The New Right is a menace and it must be defeated.
Whatever else they disagree on, libertarians and progressives should both be staunch defenders of liberal democracy, and the chief threat to liberal democracy in America right now comes from the kinds of people who, one year ago today, ransacked the Capitol. What we saw last January 6th was pure, unalloyed madness and those like Josh Hawley who aided and abetted it should forever be considered radioactive, unfit for office, or even included in polite society. January 6th was not an isolated event. It was but the most plainly visible manifestation of the illiberal, unhinged, nationalistic New Right.
We, the defenders of liberal democracy, cannot become monsters in an effort to stop monsters, but within the unwritten rules of classical liberalism, we must spare no effort to defend American democracy against this New Right. No challenge today is more important than defeating these anti-patriots, these would-be destroyers of all that is good about America.
Illiberal
The New Right is not of Oakeshott and Burke; it is of Nietzsche and Schmitt.
Michael Oakeshott wrote that “to be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”[1] In a similar vein, Burke before him asked “what is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician rather than the professor of metaphysics” and argued that “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its own conservation.”[2]
This Oakeshott/Burkean conservatism is an Enlightment conservatism that’s pragmatic rather than zealous, cautious but not reactionary, suspicious of concentrated power, and eager to keep the state limited so that civil society may thrive. For both of them, there is a notable absence of animosity and a notable presence of a sense of limits. The New Right repudiates all of that. Their zealotry, revanchism, thirst for power, and statism are all obvious.
The New Right is illiberal. By that, I do not mean Liberal in the way it is commonly used in American political discourse to mean left-of-center. I mean liberal in the classical liberal sense, dedicated to the rule of law, individual rights, markets, free speech, innovation, a commitment to persuasion over force, protections for minorities, a society-centric as opposed to a state-centric perspective, international cooperation, and a tolerance of diversity. Those seem obvious goods to most Americans, but not to the New Right, and they say so themselves. Some of the New Right scholars (Patrick Deneen, Gladden Pappin, Chad Pecknold, and Adrian Vermuele) have even taken to calling themselves Postliberals. Read their writings. They’ll tell you they don’t believe in liberal democracy.
Deneen himself argues against the following:
-religious liberty,
-limited government,
-the inviolability of private institutions (e.g., corporations),
-academic freedom,
-constitutional originalism,
-free markets, and
-free speech and expression.
The illiberalism and un-Americanness of that wish list are simply breathtaking.
He goes on to say that “liberalism’s internal logic leads inevitably to the evisceration of all institutions that were originally responsible for fostering human virtue: family, ennobling friendship, community, university, polity, church.” For his part, Pecknold finds Ross Douthat, Benjamin and Jenna Storey, and Rod Dreher all to be too nice to classical liberalism. Douthat is genuinely conservative and especially so on a wide range of social issues. He’s the closest thing we have today to Edmund Burke. The Storey’s critique of liberalism is quite direct. Dreher isn’t a classical liberal at all; he carries water for Orban’s Hungary. And these people aren’t anti-liberal enough for Pecknold.
It’s notable that these postliberals do not simply want to persuade people to lead lives that they see as virtuous. They want to use state power to compel people to lead lives they see as virtuous. To use Sohrab Ahmari’s words, they want “to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.”
It is not just that the New Right jettisons Oakeshott and Burke, it is that they positively embrace Nietzsche and Schmitt. One of the concepts that was core to Nietzsche’s theorizing was the ‘Will to Power.’ One might more accurately describe it as the desire to dominate. For Nietzsche, not just politics, but all of life, is about dominating others. It prizes strength and will over reason and process. Among other dark accolades, Schmitt is remembered for arguing that the chief structure of politics is the division between friend and enemy. Politics is not about reconciling different interests or dividing power, it is about accumulating power so that you can reward your friends and, more importantly, eradicate your enemies.
This is how it is for the New Right. There is only friend and enemy, and the enemy must be dominated. Burke’s focus on the little platoons and providing essentials to all are gone. Oakeshott’s pragmatism and caution are gone. What is left after that? For the New Right, it is nihilism, struggle, and zealotry.
You could see all of this on January 6, 2021. The rioters, at the goading of their leader President Trump, were there to violently oppose an election result, one of the central institutions of a liberal democracy. They did it at the Capitol, the very heart of American democracy. Faced with losing an election, they did not try to use liberal forms of power like cultural power or economic power but instead focused on maintaining their hold on the state, and they were perfectly willing to use violence to do so.
Like their leader Donald Trump, even if they have never read Nietzsche, they quite clearly indulge in his Will-to-Power philosophy and even if they have never read Schmitt, it is abundantly clear that their politics chiefly turns on who is friend and who is enemy, and they make no mistake of their desire to eradicate their enemies. George Washington’s reference to Scripture saying that “everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid” is anathema to them. They want to make their enemies afraid.
On its own this is all very troubling, and that’s before we even get to the unhinged or the nationalism.
Unhinged
I chose the word unhinged here both for its common meaning of having lost one’s senses but also for its less common but more literal meaning of being without a firm attachment to proper foundations, as a door off its hinges would be. The first group of the unhinged include people like Marjorie Taylor Greene. They are genuinely nuts. Between anti-vaccination nonsense, believing that the 2020 election was stolen, and QAnon, to name just a few, a significant portion of the New Right is so awash in insane conspiracy theories that they are virtually impervious to new information and so cannot be talked out of their extremism. Importantly, the conspiracy theories they believe are not harmless ones like thinking the moon landing was fake. Their content demands actions. If QAnon really were true and there really was a secret ring of pedophilic child traffickers at the highest levels of government, that really would justify extreme action to stop. The same could be said if election theft really had happened. Once you believe these sorts of ideas, you become much more likely to hate your political opponents and more willing to justify extreme, violent political action.
The second group are not unhinged in the sense of believing in bizarre, toxic conspiracy theories but in the sense that they have become so resentful of the Left that it has corrupted their moral judgment. You ask them about the obvious depravity of parts of the Right and their response isn’t to defend it per se but to respond with some kind of whatabout-ism of the Left. Whatabout-isms posture at opposing hypocrisy, but what they are really doing is justify an abandonment of moral responsibility. It’s saying ‘if our opponents are imperfect, no criticism of our indecency is valid and therefore no limit on our indecency can be expected.’ Given human fallibility, that just a mental gymnastics way of saying ‘we get to do whatever we want.’
This second group has a much more respectable appearance than the first group. These are not the kinds of people who wear 6WME sweatshirts, but these are people who, if the rest of the New Right took power via an insurrection would not oppose it, would have misgivings for about four seconds, and then say to everyone (and especially themselves) that they had no choice, that this had to be done to stop The Left. You can see this kind of January 6th apologia even now. This part of the New Right is so poisoned by hatred of The Left that it’s just as deranged as the Marjorie Taylor Greene conspiracy theorizing.
These arguments fit with the previously discussed illiberalism in that they are a repudiation of classic conservatism. For two centuries, the French Revolution with all of its demagoguery, chaos, terror, and mob hysteria represented everything Burkean and Oakeshott conservatives stood against. And here, the New Right is arguing for embracing the French Revolution if such a thing promises to terrorize and obliterate their enemies. One of the iconic images from January 6th was a quickly built dais bearing a noose qua guillotine. A new Reign of Terror doesn’s sound so bad to some of these people. And, lest we forget, there were people at the January 6th attempted insurrection wearing 6MWE sweatshirts (6 MWE stands for 6 Million Wasn’t Enough- it’s a reference to the Holocaust). This is madness. Saying six million wasn’t enough while paying homage to the French Revolution while masquerading as ‘conservatives.’ That’s the New Right. It’d be funny if it weren’t so menacing and dangerous.
Nationalistic
It is not just that- driven by a mixture of authoritarianism, lies, and resentment- the New Right is out for power and vengeance, it is that they are nakedly nationalistic, eager to define themselves as the only real Americans. As Glenn Ellmers put it in “Conservatism is No Longer Enough” an article in The Claremont Institute’s publication The American Mind, “most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” His nationalism is not the kind of civic nationalism that is sometimes used interchangeably with patriotism. It is the European-style blood and soil kind of nationalism.
It is no secret that the New Right likes Viktor Orban’s Hungarian nationalism, but perhaps a better view of what the American New Right is after can be found in France’s Eric Zemmour. In the video in which he announced his candidacy, Zemmour opens by talking about his supporters having a “pervasive feeling of dispossession.” He quickly goes on to decry people speaking other languages and saying that his supporters don’t recognize their country while showing images of people who don’t look like traditional Maries and Jacques. The opening minute of the video are designed to hammer home the idea that others are a threat that bring only displacement and chaos. It then goes through a nice montage of France’s great achievements but all the while asserting quite clearly that the appearance of ‘others’ is making that France disappear.
One theme continues throughout: others and those who welcome others are dispossessing Zemmour’s followers of a sense of home. He wants a pure France and sees all of those who do not fit within his idea of the ‘nation’ as contaminants. This is ugly, exclusionary nationalism. Zemmour is trying to create a mob that seeks vengeance against others and those who welcome others. Zemmour’s stances are substantively no different from the Charlottesville tiki-torch alt-righters shouting “you will not replace us!” And if you think I’m exaggerating, he even literally says “we will not be replaced.” Zemmour’s replacement rhetoric is not functionally different from the 14 Words, the most popular white supremacist slogan: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."
To the extent that Zemmour and American equivalents of Zemmour believe in democracy at all they believe in a herrenvolk democracy, that is, a democracy for the majority ethnic/racial group alone. In a herrenvolk democracy, the benefits of citizenship are extended only to those consider full “real” members of the nation. When the New Right expresses feelings of dispossession, this is one of the things they lost. The New Right acts as if every charge of bigotry is an unfair ad hominem attack but bigotry is a fully accurately way to describe the ways that some of their people talk immigration. At the inaugural National Conservatism conference, Amy Wax argued that the United States “will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites” and made the broader argument that the United States ought to be especially suspicious of immigrants from the Third World. This is nationalistic bigotry, full stop. In America, we don’t have a herrenvolk democracy but we used to.
That is ultimately what the January 6th mob wanted to fight to preserve. This was a nationalistic mob, feeling aggrieved and dispossessed by changes in American culture and demography, violently opposed to a liberal democracy they can no longer dominate. That nationalism, particularly when combined with the previously discussed unhinged-ness, is a recipe for political violence. The man who killed 51 people at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand was a member of the alt-right who published a manifesto on “The Great Replacement” just before the attack. The man who killed 77 people in Norway was also motivated by this same ideology. The attacker at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh was motivated by anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic ideas. The perpetrator of a mass shooting in an El Paso Walmart held similar anti-immigrant and white nationalist views.
Even apart from terrorism like this, when you combine this exclusionary nationalism with the illiberalism and unhingedness discussed earlier, what you get is something that is honestly not that far from fascism. This combination is possibly best encapsulated by Kurt Schlichter. In August, he argued “We must, by any means necessary, force them to be like us. No quarter. No compromise”, “Nationalize big tech and academia and mandate conservatism as their operational ideology. Ban leftist media and entertainment from spreading misinformation”, “Penalize barren, non-familial lifestyles through taxes and disqualification from political participation. Establish property and military service qualifications for voting”, and “use the law to ensure blue submission. Imprison dissenters.” This is not from some anonymous account. This guy writes for Townhall.com, one of the largest, most influential websites on the right. This is madness.
The Charlottesville tiki-torch alt-right. The Postliberals. Marjorie Taylor Greene. QAnon. Amy Wax. 6MWE. January 6th and its apologists. Eric Zemmour. Josh Hammer. Election fraud conspiracy theorists. Kurt Schlicter. The Claremont Institute. Tucker Carlson. Glenn Ellmers. Michael Anton. Though their motivations and degrees of extremism vary, all of these people want to shred America’s liberal democracy if it means their side gets to win and so it is indeed fair to group them together. This is the New Right.
To be clear, I do not think that most of the New Right are Nazis (though anyone with 6WME paraphernalia can fairly be labeled that way), but I do think that, if given the political opportunity, most if not all of the New Right would like to create a Franco-Trump synthesis that, backed by militia, marches on the capital, takes power, reorganizes the state such that it will never non-violently lose power, and then unleashes state power on all of its cultural and political enemies. January 6, 2021 was a quasi-riot/quasi-halfhearted first attempt at that. It may be attempted again with better planning and more ruthlessness. Nor is it ridiculous to imagine such an attempt finding success. Such a chain of events happened 100 years ago in Rome this October. It can happen again. Much of the New Right daydreams about making it happen now.
So then what is to be done?
Desperate Times Call for Accepting Strange Bedfellows
Here again, some wise words from Burke are worth dwelling upon: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one.”[3]
Everyone who will abandon and work against the New Right in defense of liberal democracy should be welcomed. If they’ll oppose the New Right, welcome corporate America. If they’ll oppose the New Right, welcome the social conservatives. If they’ll oppose the New Right, welcome any kind of libertarian, country club Republican, Kid Rock listening Republican, whoever. If you believe as I do that the core political task of our age is defending liberal democracy against this New Right menace, then you should be willing to put aside whatever you’re squabbles with anyone else along the political spectrum so long as they’ll help defeat the New Right. I’ll work with AOC to defeat the New Right and I’ll work with Charles Koch to defeat the New Right and I’ll work with anyone in between to defeat the New Right.
Every means of acceptably liberal non-violent power has to be turned on these people. The holders of economic power (corporations, consumers, the professional class) need to make sure that bright lines are drawn and defended, that while the Acceptable Right is supported, the New Right is starved of resources. The holders of cultural power (media, entertainment, tech, universities) need to relentlessly shine a light on the wannabe authoritarianism of the New Right while also dropping every last smidge of contempt for other conservatives.
The battle against the New Right will be won or lost in the center-right. The good news is that most people who call themselves conservatives, and even most Trump voters, do not share the New Right’s sentiments. They want to hang out on their pontoon boat with their friends and not get sneered at by snotty elites, and that’s perfectly reasonable. They want their kids to go to school full-time, maskless, and not be held hostage by teachers’ unions and that’s perfectly reasonable. They’re alarmed by the nonstop insanity that comes out of San Francisco, and that’s perfectly reasonable. The hyper-statist ideology of the New Right is a poor fit for a country of individualists with the frontier in their political DNA.
Conversely, the great weak point in the wall against the New Right is overreach by leftists. If presented with a choice between New Right insanity and a sane alternative, the center-right (or at least enough of it) will opt for sanity, but if their only choice is between New Right insanity and Left extremism, all bets are off. We progressives have to make the center-right our allies and whatever compromises we have to make to assure that happens, so be it. That deal can’t happen if the center-left lets the far-left’s worst instincts run wild. The center has to hold. America’s liberal democracy depends on it.
[1] Michael Oakeshott. “On Being Conservative” in Rationalism in Politics.
[2] Edmund Burke. Reflections on the Revolution in France.
[3] Edmund Burke. Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontent.