National conservatives, postliberals and the Nietzschean right: Meet today’s terrifying GOP

by MATT MCMANUS

Ersatz intellectual right-wing icons Adrian Vermeule (clockwise from left), Patrick Deneen and Yoram Hazony constitute a new vanguard of anti-liberalism (in the classical sense), challenging the foundations of democracy, especially among young men. IMAGE/Sam Fine/Images via YouTube, Francis Chung/Politico via AP Images, Wikipedia and DeAgostini/Getty Images

The New Right is mad, organized and wholly unafraid to wield state power.

The U.S. Right’s flirtation with authoritarianism has shocked many who believed the conventional wisdom that our country is genetically ?“center right” and committed to free markets, ordered liberty and as many American flags as possible. This conventional wisdom has trickled deep enough down that many forget it’s simply historically, untrue. For much of the mid-20^th century, a combination of Rooseveltian New Dealers and civil rights activists set the Overton window for U.S. politics. Things were so dire for conservatives that, as the movement reformed in the 1950s, Russell Kirk opened his manifesto, The Conservative Mind, by describing the Right as an ideology of losers who’d lost nearly every major battle from the French Revolution onward.

How things change. But as the Right resurges, in America and much of the world, which Right is it, exactly?

Through the neoliberal Reagan era, the GOP’s three major constituencies were described as a ?“three-legged stool”: social conservatives (especially white evangelicals), neoconservative anti-Communists (and later, ?“War on Terror” hawks), and free marketeers. Loads of intellectual energy and billionaire-funding were sunk into efforts to fuse these legs into a single stump, never entirely successfully.

For many in today’s GOP, that kind of Reaganite fusionism no longer cuts it. The intellectual and cultural vanguard of today’s Right, often called the ?“New Right,” is increasingly critical of classical liberalism?—?which was long the consensus philosophy of both major parties and holds that a combination of limited government, free markets and ordered liberty on social issues (that is, the protection of individual rights within a moderately conservative culture) would produce the best kind of state. These views dominated the U.S. Right for much of the late 20^th century (though never completely unchallenged). Now, new doctrines have taken over, insisting that the old fusionist Right ceded too much ground to the Left, that egalitarian or economic principles rooted in classical liberalism have led to ?“decadence” (primarily LGBTQ rights), national decline (purportedly through ?“feminization” and ?“oversensitivity”) and growing disorder.

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