Tradition, Faith, Free Speech, and the Market:
How the Right Lost Its Bearings and the Left Lost Its Edge
Charlie Kirk’s death at the hands of a fellow conservative was not just a shock event. It was also a mirror. It revealed not only how fractured American conservatism has become but also how brittle the ideological foundations of the movement are. Supporters lionize Kirk as a defender of free speech, Christian values, and tradition, but that brand of conservatism increasingly defends symbols, not substance. In practice it has ceded the terrain of economics entirely to the very forces that corrode the traditions it claims to protect.
How come? Supporters feel that regardless of the controversies—his harsh rhetoric toward minorities, trans people, and many others—the real win was holding ground on what they see as existential values. Even now, after his death, those same themes dominate the conversations of his defenders. When critics highlight Kirk’s statements—dismissing the Civil Rights Act, mocking parents of gun-violence victims, espousing great replacement fears—his supporters often see those less as disqualifying sins than as unavoidable excesses in the fight to reclaim what they believe has been ceded.
But, such statements also drew criticism from media, other conservatives, and fact-checkers. The controversies built up over time, generating both fierce loyalty among followers and strong rejection from critics. Part of the problem is that this kind of rhetorical excess tends to erode credibility—even among allies. When someone continually says something extreme or borderline dehumanizing, the critics say: what does this say about your moral judgment, your seriousness? To put it another way: free speech and Christian values become harder to defend when the speech is perceived (with some justification) as hateful, or when the invocation of faith seems performative more than principled.
Also, the rhetorical style—taunting, provocative, incendiary—can fuel backlash, make compromise harder, and often polarize rather than persuade. And polarization itself creates a feedback loop: more extreme rhetoric to energize the base, which then produces more backlash, which then prompts more extreme defense. That dynamic has been well observed in studies of political polarization, though here in the U.S. there has been less rigorous polling on the consequences of a figure like Kirk specifically.
But again, hus recent death shows it's not the "left" who's behind this. Contrary to the statements, Kirk's death shows an internal rift within these modern-day "conservatives", who, like Kirk, preaches free speech absolutism in its unadulterated, incorrect form. At first glance, this used to be that “left vs. right” was the primary frame. But now, within the right—among young conservatives, among alt-right, Christian nationalists, MAGA-aligned groups, Free speech absolutists, etc.—there has been growing antagonism, split over what conservatism ought to mean, how far rhetorically and morally one should go, and which enemies are primary.
The “Groyper Wars,” starting around 2019, are a vivid example. Groypers, followers of Nick Fuentes, frequently disrupted Kirk’s events, asked highly provocative questions designed to expose what they saw as hypocrisy or moderation in Kirk’s approach to race, immigration, Israel, LGBT rights. They saw Kirk as too willing to work within mainstream conservatism (“Conservative, Inc.”), too polite or mainstream in some ways.
After Kirk’s death, this internal tension hasn’t gone away; if anything, the rhetoric from the far-right of a kind calling for “war,” for vengeance, for militant protection shows how divisions can degenerate into hostility across ideological lines within the right. There are even those who said in life they saw Kirk as an enemy because he didn’t embrace white collectivism enough—but in death, they are calling him a martyr.
The Paradox of Conservatism: When Markets Blind
The right has learned to talk about “cultural Marxism” and “woke capitalism,” but it treats culture and economics as separate, as if moral decay can be solved without examining the economic substrate that produces it. The Thatcherite dictum “there is no alternative” to capitalism still defines its worldview, with every social problem reduced to a question of virtue or family. “Free” becomes a privilege of those who can afford it. Markets are presumed neutral if not above society. This makes it impossible for conservatism to confront its own contradictions: lamenting the destruction of tradition while defending the very market dynamics that dissolve tradition.
The irony is that earlier conservative thinkers themselves — Ernst Jünger, Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt — were deeply suspicious of liberal capitalism. The “Conservative Revolution” of interwar Europe saw capitalism as corrosive of hierarchy, rootedness, and meaning. Jünger’s Der Arbeiter (1932) foresaw “total mobilization” under technics and market imperatives. Today’s American right, by contrast, elevates Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and Thomas Sowell while reflexively mocking Marx, rarely engaging with his actual critique of political economy. It can diagnose moral decline but not the material conditions that create it.
This leads to a peculiar inversion: in practice, the supposedly “Marxist” regimes of the Eastern Bloc often behaved more conservatively than Western conservatives do today. They imposed strict controls on pornography, gambling, drugs, and advertising; they promoted stable family structures and demographic control; they regulated mass media and tied women’s participation in the workforce to national productivity and political participation rather than simply "sexual liberation". LGBT people existed, but only within narrow confines of law, not as a consumer identity. Whatever their other authoritarian faults, these governments saw unregulated markets and unbounded consumerism as corrosive. On paper at least, they looked more “traditional” than the deregulated, hyper-consumerist West.
Meanwhile, Western conservatives defended “free markets” so absolutely that they ended up enabling the very culture they claim to despise. The late Christopher Lasch, a critic from the left, saw this clearly: market society undermines its own moral foundations. What conservatives call “moral decline” often begins as the commodification of everyday life. The family, religion, and community become niches for advertisers, employers, and landlords rather than counterweights to capital.
When aesthetics are devoid yet still repurposed
This paradox extends into the culture wars around “woke.” Liberal academics and activists created the language of recognition and inclusion; corporations packaged it as HR seminars, ESG statements, and rainbow-washed logos. Social justice became a brand, a way to manage diverse workforces while union-busting or maintaining precarious gig work. It was the anti-capitalist left, not the capitalist class, that once linked identity to redistribution — from early socialists fighting for women’s suffrage and workplace safety to Latin America’s Pink Tide governments redistributing wealth to marginalized groups. Today, anti-capitalists are again trying to strip “woke” of its corporate gloss and return it to material solidarity.
This note captures it: the liberal created the woke, the capitalist promoted the woke, and the anti-capitalist can take it away. This dynamic exposes the hollowness of much of today’s debate: conservatives attack “woke elites” while ignoring the capitalist structures making “woke” profitable; liberals defend symbolic recognition without touching the underlying inequality.
Adding to this churn is the way counterculture itself is repurposed. “How come even the conservative joins the hipster culture?” Gavin McInnes offers the answer. Once the co-founder of Vice, he carried the “hipster” aesthetic — tattoos, ironic thrift, barroom camaraderie — into the far right, founding the Proud Boys. What began as a rejection of corporate suits became a rebranding of reaction as rebellion. This is not new. Punk and skinhead scenes were battlegrounds for left and right in the 1980s. Subcultures provide aesthetic toolkits. Once stripped of progressive content, irony and thrift can be rebranded as “anti-PC” insurgency.
The rise of “hipster conservatism” signals a generational shift. The old religious right presented conservatism as moral rectitude and respectability. The new “edgy right” presents it as trolling, transgression, and freedom from decorum. Internet meme culture makes it possible to float racism, misogyny, or conspiracy theories under the guise of “just joking.” This aesthetic of irony gives plausible deniability to extremism while making it feel cool, rebellious, and authentic to younger audiences.
The deeper lesson is that culture, economy, and politics are inseparable. If capitalism can market “woke” as a lifestyle, it can also market “anti-woke” as a lifestyle. Hipster conservatism is the mirror image of woke capitalism, another commodity in the culture industry. Both rely on branding wars rather than material solidarity.
A war within its "self"
Taken together, these reversals suggest the traditional categories of left and right are overdue for overhaul. Conservatives denounce “cultural Marxism” while adopting countercultural aesthetics. Liberals launch “woke” ideas yet see them hollowed out by corporate marketing. Anti-capitalists try to reclaim both economic and cultural life from the market logic that swallowed them. The question is whether any movement can build a politics rooted in material security and moral coherence rather than in the aesthetic churn of late capitalism.
Charlie Kirk’s death dramatized these contradictions. His career — and the reaction to his killing — reveals a conservatism at war with itself, unable to reconcile its moral claims with its economic commitments, and vulnerable to subcultural rebranding. It also reveals a liberalism content to let recognition replace redistribution, and a capitalism eager to package both. If there is a way forward, it will require refusing the market’s ability to commodify every identity, including conservatism itself, and recovering a sense that freedom, tradition, and solidarity are not separate realms but one intertwined social fabric.