The Battle on the New Right for the Soul of Trump's America

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For the last half-century, the GOP has been the party of capitalism—of Wall Street, Walmart, and Ronald Reagan’s famous quip that “government is the problem.” But since the Clinton years, if not earlier, the Republicans have been bleeding younger, more affluent, college-educated voters to the Democrats, while coming to rely more and more on non-college-educated whites to win elections. Thus, the sometimes comical attempts by wealthy patrician Republican politicians to perform rites of cultural affinity with lower-class voters, like George Herbert Walker Bush declaring his enthusiasm for pork rinds or Willard Mitt Romney hosting campaign events with Kid Rock.



Donald Trump drove a wedge between the Republican Party establishment and its base by denouncing the former as corrupt and stupid while courting the latter by tacking right on immigration and to the center on economics and foreign policy. Even more striking, Trump turned Republican politics on its head by promising to protect entitlements, revoke trade deals that hurt American workers, and end the country’s apparently futile wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result, Trump won college-educated whites by only 4 points, down from Mitt Romney’s 14-point margin in 2012, but he flipped the industrial Midwest and won white voters without a college degree by a massive 25-point margin. Despite his nativist rhetoric, he even slightly improved on Romney’s result among black and Hispanic voters.



Both the president’s supporters and his critics have interpreted his victory as a decisive rebuke of the GOP’s Obama-era priorities; widespread opposition to Obamacare had not, it turned out, meant that voters were enthusiastic about limited government, privatizing Social Security, or fixing the debt. At the same time, it revealed the impotence of the conservative journalists, intellectuals, wonks, think tankers, foreign-policy experts, and consultants who turned up their noses at Trump’s candidacy. Yet President Trump has been plagued by both real and invented scandals since entering office and remains unpopular despite presiding over a sustained economic expansion. Thanks to a combination of incompetence, lack of staff, and judicial, bureaucratic, media, and congressional resistance, he has also struggled to turn the populist rhetoric of the campaign trail into a coherent governing program.

Yet whatever the practical shortcomings of his administration, Trump has undoubtedly opened up new political and intellectual space on the right. Ideas that would have been taboo only a few years ago are now in play, as different factions of the party compete to set the agenda for 2020 and beyond. A great deal of attention has been paid to the ugliest manifestation of this intellectual free-for-all: The increased visibility of white nationalists and their fellow travelers, who saw in the 2016 election a vindication of the idea articulated a generation ago by the paleoconservative Sam Francis—that the GOP must transform itself into a de facto white party in order to halt the dissolution of the country’s ethnocultural “core,” and who were given endless hours of free airtime by a press eager to paint Trumpists as monsters.



But there are other forces at work, too. Among conservative millennial Catholics, for instance, the free-market Catholic fusionism associated with figures such as Richard John Neuhaus is now giving way to various strands of “post-liberal” Catholicism, including the religiously inflected populism of First Things under the editorship of R.R. Reno and a revived form of integralism that calls for the state to promote Catholic social teaching.

Less visible but perhaps more important is the shift among a set of younger conservatives—intellectuals, journalists, and Hill staffers—toward what is sometimes called the “new nationalism.” What sets this younger cohort apart is a conviction that the future of the Republican Party lies with the working class and with what one of their champions, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, has referred to as the “great American middle.” They want a more solidaristic conservatism that is less libertarian, both culturally and economically, and in some ways less liberal. Speaking of his students, Ian Marcus Corbin, a writer and academic at Boston College, told me, “I very rarely encounter the kind of bow-tied Hayekian conservative that was around when I was in college.”

Of course, blue-collar cultural populism has been a mainstay of GOP politics since Nixon, and the laissez faire fire-breathing of The Wall Street Journal editorial page has not typically been the guiding spirit of past Republican administrations. Ronald Reagan raised taxes after cutting them and poured billions into high-tech defense research, while George W. Bush imposed steel tariffs and encouraged easy mortgage credit to promote an “ownership society.” These younger conservatives may share old conservative concerns, including a skepticism toward the liberationist cultural projects of the left and an emphasis on the importance of family, patriotism, and tradition. But they are more concerned than older conservatives with the problems of inequality and immobility, more attuned to the reality of class conflict, and more interested in using the power of the state to make America great again.

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The new millennial right is as much a sensibility as a coherent intellectual movement. Many call themselves “nationalists” and most use “libertarian” as a slur. Yet at the same time, they are mostly secular but count Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, as well as atheists and agnostics of various backgrounds, among their numbers. Some support Trump, others would prefer if he vanished and left us with President Pence, and many view him with a mixture of bemusement and exhaustion: a figure who was probably necessary to clear the ground for something new, but who has been embarrassing and often counterproductive in office. The best way to think of them may be as something akin to a less heavily tattooed, right-wing version of the millennial New York socialists profiled last March in New York magazine: A group of young people connected by overlapping social and professional ties and frustrated with the politics of their elders.

They do, however, have a set of shared intellectual touchstones. One frequently cited influence is the historian Christopher Lasch, originally a socialist and fellow-traveler of the New Left who, from the 1970s until his early death in 1994, evolved into a lacerating critic of post-’60s America. Lasch argued that the “meritocracy” that had emerged from the social convulsions of the 1960s was a sham, producing an insular, culturally radical elite alienated from and contemptuous of the supposedly bigoted and backward country that it governed. This critique echoed neoconservative attacks on the liberal “new class” of academics and bureaucrats, but Lasch, ever the old Marxist, sought to tie the cultural obsessions of this elite to an increasingly globalized capitalism that had made it possible for them to break the economic, social, and cultural power of the middle and working classes. As one Republican congressional aide in his mid-20s put it to me, reading Lasch in college was “a radicalizing experience for me. Especially on the right, there’s a poverty of approaching any of this stuff from an economic perspective; of looking at class interest and how people within a certain stratum will work to pull the levers of culture to protect their own interests and status.”

The rising influence of Lasch and other communitarians tracks with a broader shift away from the “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” position popular with young right-wingers during the Obama years, and toward a newfound social conservatism tied to a form of class critique. Many of the people I spoke to said they had been libertarians in college—one called libertarianism “a way of announcing that you’re contrarian and a right-winger but that you’re totally cool with the way that sex works in the American upper-middle class”—but have since moved right on social issues. Charles Fain Lehman, a 25-year-old writer and editor for the Washington Free Beacon, described a disillusionment with “freedom as quote-unquote self-actualization.” There is, he said, a “a strong realization” that “it actually makes people quite miserable.”

“Look,” said one editor at a conservative publication, “it’s no secret that this shift on the young right is heavily male. A lot of us just want nice, simple, ordinary lives—lives like our parents lived—and the dating market is not conducive to that at all. I have a lot of friends who are just horrified by what they encounter in the dating market, and there’s an economic dimension to that, too, since houses cost way too much money and we’re all renters and nobody’s moving in with their girlfriends any time soon.” He added, “and you don’t have to be a traditionalist Catholic to think that, because I’m creeped out by those guys, too.”

 

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A number of the D.C.-based conservatives I spoke to also cited the influence of the reform conservatives, or “reformicons.” Especially influential among this group were Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat, whose 2008 book, Grand New Party, argued that the Republican Party had been unable to consolidate the Nixon and Reagan majorities because its small-government hardliners were too committed to shrinking a welfare state that most voters wanted to preserve. They counseled the GOP to abandon its panegyrics to entrepreneurs and propose policies designed to appeal to the average wage-earner. Salam was an important social influence as well; a master networker, he identified smart young conservatives with an affinity for his own reformist impulses and put them in touch with one another. (He did the same for me.)

Although none of the major reformicons supported Trump, his campaign in some ways vindicated their arguments. Douthat himself labeled Trump’s campaign message as “reform conservatism’s evil twin, since it started from a similar assumption … and ended up in a more apocalyptic and xenophobic place.” Yet the events of 2016 and after have pushed young reformicons like Saagar Enjeti of The Hill well beyond the relatively modest programs that Salam and Douthat had been advocating back in the early part of the decade. On Enjeti’s TV show, for instance, he delivers blistering populist monologues that owe as much to left-wing anti-monopoly crusaders like Matt Stoller as they do to the reformicons, and still less to Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman. This radicalization has been given a major impetus by the journal American Affairs, which over the past two years has filled out the new right’s vague desire for reform with a genuinely radical program for fixing the status quo.

‘A lot of us just want nice, simple, ordinary lives—lives like our parents lived.’

American Affairs was founded in 2017 by Julius Krein, a young, Harvard-educated, self-described former neocon. He had spent the Obama years working in finance and as a civilian subcontractor in Herat, Afghanistan, for something called the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations (TFBSO), a division of the DOD created to promote private-sector investment in the Iraqi and Afghan economies. Krein says the Afghan experience was the beginning of his disillusionment with Bush and Obama-era conservatism.

“The goal was to turn Herat into the quote-unquote ‘Bangalore of Afghanistan,’ and it was a complete disaster,” he told me. “They were buying internet from Iran at exorbitant prices, and the children of the largest Afghan drug lords and warlords would come and surf the internet for a few hours. This was packaged as a great triumph of American foreign aid and capitalism and free markets.”

Krein returned to his work in finance with a more jaded attitude about the American economy. When meeting with CEOs and CFOs, he recalls, “basically every conversation was ‘how do we cut costs, offshore more stuff to China, and use the savings to do share buybacks?’” He supported Trump in 2015-16 and launched American Affairs as a sort of journal of intellectual Trumpism. But Krein denounced Trump in August 2017 over the latter’s response to Charlottesville, and since then the journal has become a clearinghouse for all sorts of heterodox thought, ranging from essays in defense of Catholic integralism to articles by avowed communists and socialists such as Slavoj Zizek and Chapo Trap House’s Amber A’Lee Frost.



Krein declined to describe his own politics—“Someone said to me ‘only idiots label themselves,’ and I kind of like that”—but American Affairs’ core product is a dense, technically sophisticated form of neo-Hamiltonian economic nationalism, pushed in various forms by Michael Lind, David P. Goldman, and Krein himself. Although their arguments are complex and differ from one another in subtle ways, the gist of all of them is that a short-sighted American elite has allowed the country’s manufacturing core—the key to both widespread domestic prosperity and national security in the face of a mercantilist China—to be hollowed out. Production and technical expertise have shifted to China and Asia, domestic capital has flowed into unproductive share buybacks or tech schemes (Uber, WeWork), and America has become a country with a two-tiered service economy, with bankers, consultants, and software engineers at the top and Walmart greeters and Uber drivers at the bottom. As Krein explained, “basically the United States gets the financial profits and Asia gets the industrial capacity, and you’re selling out the long-term for the short-term.”

Though the journal’s editors have cultivated ties with the right more than the left—Krein spoke at the National Conservatism conference this July—they are deeply contemptuous of the existing GOP. In a scathing essay published in November, Krein described a “highly stratified and largely dysfunctional Republican Party,” in which “a few billionaires and corporate interests … pay their second-rate propagandists to offer a discredited and incoherent policy agenda to an increasingly disaffected voter base.”

Krein and his journal are making their influence felt in the Republican Party. At the National Conservatism conference in July, Oren Cass, who worked as a policy adviser on Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, convinced a room full of conservative attendees of the proposition that “America should adopt an industrial policy.” In November, The Wall Street Journal ran an adaptation of an essay from American Affairs laying out the case for “Industrial Policy 2.0.” The most enthusiastic promoter of these ideas is Sen. Marco Rubio, formerly the darling of the reformicons. In November, he delivered a speech in favor of “common good capitalism,” which he followed up with a speech at the National Defense University calling for a “21st-century pro-American industrial policy” to counter China’s rise.

Rubio is not the only high-profile Republican to flirt with bold economic policies. Josh Hawley, the freshman senator from Missouri, has declared a high-profile war on Big Tech, proposing a series of bills to (among other things) ban “infinite scrolling” on social media apps, force tech companies to disclose what they are doing with user information, and remove their Section 230 protections unless they “submit to an external audit that proves by clear and convincing evidence that their algorithms and content-removal practices are politically neutral.” He has co-sponsored a bill that would prevent drug companies from charging more for prescription drugs in America than they do in other rich countries, and one that would weaken the U.S. dollar in order to make American exports more globally competitive. In his speeches and interviews, he has also denounced the “governing class” and its “forever wars,” telling Breitbart in September that “if the conservative movement is going to have a future, it’s going to have to commit itself to being the movement of working people.”

 

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If Rubio has become the poster boy for the American Affairs platform—industrial policy, China hawkishness, and Catholic-inspired rhetoric about the “common good”—Hawley, along with media figures such as Tucker Carlson, represents a strain of the new right that is rowdier, Trumpier, and more invested in marrying economic heterodoxy to an anti-elite culture war. This latter strain is larger and more diffuse. The closest thing it has to an intellectual vanguard is the group of intellectuals gathered around the Claremont Institute, which publishes the Claremont Review of Books (best known for running Michael Anton’s “The Flight 93 Election” essay) and the website The American Mind.

Both wings of the “new right” are heavily influenced by followers of the philosopher Leo Strauss: Krein is a former student of the East Coast Straussian Harvey Mansfield, while the Claremont intellectuals, including Anton, are almost all partisans of the West Coast Straussian Harry Jaffa. Strauss criticized modern political philosophers such as Locke and Hobbes for abandoning the natural right tradition of classical philosophy and medieval religion. His “East Coast” students took this to imply that the United States, founded on Enlightenment philosophy, could be a good regime but never an ideal one. The “West Coast” Straussians, led by Jaffa, argued that the philosophy of the Founding Fathers (and of later American statesmen such as Lincoln) had in fact synthesized the classical and medieval concepts Strauss had sought to recover.

The philosophical dispute between East Coast and West Coast Straussians has shaded over into matters of ideology and temperament: The East Coasters have traditionally been more cosmopolitan, elitist, and detached from day-to-day politics, while the West Coasters have been polemical, populist, and aggressively patriotic. Krein told me he’s focused on “getting things done in the economic sphere while trying to find a modus vivendi in the cultural sphere”; the Claremont Straussians, by contrast, cast our cultural divisions as a “cold civil war” that will only end, in the words of Claremont President Ryan P. Williams, when one side wins a “decisive and conclusive political victory.”

While the “Claremonsters,” as they are sometimes called, are open to various forms of economic heterodoxy—they have defended tariffs and protectionism through copious citations of Lincoln—they are, at heart, culture warriors. In their view, the modern left, with its doctrines of identity politics and multiculturalism, represents an existential cultural threat to the American “regime,” which can only be countered by explicit right-wing moral arguments about the nature of justice and right and wrong.

Matthew J. Peterson, Claremont’s vice president of education and a founding editor of The American Mind, told me that there is an “emerging coalition” over “traditional morality,” albeit cast in terms of “civilizational health. A lot of these kids are saying, well, I may not be religious, but I’m looking around at the internet and everything I see and it’s disgusting and we need some kind of order and discipline.” In policy terms, he floated restrictions on pornography and payday lending.

Williams was even more aggressive. He told me that Claremont plans to open a “Center for the American Way of Life” in Washington this quarter, which plans “to talk frankly in a way that some of the legacy institutions seem reluctant to do about some of the domestic regime threats and what we think those are, such as identity politics and aggressive multiculturalist liberalism.” He pointed me to an article by Arthur Milikh in the current issue of National Affairs calling for an aggressive federal crackdown on universities as an example of the kind of policy the new think tank would get behind, explaining that “higher education and ed schools really are madrassas of anti-Americanism.”

The Claremont crew has been less open than American Affairs to courting allies on the left, and less interested in policing boundaries on the right. In October, for instance, CRB published Michael Anton’s critical but respectful review of Bronze Age Mindset, a self-published, virally successful “exhortation” by the pseudonymous blogger and Twitter personality Bronze Age Pervert (BAP). BAP is a difficult figure to describe: a campy, far-right Nietzschean from the corner of social media known as “Frogtwitter,” bringing a gospel of natural hierarchy, idiosyncratic dieting and supplement advice, “sun and steel” (tanning and weightlifting), and overman-style liberation from the cucks and “bugmen.” The American Mind subsequently published a symposium on Anton’s review, featuring responses by BAP and another Frogtwitter personality, Second City Bureaucrat, and it has commissioned a five-part series of essays from Curtis Yarvin, better known as the neoreactionary blogger “Mencius Moldbug.”

During my conversations with conservatives sympathetic to the realignment, a few had pointed to Claremont’s flirtation with BAP as an example of the sort of thing they were afraid of: institutions loosely aligned with their political goals attempting to engage with “edgy” figures from the online right and discrediting the entire project in the process. “I think both of them have a following among a pretty intelligent crowd of folks,” Williams told me. “So our play is to engage that audience and try to talk to them about the issues we care about and how we’re trying to rethink the right. It’s not like we’re going to have a weekly column from the neoreactionary movement or this weird pagan vitalism.”

American Mind Executive Editor James Poulos is clearly drawn to elements of BAPism—in particular to the emphasis on physical fitness and heroism, and the way in which the dislocating weirdness of BAP’s project serves to highlight the weirdness of the larger sociocultural changes sparked by the internet. “If you spend enough time on the professional right,” Poulos told me, “you will be very familiar with what the people who keynote your average rubber chicken dinner in D.C. will say about this mess we’re in. And you may realize you have lingering questions that the rubber chicken keynoters don’t seem to fully understand or aren’t interested in engaging with.”

Poulos explained that his project at The American Mind has three elements: preserving the American regime, preserving human control over the machines, and preserving Americans as the type of people who can execute on the first two tasks. “Read The New York Times or turn on Netflix for the latest quote-unquote comedy special and it’s about being chronically depressed,” Poulos told me. “I’ve seen so many young people tantalized by this official fantasy of, you gotta move to one of the five or six big American cities and live a life of autonomy and personal creation and all the doors will be open to you, and if you don’t, you will be insignificant and interchangeable and obscure. And so people move there! And they blow their 20s and 30s ‘navigating’ that environment, and what does that entail? Living in a luxury microapartment and drinking the same $20 Negronis that everyone else is drinking and grinding through the same three or four dating apps gradually getting psychosexually compromised in the way that everyone else does. And it takes away the very autonomy that was the one big selling point. And my concern is that people in those generations that have been affected that way are not as attuned to the excellence of human vitality in the way they need to be to look at all these bots and say, yeah well, it’s still amazing to be human.”

This new, more populist conservatism has received only mixed support from the larger party. For some, the new right simply doesn’t amount to much. Matthew Continetti, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said that “the young people who are driving this weren’t actually around during the ‘dead consensus.’ They’re in their mid- or late-20s, and their political memories begin with Trump. So a lot of energy is spent figuring Trump out, when in reality a lot of what he does is bring debates to the fore that have been going on a long time.”

Yet the push for a less laissez faire Republican Party has already provoked fierce criticism. After Rubio’s November speech on “common good capitalism,” National Review’s Kevin Williamson called the senator’s speech a “backward,” “destructive,” and “morally indefensible” attempt to “put something new and exciting in front of a mob that has grown jaded and bored by its own prosperity”; in another piece on the same speech, he denounced Rubio’s “half-assed moralizing”; and in a third piece on Rubio’s December speech on industrial policy, he concluded that the senator’s “problem isn’t stupidity—it’s hubris.” Writing in the same magazine, David Harsanyi said Rubio was “illiberal,” “anti-capitalist,” and shared the anxieties of Occupy Wall Street and the “puritanical progressives of the early 20th century.”

The members of the new right I spoke to tend to see the reactions of figures like Harsanyi and Williamson as evidence of just how far they had to go to shift the party in the directions they want. “It’s almost like there are foreign antibodies and these white blood cells are coming out to destroy them,” said one congressional aide. At the same time, he expressed optimism that the new right was winning the battle of ideas, adding: “Those sorts of instinctive, reflexive responses are revealing in just how empty and substanceless a lot of them are.” Enjeti put the matter more bluntly: “The whole reason that the GOP has been able to even compete for so long is that despite their horrible economics, they do hold the cultural positions of so much of the American people. But they keep thinking they’re winning because of their economic policy and losing because of their cultural policy, when really it’s the opposite.”

The Battle on the New Right for the Soul of Trump's America

 

[ogc163]

I think these new right cats could potentially undermine the econ-libertarian/neo-conservative coalition because their nationalist traditionalist stance resonates in the rust belt. I'm currently reading Patrick Deenen's "Why Liberalism Failed" and I've listened to several of Ross Douthat's interview regarding his "Decadent Society" hypothesis and their arguments veer to close to nationalism for my liking. And they are even more critical of cosmopolitanism than even the traditional GOP, as they don't believe in the Ricardian international trade ideas pushed by libertarian--and most mainstream--economists. But others have started to notice how flawed and dangerous some of these new right stances are, both on the left and the right. Hayek/Friedman influenced economist Russ Robert's interview with Deenen, and Douthat's recent interview with Ezra Klein shows that these guys don't seem to grasp the downside risk if their policy suggestions were implemented.

 

[MoneyTron]

The young right has a numbers(race and gender) issue. The GOP has turned off GenZ and Millenials in a way that didn't happen for young Boomers and GenX. Until they fix that, the GOP will be on a downward trajectory as the Boomers die off.

 

[ogc163]

The young right has a numbers(race and gender) issue. The GOP has turned off GenZ and Millenials in a way that didn't happen for young Boomers and GenX. Until they fix that, the GOP will be on a downward trajectory as the Boomers die off.

I think this is partially true, but when you add in geography and class I become skeptical of the GOP's supposed death. Southern and Midwestern white white-collar professionals have different values and incentives when compared to their coastal counterparts, and for the foreseeable future, I think the GOP will be able to take advantage of that. And I am not confident that working-class millennials and Gen-Z'ers will eventually enter the Democratic tent, because they inherit a lot of the same values from their Boomer parents. Thus, given the effectiveness of the GOP to run on culture wars I think the new right will steer the GOP towards a more polarizing nationalistic politics.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

I think this is partially true, but when you add in geography and class I become skeptical of the GOP's supposed death. Southern and Midwestern white white-collar professionals have different values and incentives when compared to their coastal counterparts, and for the foreseeable future, I think the GOP will be able to take advantage of that. And I am not confident that working-class millennials and Gen-Z'ers will eventually enter the Democratic tent, because they inherit a lot of the same values from their Boomer parents. Thus, given the effectiveness of the GOP to run on culture wars I think the new right will steer the GOP towards a more polarizing nationalistic politics.

Look at the under-45 voting results in the South and Midwest. Even places like Montana, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, etc. look vulnerable as fukk. The GOP can't survive on deep red states alone.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Here are 2018 exit polls. Remember, in 2018 the economy was still good and the COVID disaster hadn't hit. Trump and the Republicans look WORSE now than they did then and have turned off younger voters even more.


Stacey Abrams in Georgia: Won 60% of the 18-44 vote

Andrew Gillum in Florida: Won 61% of the 18-44 vote

John Tester in Montana: Won 56% of the 18-44 vote

Beto O'Rourke in Texas: Won 59% of the 18-44 vote

Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona: Won 59% of the 18-49 vote

Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin: Won 61% of the 18-44 vote



Those are landslide numbers in reddish-purple states and that's going all the way up 44. And like I said that's 2018, it's only gotten worse. If voting stopped at 65, Democrats would DOMINATE the map right now. Which means in about 10-15 years the Republicans are fukked unless something drastic changes.

 

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The new intellectuals of the American right

What is happening on the American intellectual scene? In Washington and New York, it is increasingly common to hear people say they are enemies of neoliberalism. They think liberal democracy is insufficient. They are in favour of government intervention in the economy, sceptical of free-trade deals and long to demolish what they call “zombie Reaganism”.

These people are not Bernie Sanders supporters. In fact, they are not on the left at all. They are Catholic professors, or writers for US conservative magazines. They run tech companies in California or work for Republican senators on Capitol Hill. Meet the new American right.

If you would like to find yourself a place in the vanguard of American conservatism these days, you can choose from a widening panoply of neologisms to describe yourself: national conservative, integralist, traditionalist, post-liberal, you might even be welcome if you are a Marxist. Anything just so long as you’re not a libertarian.

The once dominant intellectual lodestars of the US right – Friedrich Hayek, John Locke, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand and Adam Smith – are out. The ideas of Carl Schmitt, James Burnham, Michel Houellebecq and Christopher Lasch are in. Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville are barely clinging on. What happened?

One explanation for the American right’s leftward turn lies with Catholic opinion. Resentment was already building among US Catholic conservatives by the time of Donald Trump’s election in 2016. From around 2013, as Pope Francis appeared to be compromising on certain social issues, such as acceptance of homosexuality, Catholics began to suspect the grand bargain of the American conservative movement since the 1950s – free markets combined with social conservatism – was heavily tilted in favour of the former. They saw a Republican Party guided less by religion than by money: money which seemed little disposed to advocate on behalf of their beliefs. They saw themselves as foot-soldiers in a culture war their party seemed content to lose. Even worse: for the privilege of fighting, they had been obliged not to think too hard about what Catholic social teaching might have to say on issues such healthcare, for fear of offending the jealous god of the free market.

A demonstration of this anger came in 2018, when University of Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen published a provocatively titled book, Why Liberalism Failed. By “liberalism”, Deneen did not mean the American progressivism embodied by Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, but the entire liberal project, from the 17th-century philosopher John Locke to the postwar theorist John Rawls. By replacing old commitments to community, religion or tradition with pure self-interest, Deneen said, liberalism atomised citizens, rendering them helpless, nihilistic and alone.

The book quickly became a touchstone for conservative discussions in the US about liberalism. Instead of a threat to American liberal democracy, perhaps Trump was merely the latest symptom of a defect the liberal project had contracted at birth – the rage emanating from communities hollowed out by a corrosive liberalism.

As a balm for these social ills, Deneen advocated retreat from national politics into the enclaves of small, rural communities, echoing other writers on the American right, such as Rod Dreher, a senior editor at the American Conservative. But more recently, Deneen has taken an interest in populism, hobnobbing with the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán in November 2019 and proposing a politics of “aristopopulism” – the notion, borrowed from the 16th-century Florentine philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli, that friction between the masses and the elite is the best way to ensure that neither class dominates the other, and that material inequality remains at a moderate level.

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Deneenism, however, came up against a fiercer and more eccentric assortment of right-wing monks and bloggers who march under the banner of “integralism”. The integralists demand that the constitutional separation between church and state be smashed, so that the state may defer to the church on spiritual matters. The state’s reach, argue integralists, should be combined with Catholic teaching on social issues: “Medicare for all, abortion for none.”

The high priest of the integralist movement is the 51-year-old Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule. Though Vermeule agrees with Deneen’s diagnosis of liberal malady, his proposed remedy is not Benedictine retreat but Constantinian takeover. A leading expert on the American administrative state, he knows it is a staggeringly powerful tool, capable of swaying the actions of millions. He believes it would only take a few loyalists, well enough placed within the national bureaucracy, to steer the whole hulking contraption in the general direction of the summum bonum.

Vermeule recently caused a stir with an essay in the Atlantic calling for a new legal philosophy that would emphasise “authority and hierarchy” and demonstrate “a candid willingness to ‘legislate morality’”. Under his proposed regime, laws permitting “free speech, abortion, sexual liberties, and related matters” might be overturned. “Libertarian conceptions of property rights” would be rejected. Unelected bureaucrats would carry out these edicts, acting as “the strong hand of legitimate rule”. Aghast, libertarian-leaning think tanks such as the Niskanen Center returned fire, with one affiliate labelling Vermeule’s intervention “patently anti-democratic, illiberal, and, dare I say it, un-American”.

The political goal of integralism is a confessional state in which temporal rule is subordinated to Catholic doctrine. But without support from a popular movement, capturing America’s liberal bureaucracy might be a more difficult task than the integralists think. Such was the case with their efforts to assume control of the leading magazine of the American religious right, First Things.

Towards the end of 2017, the integralist movement had succeeded in tempting the editors of First Things to entertain its ideas. But the integralists found themselves in trouble in January 2018 after the publication of an article defending the decision, taken by Pope Pius IX in the 1850s, to remove a Jewish child from his family after he had been secretly baptised by his family’s Catholic nanny. The pope had explained – and the author of the article, Fr Romanus Cessario, seemed to agree – that the child’s baptism meant he had to be raised as a Catholic.

But to critics in the Catholic press, the article looked like confirmation of what they had long suspected. This was that the integralists, in their desire to reject the political liberalism of the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65, were also willing to undo the conclave’s historic break with anti-Semitism.

In the wake of the affair, First Things pivoted to a stance that was less Catholic and more nationalistic. This was thanks in part to the influence of Yoram Hazony, a 55-year-old Israeli academic and author of The Virtue of Nationalism (2018). Hazony makes the case for a choice between imperialism and nationalism, tracing the origins of nationalism to the Hebrew Bible. One can either desire to live in a world of limited nation states, none seeking to impose their ways on others; or a world of competing universal empires. Going so far as to write that “Hitler was no advocate of nationalism,” Hazony argues that only a world of independent nations can guarantee peace.

Hazony’s critics, including those on the right, often respond that the distinction between nation and empire is not so stark: nations often make war with the stated intent of protecting their way of life, and when they succeed they find themselves in possession of an empire.

***

The other leading magazine of the new American right is the heterodox policy journal American Affairs. In its pages, left-wing Brooklynite malcontents fight for space with eccentric Harvard professors and renegade conservative wonks. Julius Krein, the magazine’s editor, attracted attention from both left and right in November 2019 by upending the conversation over class in the Democratic primary.

The real class war in America, Krein said, is not between the working class and the elite: it is between the managers and the billionaires; between the top 10 per cent and the top 0.1 per cent. It is well known that since the financial crash of 2008, poor and middle-class incomes have grown more slowly than those of the rich. But the bounty is far from equally distributed within the top 10 per cent. As a handful of enormously prosperous Americans have watched their wealth balloon, the rewards of the country’s traditionally lucrative legal and financial professions have shrunk.

Even in the dynamic tech and biotech sectors, salaries struggle to keep pace with the exorbitant costs of living in Silicon Valley or Cambridge, Massachusetts. An increasing proportion of upper-class families’ income is dedicated to preserving their elite status, generating a characteristic anxiety. It is not unlike George Orwell’s notion in The Road to Wigan Pier of the “lower-upper-middle class” – a segment of the middle class that had taken on aristocratic pretensions during their late Victorian heyday, but by the interwar period were obviously doomed, with nearly all their income dedicated to preserving the appearance of a fictional gentility.

 

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The point is not to feel bad for these beleaguered executives and corporate lawyers, or their downwardly mobile children, but to keep an eye on them. In an age without popular movements, they still wield real power, and they’re angry. As a 2020 Financial Times article on the middle class by Simon Kuper put it: “Populism is less a working-class revolt than a middle-class civil war.”

A parallel set of clashes is happening between conservatives over economics. The most salient example is Oren Cass, who served as Mitt Romney’s domestic policy director during the Republican senator’s 2012 presidential campaign. Cass has branded himself an advocate for an American industrial policy – a government-coordinated effort to boost domestic manufacturing based on similar efforts by countries such as Germany and Japan.

The notion of an industrial policy challenges the free-market economic wisdom that once reigned, and Cass routinely does battle with libertarian-aligned economists who accuse him of advocating for a planned economy that is doomed to fail. The free-marketers are all the more enraged by Cass’s apostasy because he is supposed to be on their side: further evidence that the old conservative-libertarian partnership is under severe strain.

How might the Covid-19 pandemic affect the outcome of this intramural brawl among American conservatives? Many on the new right believe the virus has vindicated their scepticism of globalisation, as well as their demand for a stronger, more capable state that does not shrink from curbing liberties when circumstances demand it. A dictum emerged: “Nobody is a libertarian in the midst of a pandemic.”

Yet the libertarian-minded have protested that the virus is best combated by slashing regulations and spurring medical innovation. They emphasise the missteps by the US federal government in the early days of the anti-viral effort, and praise the prominent role played by local and state governments. The $2trn coronavirus stimulus package has already cast aside Republican ideas of fiscal discipline, but the cheques Americans will soon receive in the mail bear a resemblance to the “helicopter money” proposals by libertarian economist Milton Friedman. Any verdict issued while the world remains wracked by the virus is bound to be provisional.

The intellectuals of the new American right want to revolutionise the conservative establishment, but it’s not clear how they might go about it. One idea is to convince conservative donors to support the new agenda – a bigger state, more generous with money and more inclined to use it to achieve desired outcomes, whether in the economy (supporting manufacturing) or in society (larger stipends or tax cuts for families with children).

This will be a tough sell: the conservative establishment is accustomed to dismissing such proposals as bad for business. Another idea is to put forward a fellow-traveling candidate in 2024. A few options were on display at the 2019 “NatCon” conference in Washington, DC, held to showcase the new “nationalist” American conservatism.

One candidate is Tucker Carlson, the incendiary Fox News presenter who has recently promoted books by Elizabeth Warren and complained about American engagement abroad. Another is Josh Hawley, a Republican senator from Missouri, a staunch abortion opponent and a vocal critic of the tech industry. There is also Florida's Republican senator Marco Rubio, who didn't attend the conference, but who recently referenced Catholic social teaching in a First Things article that read suspiciously like a measured critique of free-marketism.

This is not the first time Rubio has been set up as the poster boy for the latest obsession of the conservative avant-garde. During the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election he was feted by centre-right intellectuals as the candidate of “reform conservatism” – a movement that hoped to make the Republicans viable with non-white and working-class voters by proposing child tax credits and a points-based immigration system. Rubio was bulldozed by Trump in the primary, and the Republican Party did indeed end up appealing to segments of the working class, but – to say the least – not in the way the reform conservatives wanted.

Politicians tend to acquire pet intellectuals. The process does not generally operate the other way around. There is the risk that a President Hawley or President Carlson might act more or less as Trump has generally done and let the conservative ruling machine do what it does best: maintain populist rhetoric and sprinkle in a few adjustments by way of camouflage.

***

Could this rebellion of the right-wing intellectuals be coming to Britain? It seems unlikely. While many on the new American right delight in the return of a more adversarial style of politics, in the UK Boris Johnson won a crushing victory in December 2019 on a platform based more on anti-politics. “Aren’t you tired of it all?” was the Conservative message to a country exhausted by three years of Brexit. If the new American right is Machiavellian, placing hopes for a better future in the clash between the masses and the elite, then the Tories are Hobbesians, promising peace and prosperity on the condition that the British people surrender the political arena to them. Nor is the national appetite for rough-and-tumble politics likely to increase amid an ongoing public health emergency.

Brexit pushed conservative British intellectuals in new directions, but only temporarily. As the Economist’s Bagehot columnist noted in August 2019, a party once defined by the Burkean tradition turned to the radical idioms of the 18th century Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his notion of “the general will” in order to defend its Brexit position.

But after December 2019 this civil war ended, and no doubt Rousseau will slip from Tory lips. Johnson’s senior adviser Dominic Cummings takes inspiration from Americans, but of a less original sort. The models for his eccentric behaviour and technocratic scorn for the humanities are the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley.

The UK’s intellectual landscape, too, lends itself less to such an insurgency. British intellectuals are more often historians, less interested in formulating unorthodox policy proposals than they are in recasting opinion on the Levellers or the Jacobites. British conservatism has just lost its leading light in Roger Scruton, an atypical figure who has no obvious successor. The sovereignty of the party of the right over conservative intellectual activity is also more total in Britain than in America. Krein emphasises the stranglehold of the Republican donor class over conservative intellectual activity, but from a transatlantic perspective he and his magazine are evidence that the American landscape is more multifarious and less easily commanded.

Still, the intellectuals of the American right are paying close attention to the Johnson premiership, because it has promised to enact a programme that reflects the opposite of the old libertarian dictum – not socially liberal, fiscally conservative; but rather socially conservative, fiscally liberal. Johnson is hardly a social conservative by American standards, but his move to win over working-class northern voters and retain them with increased spending on national infrastructure are seen in these circles as a blueprint for a 2024 realignment in US politics.

But that is a long way off, and there is another presidential election before then – one many on the new American right are not particularly eager to contemplate.

The new intellectuals of the American right

 

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n 2016, Julius Krein was one of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters. In Trump’s critiques of the existing Republican and Democratic establishments, Krein saw the contours of a heterodox ideology he believed could reshape American politics for the better. So he established a pro-Trump blog and, later, a policy journal called American Affairs, which his critics claimed was an attempt to “understand Trump better than he understands himself.”

Today, Krein finds himself in an unusual position. Upon realizing Trump was not committed to any governing vision at all (but was as racist as his critics suggested), Krein disavowed the president in 2017. But as the editor of American Affairs, he’s still committed to building an intellectual superstructure around the ideas that were threaded through Trump’s 2016 campaign.

This conversation on The Ezra Klein Show is about the distance between Trump and the ideology so many tried to brand as Trumpism. We also discuss Krein’s view that the US has always functionally been a one-party system, the disconnect between Republican elites and voters, what a new bipartisan economic consensus could look like, whether Joe Biden and the Democrats take Trump’s ideas more seriously than Trump does, which direction the GOP will go if Trump loses in a landslide in November, why Republicans lost interest in governance, whether media coverage is the true aim of right-wing populists, why Krein thinks the true power lies with the technocrats, and more.

Trumpism never existed. It was always just Trump.

 

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Why can neither of these “new” ideologies just move beyond trying to co-opt The Republicans or Dem name?

It’s like that same Hollywood argument. Instead of starting a new franchise they just try and reboot the same franchise over and over

 

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The Terrifying Future of the American Right
www.theatlantic.com /ideas/archive/2021/11/scary-future-american-right-national-conservatism-conference/620746/

Brooks sees it, these are the most threatening jokers on the right.