In a recent discussion that brought influential thinkers of the right together for an unprecedented public debate, Curtis Yarvin, Christopher Caldwell, Patrick Deneen, and Chris Rufo tackled the conservative movement’s future in a panel convened by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and held at The Heritage Foundation.
Moderated by ISI President Johnny Burtka, the interlocutors discussed the successes and failures of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in combating the abuse of taxpayer dollars and the left-wing’s ideological capture of the federal government. The panelists contemplated what it would take to restore the right as the dominant force in America more permanently.
The discussion is part of a long-form video series, “Project Cosmos,” that seeks to explore what a synthesis between the new right and the tech right would look like to promote freedom and virtue in the future. In a crowded media landscape, the conversation stands above the fray because of the participants’ roles in shaping the philosophy of the second administration of President Donald Trump.
The prominent right-wing journalists on the panel discussed whether the libertarian efficiency credo of DOGE was a good argument to make to the American public. Caldwell was a proponent of the messaging tactic, but Rufo said the Trump administration should address the question of conforming the federal bureaucracy to conservative principles head-on with the American people.
“We’re going to be more efficient in how we demand transgender teaching in class. We’re going to reduce the cost of transgender surgeries for minors and save taxpayer money,” Rufo said, parodying the efficiency arguments.
The rhetorical flourish by Rufo was indicative of how he burst onto the national scene during the COVID-19 era. A documentarian turned muckraker of academia, Rufo conducted much of the journalism that led to the resignation of Harvard University President Claudine Gay over plagiarism accusations in 2024. He has also been a national leader on education reform as an adviser to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who appointed him as a trustee of the New College of Florida.
“The only alternative was to say that this operation is an ideological purge,” Caldwell noted before Rufo added: “That’s what it was. That’s what it should have been.” Caldwell agreed, but contended that saying that fact was “a much less acceptable story to present to the public than ‘we’re saving money.’”
Rufo asserted that you have “to be actually forthright with it to say that the American people have elected Donald Trump to clean up the bureaucracy, to drain the swamp. These are democratic promises, and we’re going to deliver.”
Caldwell stipulated that a drawback of DOGE was its effect on the federal workforce. “But it’s a corrosive thing to say, ‘You can’t work in the federal government, if you believe this or that,’” he observed. Rufo disputed the assertion, noting that no one would care if a neo-Nazi had been fired. Caldwell shot back, saying that Rufo’s example was just one person, but DOGE went further than just purging a stray radical.
Caldwell, whose career has spanned the Republican presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump, has watched all manner of GOP political slogans rise and fall—and rise again. A former senior editor at The Weekly Standard, one of the brain trusts of the Right from the mid-1990s to the early 2010s, Caldwell is among those rare figures in Washington who is respected in both the liberal press (he is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times) and modern Republican circles. His 2020 book “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties” is a seminal text for members of the New Right.
“I don’t think they went far enough,” Rufo asserted. Caldwell cautioned that the president’s DOGE efforts did not demand majority support.
“I think that’s wrong,” Rufo maintained, adding, “President Trump won, and so he gets to determine who is in his administration.” Caldwell reiterated that he thought there was a good political reason that the efficiency, rather than ideological, argument was promulgated.
“No, I think it was just a mistake that Elon made,” Rufo contended.
The political philosophers of the group sparred over how best to restore conservative values to the nation.
Deneen emphasized the creation of the family, citing a Wall Street Journal poll that found huge drops in the percentages of Americans saying patriotism, raising children, and religion were very important to them, compared with what citizens of the U.S. said back in 1998.
“All of these values … are now below 50%. Americans no longer value patriotism, religion, family, community, and when you lose all of those things, the only thing you have left is money,” Deneen warned.
The summoning of the sobering statistics by Deneen was not a surprise, given that it was his 2018 book “Why Liberalism Failed,” widely seen as an incisive diagnosis of the problems facing the United States and other Western countries, that pushed the Notre Dame political theorist into the public consciousness. Since then the political philosopher has seen his former students, among them Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, assume prominent roles during the second Trump presidency.
“So, are we helping people get married? Are we helping them have children? Because if you want to have conservatives in the future, that’s going to be your base,” he continued.
“It’s a little bit too much of the sort of the William Bennett theory of how we restore the country,” Yarvin said, taking issue with Deneen’s diagnostic solution. Bennett was secretary of education in the Reagan administration.
“You know the famous John Adams quote, you know, ‘Our Constitution is made only for a moral and religious people,’ you know, and so it’s like, well, if you think that the most sacred thing about America is this piece of paper from the 18th century, then obviously virtues are good. You need to restore virtues so that we can continue to work with a piece of paper from the 18th century,” Yarvin continued.
“I have a somewhat different take. I think that, actually, the first thing that has to change is the political order. And I think that it is necessary for those virtues to be recreated from a political basis, not for the purpose of, you know, restoring our politics through restoring the virtues, but the virtues are actually good,” he asserted.
Often portrayed in the mainstream media as the bad boy of the New Right, the computer programmer brought a uniquely Silicon Valley perspective to the panel. Yarvin is perhaps best-known for his coining of the phrase “the cathedral” to describe how journalism and academia are “the intellectual institutions at the center of modern society, just as the Church was the intellectual institution at the center of medieval society.” He started an influential political theory blog under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug in 2007.
Yarvin outlined using the Department of Education to enforce a top-down change in what values are inculcated in the curriculum for public school students. He also emphasized converting the American elite.
“The most important America is very much the elite America. And so, actually, reforming the elite is the most important thing to reform, because people follow, you know, those visions” Yarvin contended.
“My goal would be, you’re going to have to know Greek and Latin to get into Harvard,” Yarvin mused.
The panelists were in broad agreement that America has lost something of its Founding culture that had been cultivated by those Protestants of old. In an ironic way, given the vehement anti-Catholicism of some of the Founding Fathers, the praise for the New England Puritans came from several Catholic perspectives.