Hick Libs and Synth Cons

A theory on political dark matter

Cross pressure is a helluva drug

I didn’t want to start my newsletter with political theorizing, it’s a crowded market with many much more talented voices covering it, but I’ve been thinking about these two little opposing groups within US politics that don’t get much attention given that both punch well above their political weight.

Hick Libs, or Reactionary Liberals

Everyone knows the MAGA populist; the small-town conservative whose pickup tells you his politics. Far fewer people notice his mirror image: the Hick Lib, the rural or small-town progressive who escaped to the city but never stopped fighting the hometown culture war.

The Hick Lib carries a siege mentality. In the places they came from, politics was the one thing that made them different from “the chuds,” so they learned to announce it; bumper stickers, pins, yard signs, rainbow flags on mailboxes. When they migrate to cities, they keep the habit. Their urban neighborhoods soon look like forts built of slogans.

Because their identity was forged in opposition, they govern through grievance rather than philosophy. They aren’t classic liberals seeking balance or pluralism; they’re anti-conservatives, moral exiles who view moderation as appeasement. The old provincial antagonists live rent-free in their heads, so every city policy debate turns into an imaginary rematch with Red America.

This explains their paradoxes. They may campaign to decriminalize street crime while demanding long federal sentences for gun paperwork violations. The logic isn’t ideological; it’s tribal. Justice means punishing the people they fled from and protecting the people they imagine those enemies would persecute.

Once concentrated in blue metros, Hick Libs often pull indigenous urban liberals further left, injecting small-town moral fervor into what was once managerial liberalism. They’re the emotional militants of progressivism: permanently on guard, permanently performing courage, forever convinced that the Handmaid’s Tale is just one election away.

Synthetic Conservatives

If the Hick Lib is the moral rebel of Red America, the Synthetic Conservative is the analytical apostate of Blue America.
They start from the opposite side of the map but the same impulse: disillusionment with the tribe that raised them.
Educated in elite liberal institutions, fluent in its moral vocabulary, they turn that fluency into a weapon; reverse-engineering progressive systems to expose their contradictions.

Where the Hick Lib acts from feeling, the Synthetic Conservative acts from analysis.
He is temperamentally liberal, curious, empirical, often secular; but rationally conservative, having concluded through observation that liberalism’s institutions corrode everything they touch.
He tends to be urban, credentialed, and autodidactic, part of the small but influential class of intellectual defectors who now design the right’s rhetorical software:
institutional capture, luxury beliefs, the Cathedral, elite overproduction.

The Synthetic Conservative is no more traditional than the Hick Lib is moderate.
He doesn’t dream of rolling back the twentieth century; he dreams of debugging it.
Where the Hick Lib performs rebellion to prove belonging, the Synthetic Conservative performs detachment to prove independence.

Full disclosure, I had AI rewrite these descriptions to keep my thumb off the scale of how they come across, the observations are mine but the prose is not.

Dark Matter

Why I call these groups dark matter is that they’re not talked about much, but they profoundly influence our politics, like a gravitational distortion revealing an unseen object in space.

The Hick Lib explains a lot of weird things you’ll run into online, from small town subreddits keeping blacklists of MAGA businesses, breathless claims that sundown towns are still a real danger, the endless warnings of rural evil. these people built their whole identity around opposing a sort of 80s or 90s version of the religious right, and never updated their priors when the right itself changed. One of the interesting things to me about this group is that they’re common but not prominent, I can’t name a single notable example, but they’re inescapable online, reddit is completely captured by them and they dominate many old school forums that are still around. It’s also not a group that anyone self identifies into, some conservatives are aware of them and will occasionally complain, but even they usually don’t recognize the role they play in turbo charging urban liberals with their zeal.

By contrast, Synthetic Conservatives are much less common but far more individually influential, guys like Rufo, Yarvin, Hanania before he decided to distance himself for his intellectual vanity. Synth Cons are also effectively invisible until they decide to de-cloak, often initially to some form of libertarianism that they think will be more palatable to their liberal peers (some may even believe it at the time), until they get enough flak from the left that they are ready to fully embrace the right. I think Rufo is really the arch example here, since he publicly went through the arc of moderate libertarian to full blown conservative intellectual who explicitly explains how he’s going to use the left’s own theories and tactics against them, then succeeds in doing so despite having forewarned them about what he was doing. Hanania himself touched on what I now think is an important part of this cadre, either high disagreeableness or mild autism, as it’s not enough by itself to be bright and curious or even contrarian, the incoming that this group receives from all sides is intolerable to all but the most stubborn and or detached people.

I don’t really have a conclusion here, I’ve just been hearing more people talk about Hick Libs recently and wanted to throw down my own marker on the term, as well as the observation that they drive city politics in a way that I don’t think has been mentioned before.

Synth Cons are clearly my own group and we really do seem to flummox everyone, too intellectual for both MAGA and progressive orthodoxy, too stubborn to pretend in order to get along, often trying to float above things thus pissing off everyone. I plan on writing more about this group, as I have the most personal experience with it, but that is a project for another day.