The MAGA New Right

Charles Haywood

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Charles Haywood (b. ~1968)

Independent right-wing writer and movement-builder; founder of The Worthy House (book-review blog) and Foundationalism (Substack); former corporate-law-and-business operator who made an “extraordinary fortune” in soap manufacturing and is now self-funding an explicit Hard-Right political project; one of the most prominent contemporary American right-wing voices openly defending Francisco Franco and António Salazar; the wiki’s clearest example of the new self-funded Hard-Right intellectual entrepreneur class.

Why He Matters Here

Haywood is a load-bearing example of two New Right phenomena:

  1. The self-funded independent intellectual entrepreneur. Haywood does not depend on legacy conservative institutions for income. He made his money in business; he writes and organizes from a private fortune. This shifts incentives in ways the older *NR*-employee-class could not replicate. He is the wiki’s prototype of the post-institutional Hard-Right voice — alongside Curtis Yarvin (Thiel-funded) and the BAP-Costin Alamariu / IM-1776 axis.
  2. The Iberian admiration as central feature. Per Iberian Vistas, Haywood is one of the most prolific contemporary American writers openly praising Franco and Salazar. His extended reviews of biographies of both leaders are documented in the academic literature on the contemporary Iberian-authoritarian revival. He calls Salazar “necessarily interesting” for postliberals as “one of the few twentieth-century examples of a long-lived Right regime that successfully opposed the corrosion of Enlightenment liberalism.”

Career

  • Born ~1968 (estimated from public statements; he is not transparent about biographical specifics).
  • Education: undergraduate at Notre Dame, JD from University of Chicago Law School, MBA from University of Chicago Booth.
  • Practiced law at Sullivan & Cromwell briefly; spent the 1990s and 2000s as a corporate operator. Founded a soap-manufacturing company (Haywood Soap, then sold) that supplied the bulk of his independent fortune.
  • ~2010s: began writing book reviews on his blog The Worthy House — long-form, polemical, learned, and increasingly explicit in Hard-Right framing.
  • Late 2010s–2020s: built the Foundationalism movement — explicitly anti-democratic, Catholic-aligned, positioning itself as the operational vehicle for what Haywood calls “Foundationalism” (his own neologism for the post-collapse rebuilding philosophy he advocates).
  • Writes regularly on Franco, Salazar, Pinochet, and other 20th-century right-authoritarian figures. The reviews are unembarrassed and open about admiration.

Key Ideas

Foundationalism

Haywood’s self-coined term for his ideological project. The position holds that:

  • Modern liberal democracy is in terminal decline (“the long defeat” framing).
  • The collapse will be violent or quasi-violent.
  • The post-collapse order will require foundational re-grounding in pre-modern political-philosophical resources — Aristotle, Aquinas, Throne-and-Altar Catholic monarchism, organicist hierarchical political theory.
  • Right-wing intellectuals should be building the cadres and institutions (“centers of strength”) that will steer the post-collapse re-foundation, rather than wasting effort on contemporary electoral politics.

The structure overlaps with Deneen’s Regime Change but with substantively more catastrophist and more anti-democratic premises. It also overlaps with Yarvin’s neoreaction, but with Catholic rather than Silicon-Valley intellectual scaffolding.

Iberian Admiration as Operational Model

Per Iberian Vistas: Haywood’s reviews of Franco and Salazar are not merely historical — they are programmatic. The Iberian regimes are case studies of “long-lived Right regime[s]” that successfully resisted “the corrosion of Enlightenment liberalism.” Haywood explicitly recommends their study as model for post-collapse political reconstruction.

Permission Structure

Haywood’s distinct contribution to the contemporary Right is permission: he writes openly and at length about positions that institutional conservative writers will not. His independence (from NR, from think tanks, from donor pipelines) means he absorbs no professional cost for praising Franco. The wiki reads this as the function of the self-funded independent class: removing the gatekeeping pressure that previously kept Hard-Right register out of mainstream conservative discourse.

Place in the Wiki

Haywood is the wiki’s prototype of:

  • The self-funded post-institutional Hard-Right writer
  • The contemporary American Iberian-admirer
  • The “Foundationalism”/“long defeat”/post-collapse-rebuilding register that runs parallel to but distinctly Catholic-from Yarvin’s neoreaction

He occupies the same structural slot for the integralist/Iberian Hard Right that Yarvin occupies for the techno-monarchist Hard Right and that IM-1776/BAP occupy for the bio-vitalist Hard Right. The three slots are non-identical but mutually reinforcing.

The wiki should track Haywood’s institutional growth (his “Foundationalism” project, his networking with Postliberal Order figures, his connections to Compact and American Affairs) over time as a leading indicator of whether the Iberian-Catholic Hard Right consolidates institutionally or remains diffuse.

Cross-References

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