The New Right
A Science-based and Historically Mindful Worldview
A brief essay in which I try to lay out what I see as the foundational ethic of the emerging anti-progressive consensus.
The New Right (on some issues, at least), out in force in Canada
For a long time, I didn’t consider myself a conservative.
When I was younger, I was interested in radical politics (although I spent enough time in high school skipping class and reading Lew Rockwell and Friedrich Hayek in the public library that I always gravitated towards libertarianism).
I went to Afghanistan when I was 23 and my experiences there pulled me sharply towards a kind of Burkean conservative impulse: things are pretty good in our society and radical changes engineered by people who aren’t as smart as they think they are are inherently risky and should only be undertaken with extreme caution. Despite being a committed pol-isci nerd, I more or less bought the media narrative about Republican voter suppression (although I never thought that racism was a motivation-just political self-interest. I think the same of the Democrats undeniable efforts to swell the numbers of migrants in our country and make it easier for them to join society while undocumented and to influence our electoral processes). I deferred to the experts during the first year of COVID and underestimated the level of ideological capture and frank incompetence in our media and research institutions and federal agencies, to my shame, until around 2021.
People like me will never trust these organizations in the same way again, and this has nothing to do with economic grievance or Trump charisma or identity category. We were assured that things were true which were not and that policies were sound which were not and that people were lying when they were not. THAT accounts for my personal political shift and also the shift of dozens of people that I know personally. This is a fact that I have yet to hear even acknowledged by anyone on the Left or in legacy media. They lied and their policies ruined the lives of possibly millions of people and I perceive no remorse or humility. No one really seems to disagree with this… some people just try to ignore it.
There’s another development which is being systematically ignored (always an sign of fire, it seems): there’s a new conservative (or, more precisely, anti-progressive) movement which has literally no connection to the conservative impulses of 20 years ago: an ideology based on human nature and the careful application of human knowledge, which prioritizes the deeper values and purpose of human civilization above those of change, tolerance, inclusivity, dismantling, globalism, technology, commerce, and individuality.
In the 1990’s, and even in 2005, the Right in America had three large feeder ideologies: (intermittently applied) free market economics, an interventionist and hawkish foreign policy, and Christian conservative values. Let’s go through the list:
Republicans were never consistently a doctrinaire free market party. The inversion of political support and the new alignment of the Left with corporate interests (DEI, ESG, immigration, LGTBQ promotion, corporate media control, pharmaceutical state capture) plus the Trumpian love of tariffs (at least in theory-we will see what kinds of policies are actually implemented) have, in many ways, caused a complete reversal. The Democrats are now thoroughly the party of the rich and the educated and corporations because the dynamic of American wealth creation has changed. Our economy is much more consolidated than it was 50 years ago and those large companies work with the government to regulate industries and try to cripple nascent competitors.
Our economy is much more consolidated than it was 50 years ago
It’s a system that some might call corporatism, or state capitalism, or fascism. Then there are the huge interests which effectively act as parasitic feeder organisms, dependent upon government spending: health insurance companies, universities, hospitals, even (in many cases) car manufacturers. Beliefs in this area are not motivated primarily by differing visions of human nature but the re-alignment of corporate power with the Democrats has been a seminal political shift, which has been (unsurprisingly) little noted in legacy media.
A similar thing has happened with foreign policy. This issue is also not so much rooted in different cultural ideas or vision of human nature-instead these re-alignments are also determined by financial incentives. There are quirks of the Left (their fixation on Russia as a bête noire, for example, while mostly ignoring Iran and China) but the overall division is fairly simple: certain groups receive a tremendous amount of money from the government and have an interest in maintaining a rigid and ideological military and intelligence apparatus-and other groups are critical of trillions of dollars being spent and wish to reduce government spending on Ukraine and Israel and NATO and make the Department of Defense and the CIA and the State Department less partisan and more nimble-and more accountable. The Left represents the former and the Right the latter,
Christian conservatism is still a lively and active force in American politics but it simply lost too many battles and yielded too much ground to the Left during the previous generation. Unless you were a committed Christian (and only certain kinds) the idea of basing educational policy or marriage laws or military recruitment on Biblical principles was deeply unattractive… and it still is. The Christians are now on the defensive (save for the Dobbs decision, which cost the GOP a significant share of voter support in 2022). You never much hear calls for prayer in schools anymore.
While there are still policy battles around gender identity and sex ed and cultural training and the legacy media tries to tie the anti-progressive side to Christian intransigence (the only species of religious devotion which is widely mocked and derided in our culture) the real energy comes from more basic and scientific ideas about normal human psychology and the fragility of children’s worldviews and a kind of basic prudence about executing radical new designs in the realms of gender identity or mate selection or childhood education or LGBTQ promotion. In brief, it’s not that the ‘conservative’ sides of these battles take their positions because they see the radical side as ungodly. They are basing their ideas in universal human social structures and sex roles and developing corpuses of psychological study.
It’s really the last category which is adjacent to the most flammable cultural debates-LGBTQ education in schools, trans activism, erosion of established sex roles, expanded abortion access as a means of empowering young women, feminist activism. We can add certain items to the list of divisive cultural issues: arguments about race (including the narrative that police-or corporations, or universities, or schools, etc.-are ‘systemically racist’; changes to language and priorities in areas of public policy and research, competing visions of history and citizenship.
Political competition is a never-ended series of syntheses: a new idea or interest group emerges and makes their claim and either succeeds or fails but never without changing things.
The Left is still behaving as if they’re struggling against the American conservatism of twenty years ago, but they’re not. Instead, there’s an entire corpus of belief which is completely throwing them off. They barely even have language to counter it and the old imprecations and slanders have become worn with over-use.
I think it’s strange that I still can’t think for a word for this change: intuitive? natural? historically consistent? Culturally cautious? This seems to a change that everyone senses but few are discussing. There are a myriad of words for Critical Theory: woke, social justice, progressive, identity politics. What is the label for this movement?
I will try to summarize this new belief system as best I can:
Humans are either male or female. Living according to these gender roles, the most basic and important activity of adults for the survival of a society is to have children (not too many, not too few) and raise them according to basic ideas of civic decency. Children are best raised by two parents living in the home. Emphasizing education and self-control during child-rearing are also useful. Men and women are fundamentally different (on average), and those differences are reflected in the great stories of human civilization and in expectations for and treatment of people in many contexts. Sex disparities will necessarily be reflected in government and business and that’s okay because women (as a whole) have a very important and energy-intensive duty which men do not, and never will, have. People are variegated and should all be treated with basic civic equality and respect but those who fall well outside the norms cannot see their impulses or priorities reflected in education or public policy. One of the most important functions of a person is to participate in family life or to produce value for the economy. The market economy is a limited resource and should only be siphoned off for special projects and reformist ideas with care and prudence. Law and order is the most basic function of a government and is the foundational value of any society. Addicts and the mentally ill should receive adequate treatment but excusing and failing to punish serious property crimes and (still more) personal injuries will degrade the quality of life for everyone. Crimes should be punished, and good works should be rewarded. These penalties and rewards should be distributed fairly, blind to a person’s identity category. Every person has the potential for self-improvement and every person has the ability to make bad choices and society rests upon the former being recognized and requited and the latter being punished and disincentivized. Education should also be undertaken with blindness to a person’ identity characteristics and without any unpopular political motivations. Education exists to instill curiosity and promote personal development and instill the values of socialization and citizenship in the young. Later on, it exists to develop professional skills and teach older people how to think and challenge themselves, morally and intellectually. Activism and political change cannot be central to these projects and should always be undertaken on extracurricular bases. Similarly, all public institutions should broadly reflect the values and norms of the American people and should make national unity and institutional effectiveness their collective missions.
I believe all of these things and most of the people I respect also do and NONE of us (or very few) are motivated by religious feeling or reactionary reflex. Rather, we have examined the social science and the emerging data on gender ideology and smart phone usage and pharmaceutical corruption and the results of bail reform and birth rates and sexual disparities and we have arrived at some combination of the above conclusions. We think they’re broadly consistent with the findings of science and economics and are continuations of anthropological and sociological features of societies which have flourished throughout history.
At some point the Left will have to meet us on our terms and debate us on the merits of these claims according to nonideological scientific data and emerging sociological research or they will continue to contract, and to isolate themselves among the richest (but feeblest) strata of our country. If they don’t address our beliefs honestly, they will certainly falter.
I suspect they will falter even if they do.
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.
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.