This is one outlet's own report from Vox — the article as it was filed.
AIPROPX ReportVox · 16m ago
Meet the “intellectual super influencers” of the new right
Though the preoccupations of the right’s new social thinkers may have arisen alongside Donald Trump, they themselves are not necessarily Trumpy. | Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images
Aaron Renn was in a good mood. And that was fair: It’s not every day that you get labeled the No. 1 “intellectual super influencer” for a major swath of the Trump-era right.
“It’s always good to have some independent validation of your work,” he told me.
A former partner at the consulting firm Accenture, he’s now best known for his writing on urban policy and the role of evangelical Christians (like himself) in American culture. His concept of the “negative world” — the idea that contemporary mainstream culture is inherently hostile to anyone taking evangelical principles seriously — has become influential enough to receive feature treatment in the New York Times .
Yet for anyone familiar with American politics, the idea that someone like Aaron Renn is in any way the No. 1 “super influencer” on the right might seem implausible. He’s not a social media warrior with the White House’s ear, like Laura Loomer or Chris Rufo. He’s not a household name like Tucker Carlson. He doesn’t run a big media outfit like Ben Shapiro. So where does Renn’s achievement come from, and what does it mean?
The source is a new report from the boutique risk analysis firm Baron Public Affairs LLC. Baron makes its money, in part, by advising corporate clients on how best to navigate the DC political environment to advance their interests. Its new report is an attempt to guide them through a specific subset of the right: the national-populist corner of the right-wing policy world that’s achieved greater prominence since 2016.
Baron’s report paints a fascinating picture of today’s conservatism, shining a light on some of its most thoughtful, relevant, and interesting quarters. Yet in doing so, the report also skates over divisions inside the group under consideration — splits that matter immensely for the American right’s future.
The “super influencers,” explained
In its report, Baron compiled papers published by six right-wing think tanks and one right-leaning intellectual journal. They then used a proprietary research platform to comb through 29,181 citations to individual people in those papers, and assembled a list of the top 20 most cited names in their sample. These, in Baron’s estimation, are the “super influencers” who “most inform the policy leaders of the nationalist-populist movement,” the conservatives building intellectual scaffolding to support the GOP’s turn toward both economic and political nationalism.
Baron did not publish the full list of 20 names (and did not respond to my repeated requests for comment). But alongside Renn, the most cited name in its sample, it revealed two other “super influencers” in an accompanying podcast : Brad Wilcox and Michael Lind. Both are revealing.
Wilcox is a sociologist at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, a think tank known for taking an unusually empirical approach to social conservatism. If you’ve followed Wilcox, whose work has often been relevant to our coverage at Vox , you’ve probably seen him offering charts, graphs, and regression analyses to defend his view that marriage is one of society’s most important and valuable institutions. His most recent book is titled, simply enough, Get Married .
Lind, by contrast, arguably isn’t a conservative at all. A longtime commentator on American politics, he began his career as a kind of left labor populist — hostile to mass immigration due to the same ( empirically doubtful ) fears about the harmful effects on native-born workers that once shaped Bernie Sanders’ views on the issue .
Long critical of the cultural elitism of American liberals, Lind has drifted more and more toward writing for conservative outlets: becoming in effect, if not in self-identification, a real influence on the populist right. (He is not the only liberal on the list, which per Baron includes “two Biden-era White House officials and a writer who leads one of the more prominent tribes of the Left.”)
These three men — Renn, Wilcox, and Lind — reflect what Baron sees as the defining preoccupations of the “super influencers” more broadly.
Unlike previous generations of conservatives, the right’s new intellectuals aren’t especially interested in maximizing economic growth or projecting American power abroad (in fact, none of Baron’s top 20 were foreign policy experts at all). Instead, they’re overwhelmingly focused on different questions: how to reverse declining fertility rates, or the effect of trade competition with China on American cities and families.
Unlike previous generations of conservatives, the right’s new intellectuals aren’t especially interested in maximizing economic growth or projecting American power abroad.
In our conversation, Renn suggested a uniting concept for the issues these writers cared about: “the social health of the nation.” By this, he meant things that couldn’t be fully captured by traditional economic metrics: whether Americans feel happy, whether they feel like they live meaningful lives, whether they feel like their families and communities are secure and stable.
“There are these trends that don’t seem super healthy even if the GDP line continues to go up,” Renn says. “Those have been issues that weren’t part of Donald Trump’s initial set of issues, but are ones that have become widely talked about — even on the left.”
Though the preoccupations of the right’s new social thinkers may have arisen alongside Trump to challenge Reagan-era free-market conservatives, they themselves are not necessarily Trumpy. Befitting the fact that many have backgrounds in quantitative social science, and that some see themselves as liberals, they tend to be looking for answers beyond MAGA demagoguery. That’s true even though their research topics have some...
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