Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
-- W.B. Yeats
Most of the men I spoke with said that the president is abandoning his “America First” agenda, which is what attracted them to the Republican Party in the first place. Rather than defect to the Democratic Party, they want a more radical GOP—one led not by MAGA insiders such as J. D. Vance but by figures further to the right, who they believe can deliver on the promises that Trump has failed to keep on immigration and foreign policy. Some young activists, though, articulated a political vision that goes far beyond any Trump-campaign pledge. For them, the future of American conservatism should be rooted in a patriarchal version of Christianity and an unapologetic ethnonationalism.
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For Kai Schwemmer, who is the national political director for the College Republicans of America as well as Utah County’s deputy elections clerk, embracing overtly racial nationalism isn’t just good in itself. It’s shrewd politics. “If we go back to this kind of civic nationalism”—the idea that America is united by shared ideals rather than common ethnicity or culture—“I think the Republican Party will end up losing,” Schwemmer told me. “Nationalism is not a dirty word,” he continued. “We can’t retreat from it, and we can’t retreat from having a more conservative Republican Party.” He said that the party’s future leaders must “appeal to the fears and worries of the majority of Americans, who are white.”
Speaking of potential leaders, Schwemmer identified a “big three” for young conservatives: Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens. This “dissident” wing, Schwemmer said, has displaced the “old guard”—figures such as Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson who first drew many young conservatives into politics.
None of the conservative activists I spoke with endorsed Fuentes unequivocally, and a couple condemned him, distancing themselves from the “groyper” label that his white-nationalist followers embrace. A member of the College Republicans at a private Ohio university estimated that only a minority of his group’s membership considered themselves fans of Fuentes, and most rejected the streamer’s blatant anti-Semitism. But he also conceded that about three-quarters of them “broadly sympathize” with Fuentes’s views. Skepticism of Israel, he told me, is the “dominant narrative” among his peers.
The Turning Point president from the southeastern university, however, has observed something much warmer, and more worrisome, than broad sympathy: the belief that Fuentes is a more genuine representative than Trump of the America First vision, not in spite of his anti-Semitism but because of it. “Almost all of Gen Z hates the Jews,” he told me. In his Turning Point chapter, he said, “Fuentes is the guy."
The DSA, in fact, seems to despise the Democratic Party. Darializa Avila Chevalier has called Joe Biden a “rapist” and wrote “Fuck Kamala Harris” on social media. She proceeded to be nominated for a House race in New York last week by Democratic voters who presumably do not all share those feelings. The DSA now includes a growing caucus of supporters in Congress, has mayoral candidates well positioned to win in several big cities, and has plans to throw its weight behind a yet-to-be-determined presidential candidate in 2028.
The DSA’s feelings about Democrats encompass not only the party’s leadership but also the philosophical commitments that have guided it since the New Deal: a mixed economy undergirded by democratic values. Chevalier, for instance, joined a post–October 7 celebratory rally and portrayed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a defensive response to Western “bullying.” She previously called for seizing land and the means of production and has repeatedly praised communism.
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Militant anti-Zionism became a wedge that the group’s more radical activists used to drive away critics of authoritarianism on the left. In 2025, the group’s convention voted to officially remove its founding language allowing for the expulsion of members who worked for communist cells, and added a provision calling the Palestinian “right to resistance” a central tenet of the DSA. Having dismantled the guardrails that Harrington built to exclude communists, the group established new guardrails to exclude anybody opposed to Israel’s destruction. “Michael Harrington’s DSA is dead,” a dispatch from the proceedings gloated.
The DSA’s Red Star caucus was formed the year after the North Star caucus, in an apparent rebuke. It writes that nearly half of the members of the National Political Committee, the DSA’s highest leadership body, “openly identify as communists.”
These left-wing factions have realigned the organization in firm opposition to liberal democracy. In 2021, the DSA joined the São Paulo Forum, a communist-led international network—a move that would, one DSA member protested at the time, “support authoritarian governments who systematically violate the basic tenets of democratic socialism.” It proclaimed its solidarity with Venezuela under the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro, and with Cuba under that of the Castro brothers. The DSA now locates its vision of the ideal society in the world’s most despotic regimes.
