The Party Politics of Sovereign House
Later, I asked Allen why all the debaters and most of the participants were men. “I think guys like to debate more than girls,” he said. “They like structure.” He continues: “The girls are there for more aesthetic reasons: they are with a guy, they are interested in the show, they want to dress up.” He highlighted the personalities present: Dasha Nekrasova, actress and co-host of the “Red Scare” podcast. A lawyer who had recently gotten a job at the Department of Justice. A guy who worked at Palantir, the software company co-founded by Peter Thiel.
Every two months or so, the James Duane Society meets for a roasting session, during which members sometimes sing tunes from a personalized songbook. Titles range from “America the Beautiful” to the apartheid-era South African national anthem. There are also satirical original songs, composed by members of the society. Take “Trump Rest You Merry, Patriots,” to the tune of a Christmas carol:
Allen told me that these songs were written in the context of debates and that the authors might not agree with the lyrics. This particular song was submitted for “Resolved: The Mob Should Rule”. (The resolution failed.)
During the history versus myth debate, participants effortlessly alternated between provocative jokes and serious arguments. One speaker argued that myths are more useful than history and that they define our politics. He gave the example of fire trucks dousing black children with water during civil rights protests – which made people laugh and stomped. Jokes were made about women and all academics being “stupid and gay or whatever”. At one point, a participant in the back started shouting, “JEW!” JEW! JEW! (Another member told me this may have been a reference to an Alex Jones meme.) One speaker was chastised for not wearing a tie and offered a loan: what Allen called the “autism tie,” decorated with brightly colored puzzle pieces that are used as a symbol by the autism community. Allen described the group’s taste for provocation as a significant confidence-building exercise: “Prove you’re not a cop. Do that line of cocaine.” It was meta-satire, he said – a conscious performance of lib-trolling between friends, which allowed them to have more authentic conversations. Matt Gasda, the playwright, had a different impression after visiting several times: people weren’t just “testing the Sovereign House system – if it’s absolutist on free speech, whatever. They were also testing to see if people would like them even if their strange, dark impulses came out.”
One of Allen’s goals in removing a group of people from the Internet and encouraging them to create community in person was to transcend the grievance culture so pervasive on social media — the outrage and mockery directed at the left. Yet offensiveness and outlandishness was the local dialect, even in real life. “There is a highly combustible, cathartic, reactionary energy bubbling up among young people in recent years,” Elena Velez, the fashion designer, told me. “I would go so far as to call Sovereign House the epicenter of this escape valve.”
The simplest way to visualize generational change in American politics is to look at voting patterns. In 2020, fifty-six percent of men ages eighteen to twenty-nine voted for Joe Biden, according to an analysis from a Tufts University research center. In 2024, fifty-six percent of men in this age group voted for Trump. Young women favored Kamala Harris, but they also moved to the right, by eight percentage points.
Sovereign House captures and complicates this trend. Some members of the cohort are “like Zoomers for Trump,” Allen told me. (Born in 1992, he’s technically a millennial, but he told me he has a “Gen Z soul.”) However, Allen also described voting as “a meme” that co-opts people into pre-existing political identities, and he didn’t vote in the 2024 election. “We like the fact that we have this strong man who makes us laugh,” he said. “But we understand the problem and we’re not going to get dragged into this.”
