Philip Jeffery is bothered. The deputy opinion editor of Newsweek and occasional contributor to The American Conservative has penned what people who went to liberal arts colleges inevitably call a “cri du coeur” in Commonweal, which is, for the folks who aren’t paid to follow this stuff, basically the New Republic for Catholics. Titled “Wrong From the Beginning” (get it?), Jeffery bemoans at some length what he sees as the moral bankruptcy of “the New Right.”
Jeffery’s general grievance is that the New Right has always held contradictory strains and is in thrall to the person of Donald Trump; his specific grievances are that the New Right has been insufficiently receptive to the racial agenda of the summer of 2020, that it has been insufficiently pro-immigrant, that it opposed Covid measures, and that it’s needlessly cruel to “weird” people. He feels that the New Right has betrayed a vision of economic leveling in favor of crony capitalism and capricious exertions of power. He is especially troubled by the failure of the “postliberal” strain to have much effect on the movement as a whole, which seems like a mere error in judgment—postliberalism has always been a parlor game for professors and Catholics, far removed from the actual practicalities of doing politics. All in all, he seems to think it’s just an unappealing mess. “Absent a coherent ideology or policy agenda, what really united all the strains of the New Right was an eagerness to be edgy, to say ‘based’ things about ‘childless cat ladies’ and ‘blue-haired libs,’ ‘neocons’ and ‘normie-cons,’” he writes.
Well, all right. It’s a free country and you can think what you want. I do wonder what movement Jeffery thought he was part of, though. I have admittedly poindexterish gripes about the term “New Right”; the New Right to me, a grown man with a political memory that did not start in 2015, is the other name for William F. Buckley’s Movement Conservatism, as opposed to the inchoate “Old Right” that preceded it. But we’ve been doing this thing—the realignment, the new nationalism, the New Right, whatever you want to call it—for a decade now. I think we can finally do some defining, empirical-like.
It’s time to break out that creaky old piece of metaphorical furniture, the three-legged stool. The three legs of the New Right have always been foreign policy, immigration, and—here comes the curveball, keep an eye on it—egalitarianism. These legs are thick enough to hold the contradictions Jeffery objects to (and I defy him to find an actual historical political movement that does not have internal contradictions; politics is a coalitions game). They are also in fact coherent enough to describe a particular movement and how it is distinct from the concerns of Movement Conservatism. There’s more harmony than noise in this sing-along. Most importantly, they have been there for those with eyes to see from the very beginning.
The first leg comes from the factual observation that American foreign policy has been expensive, disruptive, and, since the Cold War, largely detached from even notional American interests. The Global War on Terror served as an excuse for the massive expansion of state power over the public square, hollowing out the distinctive rights of Americans and giving birth to the mechanisms by which Leviathan carries out its petty wars on individuals. Post–Cold War interventionism was a dud, and the New Right articulated its errors. Even the more aggressive elements of the New Right (for example, The American Conservative’s biggest fan, Josh Hammer) have been compelled to frame appetite for foreign adventures in appeals to the American national interest; they feel the need to assure the public that any given action won’t “be another Iraq.” And these voices are not the dominant strain; the old paleoconservative and paleolibertarian opposition to interventionism, “realism and restraint,” is the mode of the day. Fears that “the 12-Day War” would destroy the Trump movement were overblown, as anyone could see at the time, but they nevertheless did reveal that the thematic affinity for retrenchment abroad is a central tenet of the New Right.
And it has always been thus. Bush’s failed wars were one of Trump’s main talking points in 2016; “The Flight 93 Election,” the closest thing to a manifesto the movement had in those days, identifies fewer wars as a key element of the Trump platform. Yes, Jeffery is right, the National Conservative Conference trots out old Bush cronies like John Bolton and John Yoo—but who thinks NatCon is the center of gravity for anything in particular these days? While there are many gripes to be made about this administration’s foreign policy (and they are made, often in these pages), the foreign-policy orientation of the New Right as a movement has been consistent and relatively coherent.
The second leg is immigration. This item has always been more overt and univocal than even the foreign policy leg. Mass immigration erodes national cohesion and demands state mechanisms for dealing with large populations that do not share American mores; it also undercuts the American worker, whom Jeffery laments the New Right seems to have abandoned. (No wonder an enlightened hero of the people like Cesar Chavez said some pretty stiff stuff about illegal immigrants.) The Wall and “bad hombres” have been there since the get-go. Jeffery says that mass deportations are a relatively recent fixation, but this to me seems to ignore the historical context, both then and now. Mitt Romney’s “self-deportation” was the starting bid on immigration enforcement, and it was deemed too weak. And that was 10 years ago, before the Biden wave of mass migration, which made all the problems associated with immigration far more acute. It seems specious to say that the sensus populi among the New Righters in 2025 is very different on this issue than what it was in 2016, although the conditions may be.
The final leg, and perhaps the most important, is a form of egalitarianism. The New Right holds as its basic premise that the public square is weighted in favor of some and against others, and that this is itself a problem. This is the underlying premise of the economic opinions of New Right types, both those of the libertarian strain (who think that regulation and corporate cronyism distort this fairness) and those of the protectionist or economic nationalist strain (who think that the state’s framing of the market is prejudicial to ordinary Americans and American national interest). Another corollary of this egalitarianism is an opposition to the leftist tendency to divide the nation into groups based on identity markers and doling out privileges—a word, it is always worth remembering, that means “private laws”—based on those divisions. You can see how this dovetails with the immigration issue; the fundamental concern is the milletization of the country. This is why the New Right rose so precipitously in parallel to “woke” identity politics; no wonder they weren’t on board with the George Floyd riots. While Trump himself was equivocal about the issue on the ’16 campaign trail, his first administration targeted affirmative action relatively early. Nor is it a surprise that a movement whose antecedents include Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement and the writings of the paleoconservatives was pretty down on race wokeness. At the same time, you’d be hard-pressed to find a mainstream New Right figure calling for the reinstitution of segregation or white affirmative action; even the quotation Jeffery takes from the firebrand Amy Wax stops short of actually endorsing such a thing. The bog-standard New Right ask is what conservatives’ bog-standard ask has generally been, the equality under the law that underwrites a constitutional republic.
These elements have all been in the New Right from the beginning. You can certainly find them distasteful or wrong; I myself have the reservations about the New Right that I have about all mass movements, plus a few particular ones. But I am not sure what there is to be surprised and disappointed about.
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Jeffery himself concedes the argument. He concludes,
Perhaps it was inevitable the New Right would answer all these questions the ways it did. I had hoped that certain aspects of American conservatism could be changed: its commitment to growth at all costs, its imperialism, its indifference (to put it mildly) to racial justice. But these aspects proved to be foundational, not accidental. Looking back, perhaps the tests of 2020 were not for the New Right, but for me. Perhaps I was never looking for a “realignment” or for any type of conservatism, real or imagined; perhaps I was really looking for a left. Back at square one, I at least know what I should have looked for all along: politics that substantially, and not just rhetorically, takes the side of labor; that places the poor, the marginalized, and even the “weird” at the center of its concern.
