The Dark Canon: Cultural Supply and Political Deployment in the American New Right

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Comparative Conservatism (Table 2)

Abstract

Contemporary New Right elites repeatedly invoke a recognizable set of social and political theorists across institutional publications, conversion essays, and podcast networks. Figures such as Carl Schmitt, René Girard, Leo Strauss, and Christopher Lasch circulate as shared reference points in venues including First Things and venture-capital–adjacent writing. Yet sociology has rarely treated this intellectual traffic as an object of analysis in its own right. Drawing on Swidler’s toolkit framework, this paper maps what I term a “dark canon” as a form of cultural supply: a recurrent constellation of theorists and concepts available for political use. Through close textual analysis of elite publications and media, I first document the patterned recurrence and aesthetic coherence of these references. I then examine their interactional deployment. How are these figures used in practice? As analytic interlocutors, moral authorities, boundary markers, or legitimating resources? What political problems are their concepts attached to, and how do modes of use vary across institutional contexts? Finally, I contrast these deployments with the reception of the same theorists within sociology, where they are treated as historically situated and internally contested. This comparison highlights how theory’s function shifts across fields. Rather than presuming coherence or misuse, the paper treats canon construction as a pragmatic cultural process, showing how social theory operates as a toolkit within contemporary political projects.

Author

• Jesse Callahan Bryant, Yale University