The New Intuitive Right

By Abe Greenwald

Thursday, February 06, 2025

 

Part of the fun of getting into conservative thought (particularly if you’re moving away from liberalism) is discovering that counterintuitive ideas can be morally sound and effective. For former liberals, this can strike with the force of epiphany. To take a basic example: reducing or reforming welfare. The intuitive approach is to provide those in need directly with the means to purchase goods and services. What you learn, however, is that this kind of assistance has the unintended consequence of creating a class of dependents who don’t find work or meaning in their lives. So the counterintuitive approach—reducing welfare and incentivizing productivity and responsibility—turns out actually to help people. 

 

There many circumstances in which conservatives can make the case that counterintuitive policies have been or should be vindicated. Lowering taxes on high-income earners can increase tax revenues, giving excess foreign aid can hurt poorly governed countries, affirmative action can harm minority students, and so on.

 

It’s gripping when you first realize that doing the obvious thing isn’t the same as doing the right thing. But there’s a downside to embracing this two-step thinking: It’s a hard sell. You need to convince people to take an intellectual leap and forgo the quick fix. Most of us, by nature, resist what’s counterintuitive. Instead of taking the second step and considering the unintended consequences of well-meaning policies, it’s easier for people to ascribe cruel motives to conservative ideas: conservatives hate the poor, hate minorities, want to enrich their billionaire friends, and don’t care about the suffering of people in the developing world. 

 

Or at least that’s the way it used to be. Something extraordinary has happened recently to flip all this on its head. Liberals have gone so far off the rails that conservatives are now the ones pushing intuitive ideas—ideas so intuitive that they are self-evidently irrefutable. And Americans are eating it up. For example, the idea that biology dictates sex. 

 

Yesterday, Donald Trump signed an executive order prohibiting biological males from competing with females in sports. The White House took the opportunity to turn the moment into a heartwarming scene, with Trump surrounded by young female athletes as he signed the document. He made the most of it because he knows the country is with him. In January, a New York Times/Ipsos poll found that 79 percent of respondents said that transgender females should not be allowed to participate in women’s sports. Similarly, most Americans back Trump’s executive order prohibiting the chemical or surgical treatment of transgendered children. 

 

Republicans no longer have to sell the clever counterintuitive policies backing up in think-tank storerooms. They’re selling simple intuitive truths—and they’re flying off the shelves. 

 

Here’s another one. When you have a massive illegal immigration crisis, it is both intuitive and good to deport illegals. And it is even more intuitive and good to start with the violent criminals among them. Which is why 87 percent of Americans support “deporting immigrants who are here illegally and have criminal records.”

 

There’s more. Elon Musk’s DOGE squad is going through the books of USAID to figure what needs cutting. It’s probably best to be cautious about the numbers and projects being thrown around, but here’s White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on some of what’s been uncovered: “$1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia’s workplaces, $70,000 for the production of a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, and $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru.” If a fraction of this is accurate, it’s up to the Democrats to make the dauntingly counterintuitive case that it helps the U.S. in any conceivable way. All Republicans have to say is: Kill this garbage now. 

 

And Americans will agree, intuitively. 

 

If you want to know why, for the first time in 30 years, more Americans identify as Republican than Democrat, it’s because Republicans have been given the easy task of asserting intuitive common sense in a country whose leaders got high on reality-altering theories. It’s now liberals who have to explain why, even though every instinct tells you its monstrous, its ultimately good to toy with children’s gender. Why your daughter should face-off against a boy on the playing field. Why, even though, we have a massive illegal-immigration crisis, it’s ultimately good to keep criminals in the country that they entered illegally. Why, it’s ultimately good to spend your money on a Peruvian transgender comic book. 

 

If it was hard for conservatives to argue for worthy counterintuitive ideas, think how hard it is for liberals to argue for ruinous ones. Watching them try is as fun as discovering conservatism all over again.