The problem is that a long-term political movement has to have some kind of ideological grounding. They have to have a metaphysic, not merely an action plan. This will perhaps work for a temporary alliance against things, but it will not work to ground a society long-term.
This article reads like James is trying admit that Christian Conservatives were right about LGBT and related cultural issues, without having to admit he was wrong to oppose them at the time.
The issue j have with this thesis of the new right is a) it almost entirely ignores economic, health care, and disability/retirement/welfare care with the brief exception of noting the market is good (duh). B) your thesis also mostly ignores foreign policy, and although you did describe the new rights foreign policy beliefs above the core thesis, these are hard to square with what trump does and says as president and president elect . C) many of youur ideas are also incompatible with trump in general, who seems to exist more to complain about stolen elections, buying Greenland, and prosecuting the press and his opponents then anything else.
Ultimately, the new right seems to be almost entirely a movement to reshape the definition of social conservativism (albeit without alienating or entirely eliminating the religious anti abortion conservatives, which further dilutes even this aspect of the new right since it still has to coexist with the christian right to win elections). It says relatively little about economic conservatism, the welfare state, it abandons reagan Republicanism in the foreign policy sphere but has a somewhat agreeable but mostly incoherent replacement for it, and it has no health care policy at all, just "concepts of a plan" and a desire to kill health care for the disabled and mentally ill by slashing Medicaid. To the extent it has a housing plan, it is nimby and in favor of roads and single family houses, which is a bad policy.
I do agree with the new rights definition of social conservatism much more then the religious version, though some areas you mention seem relatively irrelevant to government, like family planning. Of course two parents and married households with kids are better then alternatives, but what policies does that lead to? You don't say, probably because the ones that might actually work to keep families together and producing babies (nationwide abortion bans, banning divorce, reclassifying sex during marriage as never rape) are incredibly unpopular, and most other policies in that regard were tried during the bush years but rarely had much success -- this is more of a cultural issue then a political one. Some areas of the new rights social conservatism, otoh, do make sense , though the new right has a mean streak and often takes logical and agreeable anti illegal immigration, anti trans minor policies and executes them in a way that seems cruel and belittling rather then genuinely attempting to improve humanity. Family separation is a good example. And although the new right does not have strong opinions on abortion or Christian morality like anti-vulgarity or anti-porn laws, in practice the new right still relies on the christian right to get enough votes to win elections, which complicates the picture.
Most of your objections seem to be that my analysis is not complete, is partially inconsistent (even self-contradictory), and that this worldview bleeds over into cultural domains without any clear policy directions or party platforms.
I would say that ANY major political coalition right now is incomplete, partially inconsistent (even self-contracting), and features major cultural values without any clear policy proposals or workable paths toward those values.
To be clear: I'm not a conservative. I'm not arguing for the logical coherence or the completeness of this coalition. I'm simply observing massive changes in political alignment (which are completely undeniable, regardless of your personal interpretations) and trying to understand the particular themes and values and issues around which believers are tending to coalesce. If you could find an avatar of this 'new right' you could take it up with him, but of course no such person exists. You're making objections to national political shifts involving millions of people and trying to go issue by issue or policy area by policy area to explain which are workable, hypocritical, absurd, etc. Some of your claims I agree with and some I disagree with but they're not directly relevant in most cases.
The real development that spurred my writing was observing MANY, many liberals (I could literally name like 20 famous ones off the top of my head) which advocated for Trump or against Harris in the last election. Most of them still don't regard themselves as Republicans... but they now share real areas of political overlap with Trump. I voted for Biden in 2020 and I certainly wasn't planning to repeat that in 2024. This piece was an attempt to discern the contours of this re-alignment. Everything cultural and political is changing rapidly but it's simply a fact that the GOP has gained millions of net voter registrations in the past few years. Surely these people are motivated by issues, and the issues and beliefs become more granular the more informed and engaged these people are. What are these issues and beliefs?
The workability or benefits (or not) of these issues and beliefs is secondary-not my focus.
Trump seems to be currently branding this as something like "Common Sense Conservatism", though I suspect that's too generic a label to stick meaningfully.
If accuracy were the priority, I'd probably favor "temperamentally conservative", but that's unsuitable to political usage since too many people would misinterpret "temperamentally" to assume the movement is defined by anger issues. "Dispositional conservative" similarly is accurate yet not effective communication. Nonetheless, I see a lot of parallels between your description here and that in this article more than a decade old. https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-conservative-governing-disposition
Sadly, too few people these days are educated in Burke or Scruton for it to be viable to use their names, though there's a strong similarity there.
Mostly though, I'm just amused. Once again the scientists and those who follow them have laboriously climbed an entire range of ever more difficult mountain peaks though great time, cost, and effort, with many mistaken wanderings down dead ends, in search of the highest perspective overlooking nature... And found the priests and theologians waiting patiently atop that highest mountain asking them "What took you so long?"
Conservative Christians may have been on the losing side of cultural battles for a time, but they've been in the right on nearly all of this for the entire time. You've all gone the long way around to arrive at mostly the same positions religious believers already held. Welcome!
>>You never much hear calls for prayer in schools anymore.
I'm enjoying the article so far, but this line is a bit off. The truly Christian conservatives are much less involved in the government schools nowadays because they are using private schools or homeschooling.
"The Left is still behaving as if they’re struggling against the American conservatism of twenty years ago, but they’re not." - BINGO. See this a lot in Canada these days. Actually, this is very apparent among the under 40's - especially the woke mob - but the boomers are still living in the 20th century by 20th century rules - or doing their best - perhaps they are simply bewildered by the absurd complexity of 21st century issues!! I can't even talk about substack political conversations with this generation, even family members, without offending them and risking being labeled ''radicalized''...
I think it's a mistake to base this neo-Right solely on the opposition to trans ideology. What's obnoxious about this ideology is that it pretends to be a new morality, if not a new religion. No dissent is allowed. So the simple distinction between sex and gender is treated as hate speech, not to say blasphemy. I actually doubt that gender roles are rooted in reproductive biology. But this is open to debate. However, you have to have a debate first, which is what the "woke" left disavows.
This is a remarkably cogent analysis. N.S. Lyons also took on this question recently, but I don’t recall his analysis being as comprehensive, or maybe as accessible. I think you have put your finger on exactly the moment and the shift we are experiencing. Every point you made resonates with what I observe about the Left and Right, from the politics I grew up with as a GenXer to today. Very well done.👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Ok, finished... I'm not convinced.
The problem is that a long-term political movement has to have some kind of ideological grounding. They have to have a metaphysic, not merely an action plan. This will perhaps work for a temporary alliance against things, but it will not work to ground a society long-term.
This article reads like James is trying admit that Christian Conservatives were right about LGBT and related cultural issues, without having to admit he was wrong to oppose them at the time.
Well, my point would be that he is proposing a foundationless halfway house that cannot stand. I don’t know if you read my post on ‘halfway house’?
https://vonwriting.substack.com/p/halfway-house
I'll read it now. Thanks!
The issue j have with this thesis of the new right is a) it almost entirely ignores economic, health care, and disability/retirement/welfare care with the brief exception of noting the market is good (duh). B) your thesis also mostly ignores foreign policy, and although you did describe the new rights foreign policy beliefs above the core thesis, these are hard to square with what trump does and says as president and president elect . C) many of youur ideas are also incompatible with trump in general, who seems to exist more to complain about stolen elections, buying Greenland, and prosecuting the press and his opponents then anything else.
Ultimately, the new right seems to be almost entirely a movement to reshape the definition of social conservativism (albeit without alienating or entirely eliminating the religious anti abortion conservatives, which further dilutes even this aspect of the new right since it still has to coexist with the christian right to win elections). It says relatively little about economic conservatism, the welfare state, it abandons reagan Republicanism in the foreign policy sphere but has a somewhat agreeable but mostly incoherent replacement for it, and it has no health care policy at all, just "concepts of a plan" and a desire to kill health care for the disabled and mentally ill by slashing Medicaid. To the extent it has a housing plan, it is nimby and in favor of roads and single family houses, which is a bad policy.
I do agree with the new rights definition of social conservatism much more then the religious version, though some areas you mention seem relatively irrelevant to government, like family planning. Of course two parents and married households with kids are better then alternatives, but what policies does that lead to? You don't say, probably because the ones that might actually work to keep families together and producing babies (nationwide abortion bans, banning divorce, reclassifying sex during marriage as never rape) are incredibly unpopular, and most other policies in that regard were tried during the bush years but rarely had much success -- this is more of a cultural issue then a political one. Some areas of the new rights social conservatism, otoh, do make sense , though the new right has a mean streak and often takes logical and agreeable anti illegal immigration, anti trans minor policies and executes them in a way that seems cruel and belittling rather then genuinely attempting to improve humanity. Family separation is a good example. And although the new right does not have strong opinions on abortion or Christian morality like anti-vulgarity or anti-porn laws, in practice the new right still relies on the christian right to get enough votes to win elections, which complicates the picture.
Most of your objections seem to be that my analysis is not complete, is partially inconsistent (even self-contradictory), and that this worldview bleeds over into cultural domains without any clear policy directions or party platforms.
I would say that ANY major political coalition right now is incomplete, partially inconsistent (even self-contracting), and features major cultural values without any clear policy proposals or workable paths toward those values.
To be clear: I'm not a conservative. I'm not arguing for the logical coherence or the completeness of this coalition. I'm simply observing massive changes in political alignment (which are completely undeniable, regardless of your personal interpretations) and trying to understand the particular themes and values and issues around which believers are tending to coalesce. If you could find an avatar of this 'new right' you could take it up with him, but of course no such person exists. You're making objections to national political shifts involving millions of people and trying to go issue by issue or policy area by policy area to explain which are workable, hypocritical, absurd, etc. Some of your claims I agree with and some I disagree with but they're not directly relevant in most cases.
The real development that spurred my writing was observing MANY, many liberals (I could literally name like 20 famous ones off the top of my head) which advocated for Trump or against Harris in the last election. Most of them still don't regard themselves as Republicans... but they now share real areas of political overlap with Trump. I voted for Biden in 2020 and I certainly wasn't planning to repeat that in 2024. This piece was an attempt to discern the contours of this re-alignment. Everything cultural and political is changing rapidly but it's simply a fact that the GOP has gained millions of net voter registrations in the past few years. Surely these people are motivated by issues, and the issues and beliefs become more granular the more informed and engaged these people are. What are these issues and beliefs?
The workability or benefits (or not) of these issues and beliefs is secondary-not my focus.
Trump seems to be currently branding this as something like "Common Sense Conservatism", though I suspect that's too generic a label to stick meaningfully.
If accuracy were the priority, I'd probably favor "temperamentally conservative", but that's unsuitable to political usage since too many people would misinterpret "temperamentally" to assume the movement is defined by anger issues. "Dispositional conservative" similarly is accurate yet not effective communication. Nonetheless, I see a lot of parallels between your description here and that in this article more than a decade old. https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-conservative-governing-disposition
Sadly, too few people these days are educated in Burke or Scruton for it to be viable to use their names, though there's a strong similarity there.
Mostly though, I'm just amused. Once again the scientists and those who follow them have laboriously climbed an entire range of ever more difficult mountain peaks though great time, cost, and effort, with many mistaken wanderings down dead ends, in search of the highest perspective overlooking nature... And found the priests and theologians waiting patiently atop that highest mountain asking them "What took you so long?"
Conservative Christians may have been on the losing side of cultural battles for a time, but they've been in the right on nearly all of this for the entire time. You've all gone the long way around to arrive at mostly the same positions religious believers already held. Welcome!
>>You never much hear calls for prayer in schools anymore.
I'm enjoying the article so far, but this line is a bit off. The truly Christian conservatives are much less involved in the government schools nowadays because they are using private schools or homeschooling.
"The Left is still behaving as if they’re struggling against the American conservatism of twenty years ago, but they’re not." - BINGO. See this a lot in Canada these days. Actually, this is very apparent among the under 40's - especially the woke mob - but the boomers are still living in the 20th century by 20th century rules - or doing their best - perhaps they are simply bewildered by the absurd complexity of 21st century issues!! I can't even talk about substack political conversations with this generation, even family members, without offending them and risking being labeled ''radicalized''...
Call it The Normies.
I think it's a mistake to base this neo-Right solely on the opposition to trans ideology. What's obnoxious about this ideology is that it pretends to be a new morality, if not a new religion. No dissent is allowed. So the simple distinction between sex and gender is treated as hate speech, not to say blasphemy. I actually doubt that gender roles are rooted in reproductive biology. But this is open to debate. However, you have to have a debate first, which is what the "woke" left disavows.
This is a remarkably cogent analysis. N.S. Lyons also took on this question recently, but I don’t recall his analysis being as comprehensive, or maybe as accessible. I think you have put your finger on exactly the moment and the shift we are experiencing. Every point you made resonates with what I observe about the Left and Right, from the politics I grew up with as a GenXer to today. Very well done.👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻