Unfortunately, we have to talk about Bronze Age Pervert.
The pseudonymous writer, widely identified as a Romanian-American political theorist named Costin Alamariu, has become a popular influencer among very online young conservatives. BAP’s worldview is crudely Nietzschean: decrying women, minorities, and the rule of liberal “bug men,” he urges young conservative men to lift weights and assert their natural dominance in a weak and effeminate America. He has described his politics as “Fascism or ‘something worse,’” and indeed they are.
I generally find BAP’s work “something worse” than offensive: stupid. For all his claims to natural superiority, Alamariu’s writing is shallow and poorly reasoned — full of absurd generalizations and empty provocations. While he has readers in high places — including high-ranking Trump officials like Michael Anton and Darren Beattie — he doesn’t have ideas worth the name.
Yet this week, BAP published something that is actually interesting: a far-right critique of the economic nationalism animating Trump’s tariff policies.
The core argument is that trying to revive American manufacturing through heavy-handed industrial policy like the tariffs is ceding the future to China — a policy argument I associate more with libertarians and the center-left than frothing neo-Nietzscheans. Yet in this case, the call is coming from inside the house: BAP is attempting to argue that his enemies on the right — specifically economic nationalists like American Compass’ Oren Cass and Catholic postliberals like Vice President JD Vance — are advancing an economic vision that is essentially a betrayal of what Trumpism is really about.
“The mental universe of the postliberal intellectual is populated by mostly half-truths and talking points,” BAP writes. “It’s not really Trumpism, but something that saw its chance to piggyback on Trump.”
I have my doubts about this: Tariffs are about as core to Donald Trump’s worldview as anything. But the piece is interesting less for the quality of argument than for the way it provides a window into how factional infighting works in the Trump era — and the kinds of arguments that could actually matter under our current malformed government.
“What a strange reality we live in, where a BAP essay has greater potential to influence American foreign policy than any editorial published in the Wall Street Journal,” writes Tanner Greer, a thoughtful commentator who focuses on the American right and China.
The pervert versus the nationalists
In the new essay, BAP’s argument proceeds on basically two fronts: the first policy, the second more philosophical or ideological.
On the policy front, BAP argues that trying to revitalize American manufacturing through tariffs is to misunderstand the nature of our problems.
The United States is not hobbled by foreign competition, but rather by a thicket of domestic regulations that strangle our ability to create world-leading industries. This, he argues, is the product of a small-minded American elite class too obsessed with rules and moralism to unleash our true economic energies. The overall effect is an odd mashup of Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, and abundance-style critiques of a regulatory state gone awry.
“Environmental regulations aren’t bad: in fact the words of these regulations are quite reasonable. But they’re enforced by fanatical, stupid or malicious bureaucrats who interpret them in a way that makes building of new factories basically illegal or too costly in most of the United States,” BAP writes. “In all this debate, the poor quality of America’s ‘elite’ or managerial class, which is unserious and self-righteous, is maybe the biggest weakness, and it’s again hard to decide if this is a cultural, social, economic or political problem.”
BAP’s bigger concern is less about tariffs per se than it is the vision underlying them: an idea that the American economy’s future rests in restoring 1950s-style factory jobs to the heartland communities that lost them.
You can hear versions of this in Trump’s own rhetoric going back to the 1980s, when he blamed America’s economic problems on competition with the Japanese. But BAP is more interested in the more intellectualized version of these arguments, of the sort associated with the economic nationalists like Oren Cass or the more radical group of Catholic postliberals (who, beyond Vance, include influential academics like Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen and Harvard’s Adrian Vermeule).
These factions see economic policy primarily through the lens of social concerns — claiming that trade and immigration might have been good for growth, but have hollowed out the working class and given rise to dysfunctions like declining small-town populations and rising drug addiction. The economy, they believe, should be restructured toward the “common good” of healthy communities: delivering well-paying and dignified jobs to the workers who lost them when factories closed in the late 20th and early 21st century.
BAP thinks this entire vision is nonsense. The purpose of industry is not “to give the common people good jobs,” as these right-sentimentalists have it, but rather “to produce high quality goods other people want to buy.”
When you focus on the former, he claims, you end up falling into traps — like thinking that 1950s jobs are coming back, when the entire lesson of China’s rise is that modern economies should want to move past menial, basic good factory models of growth.
“China didn’t and doesn’t actually want to be stuck building just iron pipes. In the last 10 and especially 5 years China made enormous progress in manufacturing technology, energy production, and automation. It’s trying to move up the production chain to higher-quality goods, and here has made great leaps very recently,” BAP writes. “No smart country wants just to remain a manufacturer of toilets (designed by others) in order to ‘give good jobs to good communities.’”
Worse, he argues, the nationalist right’s economic philosophy is a recipe for disaster. He cites the Peronist model in Argentina — where a populist tariff-heavy economic approach led to a rent-seeking, hyperinflationary disaster — as a cautionary tale for where such ideas end.
Thus, he argues, the Trump movement has a choice: either continue implementing “Bannonite” economics, and lay the groundwork for a Chinese 21st century,” or else “empower again excellence, and reward actual merit.” He is not specific on what that would entail, but he is confident that it would look different from what much of the Trump-aligned right wants.
Why the BAP essay matters
I actually agree with elements of BAP’s critique. It is true that tariffs create perverse economic incentives, and that trying to literally reverse deindustrialization is a doomed project based on nostalgic fantasy.
But these are not original insights. You can read many similar critiques of Trumpist political economy elsewhere, argued with actual data and none of BAP’s egregious racism (e.g., his claim that “the United States now has frankly too many stupid blacks and hispanics who are unemployable and useless in a technological civilization”).
So why care? In his illuminating Twitter thread on the essay, Tanner Greer argues that the BAP essay is unusually important not despite its author, but because of him.
BAP’s cult among young conservatives, and the respect he’s earned because of it among some senior Trump administration leaders, means that he commands an unusual amount of influence for an internet scribbler. The stylistic choices in the essay suggest it’s a straightforward attempt to influence policy.
“You can tell that BAP aims for it to be read by people on the inside by his refusal to play the sort of cutting rhetorical games he is famous for. He is trying to persuade these people not [to] ridicule them,” Greer writes.
Indeed, in a postscript to the essay, BAP makes this appeal fairly plain. Insisting that he is not attempting to reject Trump, whom he describes as “the greatest man of our age, by far,” he instead frames the essay as an attempt to provide the administration — which he suggests is “actually proceeding in general without a plan” — with a roadmap to the policies that actually matter.
“I felt I had to say this, motivated by my sincere belief that America is engaging in frivolities and doesn’t see the looming danger that will, unlike many current-day for-you-page fixations, actually determine what your and your children’s lives will be like for the next few decades.”
But BAP’s argument isn’t just directed at shaping policy. It’s also an unusually naked effort to seize the philosophical mantle of “true Trumpism” from his enemies on the radical right.
If we talk about the extreme right flank of the current MAGA coalition, there are at least two broad camps vying for influence: the Catholic postliberals, who want an illiberal state infused with Christian values, and the Nietzscheans like BAP, who advocate for a more straightforwardly fascist politics that disdains Christian moralizing about the poor and weak.
Both groupings lay claim to be the right’s future. The postliberals have a more direct line to high-level White House influence through Vance; BAP and aligned blogger Curtis Yarvin do not have an avowed believer of similar stature (at least not anymore), but are still read by important people. They are also increasingly influential among the party’s younger activists and staffers, outcompeting the postliberals by seeming even more edgy and radical.
The economic policy divide, as described in BAP’s essay, mirrors the two factions’ deeper philosophical one. The postliberals are, in his view, deluded by their pity for the poor and nostalgia for a communitarian America — obsessed, he notes derisively, with “hoary stock photos and manufactured memories about the salt of the earth working folk where the husband has a perfectly manicured beard at his factory job.”
It is their moralism, he argues, that prevents them from seeing reality: that America is locked in a zero-sum fight with China for dominance, and that brute economic dynamism is necessary if it is to prevail.
“Conceiving of industry as a means of worker welfare, or Building Communities, or anything else other than what industry is actually for won’t actually produce either prosperity or power for a nation. In face of China’s progress and America’s industrial decay, this is all just so frivolous,” he writes.
So this isn’t just a fight about tariffs, or even economic policy per se. It is a window into a fundamental philosophical divide among the most radical elements of the current right. It’s a battle that will continue to play out not just in this administration, but in continued debates over the GOP’s future.
This story was adapted from the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.
