual lordship. You know who rules you—Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, the names are public, the companies are known. You can identify the lord precisely. The relationship is negotiated through terms of service, entered by consent, governed by contract rather than command.

The consent is not perfectly free—monopoly conditions constrain choice, network effects lock you in. But it is consent nonetheless. You clicked “I agree.” You chose the service. You may leave, at a cost. This is not serfdom by birth; it is serfdom by contract, revocable in principle if not always in practice.

And crucially: the lords can be competed with. The monopoly is not permanent by law but by market position—and market positions erode. The next platform may displace the current one. The mechanism of displacement exists, even if it operates slowly.

VI. The Structure of the New Feudalism

Observe the emerging order:

Layered sovereignty. The federal state handles external affairs—war, diplomacy, borders. Internal governance fragments: to platforms (who govern speech, commerce, attention), to localities (who compete for investment by offering favorable terms), to corporations (who govern their workers more intimately than any state could).

Private justice. Disputes are resolved by arbitration, by content moderation, by terms of service—not by courts. The corporation is judge, jury, and executioner within its domain. You have no rights; you have permissions, revocable at will.

Surveillance as governance. The medieval lord could not know what his serfs said to each other. The platform lord knows everything. Your location, your purchases, your messages, your heart rate. Governance becomes algorithmic: you are not commanded; you are nudged, shaped, optimized.

Competition among subjects. Localities compete to attract corporate investment—offering tax breaks, regulatory exemptions, union suppression. Workers compete for algorithmic favor—rating each other, optimizing metrics, performing enthusiasm. The lord need not coerce; he need only rank.

Democratic legitimation of oligarchy. The genius of the system: it is chosen. You voted for the politicians who deregulated. You clicked “I agree” on the terms of service. You bought the products. The cage was built with your consent, and so you cannot call it a cage.

VII. The Genealogy

How did we arrive here?

The old right—the right of throne and altar—was destroyed by liberalism. The divine right of kings gave way to the consent of the governed. Hierarchy was delegitimized. Equality became sacred.

But equality under liberalism meant procedural equality: equal rights, equal standing before the law. It did not mean equal outcomes. And capitalism, unleashed, produced inequality beyond anything the old aristocracy had known.

Fascism was one response: restore hierarchy openly, through the nation and the state. It was defeated.

The new right learned from that defeat. Open hierarchy fails. Democratic legitimacy is too powerful. You cannot abolish equality; you can only make it irrelevant.

How? By moving power outside the sphere where equality applies.

The state is subject to democratic accountability. The corporation is not. The state must treat citizens equally. The platform may treat users however it wishes. The state is public; its actions can be scrutinized. The algorithm is proprietary; its operations are secret.

Transfer power from state to corporation, and you transfer it from the realm of democratic accountability to the realm of contract and market. You do not abolish the vote; you make voting cover fewer decisions. The decisions that remain—who may speak on which platform, which services are available, what terms govern exchange—are made by visible lords through explicit (if asymmetric) agreements.

This is the Thiel project. Not fascism—fascism is state coercion. This is post-political: the recognition that contractual private power can govern what state power cannot, precisely because it operates through consent rather than command.

VIII. Why This May Be Preferable

Here is what must be said plainly: the new lordship may be better than the alternative.

The therapeutic left colonizes the interior. It demands not compliance but confession. It pathologizes dissent. It dissolves the self into a patient requiring endless treatment. You cannot maintain a private realm of resistance because your private thoughts are the site of intervention.

The platform right wants only behavior. It extracts data and compliance. It does not require belief. You may use Amazon while hating Bezos. You may drive for Uber while cursing the algorithm. Your interior remains your own. The lord wants your labor and your data; he does not want your soul.

This is no small thing.

The serf under the medieval lord could curse his master in his heart. He could dream of freedom, tell subversive jokes, maintain a self untouched by power. The therapeutic subject cannot—her resistance is reclassified as symptom, her interiority is the battleground.

Legibility matters too. When Thiel or Musk exercises power, you know. You can name the lord. You can identify the enemy. You can hate clearly and therefore resist clearly. The therapeutic manager exercises power while denying it exists—”I’m just here to help,” “This is best practice,” “We’re concerned about your wellbeing.” Power wrapped in care is harder to fight than power held openly.

And there is competition. MySpace died. Blockbuster died. Nokia died. The mechanism of displacement exists. What is the equivalent on the left? How does a university DEI office “go out of business”? There is no P&L to check it, no competitor to displace it, no customer who can switch providers. It grows without limit because it faces no market test.

The business as unit of agency has virtues the activist group lacks:

• Clear success criteria (profit, or death)

• Natural mortality (firms fail and disappear)

• Legible structure (you know who commands)

• Exit as default (customers leave, workers quit)

The activist group has:

• Unfalsifiable mission (justice is never achieved)

• Institutional immortality (the cause never ends)

• Diffuse authority (who leads the movement?)

• Exit as betrayal (leaving is complicity)

Given the choice between competing in a market and fighting in a crusade—between lords who want compliance and priests who want confession—the lords may be preferable.

This does not make them good. It makes them tolerable. And in politics, tolerable is no small achievement.

IX. The Comparison

What, then, distinguishes the three?

Conservatism was skeptical of power—all power. It sought to preserve institutions that distributed and checked power. It feared the radical with a plan—whether that radical wore a red cap or a black shirt.

Fascism was the open seizure of state power in the name of the nation. It was visible, honest about hierarchy, demanding of loyalty. It could be seen, and therefore resisted. It could be defeated, and was.

The new right is the transfer of sovereignty to private hands under cover of freedom rhetoric. It does not seize the state; it buys it. It does not demand loyalty; it demands only compliance. It does not build a coercive hierarchy; it builds a contractual one—of platforms and market position, terms of service and user agreements.

The crucial difference from fascism: it can be competed with. The platform can be disrupted. The monopoly can be broken. The lord can be displaced by a better lord. There is no Führer whose death ends nothing, only firms that rise and fall.

The crucial difference from the therapeutic left: it does not require belief. You need not confess. You need not be healed. You need only perform your function and accept your payment. Your soul remains your own.

Fascism was the boot stamping on a face forever.

The therapeutic left is the face being hollowed out by caring hands, scraped clean of resistance, then filled with approved sentiments—and thanking the hands for their gentleness.

The new right is the face watching a screen, free to look away—but knowing that looking away has costs, and that the screen is watching back.

X. What Remains To Be Said

This is not an endorsement. It is a comparison.

The new lordship has real costs. Privacy dissolves. The unplatformed cannot function. Power concentrates in few hands. The market test, while real, operates slowly—monopolies persist for decades. And the libertarian rhetoric, however useful as cover, obscures what is actually happening: not the absence of governance but its privatization.

Yet costs must be weighed against alternatives. And the alternative on offer—the therapeutic management of souls, the pathologization of dissent, the colonization of interiority—may be worse.

The new lords want your labor. The new priests want your confession.

The new lords can be named, competed with, perhaps eventually displaced. The new priests deny they hold power at all—and how do you fight what insists it is only helping you?

The new lords build platforms you can leave, at a cost. The new priests build a consensus you cannot escape, because escape is diagnosed as illness.

If these are the options—and they may be—then clarity demands we admit: the lords are preferable to the priests.

Not because lordship is good. Because legible power is better than invisible power. Because extraction is better than colonization. Because a cage you can see is a cage you might one day break.

The old lords wore crowns and demanded fealty. The new lords wear hoodies and demand only compliance. This is not freedom. But it may be the better unfreedom.