Elite theory is misunderstood as something cold, detached and structural when it is, in fact, rooted in an understanding of human psychology down to the level of personality types and character traits. This might be illustrated in actu et in situ by comparing seven character traits necessary for effective political organisation with the seven main traits which predominate in the online right.
Effective organisation requires individuals to be:
1 Cooperative
2 Instrumental
3 Self-effacing
4 Flexible
5 Pragmatic
6 Disciplined
7 Loyal
The online right is made up almost exclusively of people who suit the following descriptors:
1 Disagreeable
2 Truth-obsessed
3 Ego-driven
4 Principled
5 Moralistic
6 Impulsive
7 Grifting
It should not have taken you long to figure out that these seven traits are the exact opposite of those necessary for effective organisation. I will spend the rest of this essay analysing this binary in more detail, but before I do so note that I have deliberately excluded real-life examples such that we do not get bogged down in them (which people definitely would). You can come up with your own. There are dozens, possibly even hundreds, of examples of failed organisation and not a single counter example unless you think career GOP operatives like Christopher Rufo or Charlie Kirk are “online right” (what are you even doing here?). Anyway, let us begin.
Organisation requires cooperativeness. People must be able to tolerate one another long enough to act in concert and to subordinate personal friction to collective purpose. The online right is dominated by the disagreeable. High disagreeableness is the very trait that allows them to reject official narratives, break taboos and see through the regime’s political formula. It is also the trait that renders sustained joint work impossible. They treat disagreement as betrayal and compromise as surrender. Mosca’s law is unambiguous: the organised hundred defeats the disorganised thousand. Disagreeableness tends to produce the thousand.
Organisation requires a Machiavellian instrumental attitude to truth. Private conviction must on occasion yield to the necessities of the structure. The online right over-indexes on the truth-obsessed. Absolute truth functions for them as a higher loyalty than any collective project. They cannot accept tactical silence, necessary fiction or the temporary subordination of private insight. This prevents such characters from formally entering politics. Those who remain inside functioning parties are those prepared to treat ideology as a tool.
Organisation requires self-effacement. Work advances when individuals are prepared to vanish into the machinery rather than remain the perpetual centre of attention. The online right is crowded with people driven by ego. Online prominence rewards the cultivation of personal brands, constant self-assertion and the defence of audience share. Once a following exists, protecting it becomes the overriding incentive. Rivalries turn into status competitions. The qualities that generate internet stardom stand in direct opposition to the subordination that organisation demands. Power is exercised by those willing to set personality aside.
Organisation requires Machiavellian flexibility. Lines must sometimes change, alliances must be accepted and personal consistency must be suspended for institutional continuity. The online right is filled with the principled. Every deviation from their present understanding registers as betrayal. They cannot perform the controlled adjustments that political survival requires. Selection therefore favours those who can alter course without existential crisis and eliminates those who cannot.
Organisation requires Machiavellian pragmatism about means. Necessary deception, imperfect allies and the inherent ugliness of power must be tolerated without paralysis. The online right is populated by the moralistic. Action is measured against an absolute standard of purity. The inevitable result is purity spirals, denunciations and the endless search for heretics. Such a temperament cannot sustain the cold calculation that Michels identified as the conservative character of successful organisations.
Organisation requires discipline. Operatives must be able to hold a line, keep silent when ordered and change direction without public theatre. The online right is dominated by the impulsive. Shitposters, content creators and online theorists live by the daily cycle of provocation and reaction. They cannot accept temporary restraint. Without discipline, coherence collapses at the first internal dispute. The disorganised remain what they have always been: passive, emotional, and easily managed.
Organisation finally requires loyalty that is not contingent on immediate reward. Commitment must survive the absence of money or attention. The online right is dominated by grifters. The grifter can be absorbed more easily than the pure idealist and can be bought off with less open conflict. Yet financial survival overrides every other consideration. The grifter will discard a cause or a party as readily as changing a coat the moment the incentives shift. Volatility is built into the grifting type. It cannot serve as the foundation of any durable structure.
These seven binaries compound one another: disagreeableness feeds ego; ego blocks flexibility; the absence of flexibility destroys discipline; morality and principled rigidity multiply internal conflict; grifting injects further instability. Therefore, every attempt at independent organisation dissolves into in-fighting, incoherence and petty dramas over small disagreements.
The deeper consequence follows directly from the selection process itself. The seven traits required for effective organisation systematically favour mediocrity. Those who fit the profile of the cooperative, instrumental, self-effacing, flexible, pragmatic, disciplined and loyal tend not to be creative, insightful, original or distinctive. They are the lanyard class: competent functionaries who keep the machine running but lack spark, originality or the capacity to think differently. Intellectual brilliance and the willingness to question foundational assumptions are selected out. Every organisation therefore acquires a small-c conservative character. It tends toward the status quo because the people who rise within it are those least inclined to disrupt it. This is a feature, not a bug: a core part of the iron law. Michels observed that organisations develop a conservative temperament precisely because survival demands the subordination of disruptive individuality. Established parties and institutions remain stacked with such types. Such people monopolise power not through superior insight but through superior fitness for organisational life.
The online right has always massively overrated itself, its influence, reach and potential to affect power. This is principally because it is mostly blind to the hyper-real miasma in which it is entombed. However, beyond this, it fundamentally cannot and will not grasp that there is no mechanism to translate online clicks and Twitter likes into political organisation. I still see dozens of second-rate substackers airily proclaim that we are living through a second Gutenberg press. “We are witnessing”, they declare — eyes closed, nose in the sky, index finger pointing up — “the transformative power of social media”. This, they imagine, will magically produce political change as night follows day. This is a hidden form of the populist delusion.
Here, I intend to show how spectacularly unfit the online right is for producing genuine political change. I do not want the word ‘impossible’ in the title to be taken lightly: a loose disorganised collective of individuals who are disagreeable, truth-obsessed, ego-driven, principled, moralistic, impulsive or grifting simply won’t ever get anywhere. But let us pretend that the individuals who make up said online right were replaced by people who are cooperative, instrumental, self-effacing, flexible, pragmatic, disciplined and loyal; in that case it would no longer be recognisably the online right and would have effectively succumbed to the iron law of oligarchy. The game is not designed to be won by people who can’t play it in the first place, it’s Christopher Rufos all the way down.
A final cope for the online right is to do cartwheels and somersaults in celebration when they are quote tweeted by Elon Musk or when the mediocrities in power, lacking any ideas of their own, steal their homework. Here, the online right generates diagnosis, frames, and taboos. Power (or adjacent elite factions such as the writers of UnHerd (“who is it for?”) and other such faux-dissident publications) then selectively absorbs the parts that can be made useful or less dangerous, strips the radical or unassimilable edges, and routes the residual energy into vehicles that remain inside the existing institutional game. MAGA and Reform UK function as classic containment structures in this sense: they convert online discontent into electoral and media forms that are legible to the system, reward more flexible and instrumental operators, and leave the purest online-right types outside the actual decision-making core. Meanwhile, nothing really changes.
The right needs to behave more like a mafia and less like a religion
Superb article. Rightists are not made psychologically of the right stuff and mindset. They also ignore the money-power complex. All major social and political paradigm shifting change, which is what the Rightists complain they want, is ultimately driven by this mechanism. They are so immersed in the practice of intellectualising, striving for unobtainable purity and arguing with each other that they ignore hard cold truths, and realities and how to navigate these with skill. To be honest the project is futile. We are headed towards a dark tyrannical technocracy where the money and power is too distant and entrenched for any organised movement to touch.