The New Right Is Neither New nor Right

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, July 28, 2023

 

“We’re seeing a conservatism that emphasizes freedom give way to a conservatism that emphasizes authority,” a prominent, albeit somewhat heretical, conservative wrote a while ago. “For a hundred years we debated the economic reach of the state, but that debate’s basically done. The next one will be over where the state should erect guardrails in a mobile and fragmented world.”

 

In another column he wrote about the need to strengthen the state to combat new concentrations of corporate power and to promote a new standard of American “greatness.” Teddy Roosevelt was the lodestar for this new rethinking. 

 

Roosevelt believed that the problem of corporate power made a lot of free market arguments obsolete or at least unsuited to the times. This unorthodox conservative quoted Teddy Roosevelt favorably: “Every new social relation begets a new type of wrongdoing—of sin, to use an old-fashioned word—and many years always elapse before society is able to turn this sin into a crime which can be effectively punished by law.”

 

I should say this writer was hardly alone. He was joined by a host of intellectuals and activists—and some powerful politicians—who rejected the old Buckleyite formulation of “standing athwart history, yelling Stop!” Government needs to move. Government needs to be strong, even if that opens you up to complaints that you’re making government bigger. Size, by itself, doesn’t actually matter. These mavericks wanted to conceive of a new idea about government that drew deeply on Lincoln’s war powers and the zeal of the progressives at the beginning of the 20^th century. 

 

So who am I talking about? 

 

Well, David Brooks of course. And Bill Kristol. Oh, and George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain. As a candidate in 2000, McCain ran to Bush’s left as a “Bull Moose” Republican. 

 

In 2003, Fred Barnes wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal explaining that President Bush was a “Big Government conservative” (Bush preferred “strong government conservative”). Bush rejected the Buckleyite approach, saying that conservatives needed to be “activists” and “lead.” So Bush and his “neoconservative” stalwarts were committed to “using what would normally be seen as liberal means—activist government—for conservative ends.” 

 

In some ways, they were playing catch-up to Newt Gingrich, who spent much of the 1990s arguing for a revivalism of the spirit of the Progressive Era to “transform” government. Lamar Alexander issued a book that promised to follow in the spirit of Herbert Croly (the godfather of progressivism whose book, The Promise of American Life, radicalized Teddy Roosevelt). The title of Alexander’s opus was The New Promise of American Life.

 

Now, I had some big problems with this stuff back in the day. I excoriated Bush’s expansion of government and big spending, and harshly criticized this nostalgia for progressivism. But I don’t bring this up to criticize those guys. Not all of their arguments were bad and many of their goals were good. Bush, to his credit, wanted to use the power of government to improve the choices of citizens in an “ownership society” and to hold government more accountable. Depending on the specifics, I can get behind that. 

 

I bring it up instead to note a few things. First, the irony of all of these New Right table thumpers—who, I think it’s fair to say, for the most part loathe Bush, McCain, Brooks, Kristol, “neocons,” et al.—aren’t even making new arguments on the timescale of relatively recent memory. I mean, Bush was the last Republican president before Trump and John McCain was the GOP nominee in 2008. 

 

Second, as I’ve often argued, a lot of the New Right stuff is less about principles or ideals or policies, and more about factional infighting and the desperate effort to climb to the top of the greasy pole of power. According to internal tribal rules, the last thing any of these people can do is begin a sentence, “As David Brooks brilliantly demonstrated …” They see those guys as icons of the old establishment they want to replace. So they pretend these debates never happened (or in some cases they don’t pretend, because they have the historical memory of gnats). 

 

And of course, as you move deeper into the swampier parts of the New Right, you can’t credit “neoconservatives” with anything because they’re Jooooooooz. 

 

Putting aside the issue of antisemitic and racist goons (of which there were many among leading progressives), and the unavoidable tendency of factions to instrumentally appropriate ideas that will given them political advantages in intrafactional squabbles, one of the main reasons for this convergence is that we simply live in a world defined by progressive assumptions about the role of the state. Before some nationalists respond, “Yes, and that’s the problem. We must reject these progressive assumptions,” let me just point out that American progressivism was deeply nationalist, and not just Teddy Roosevelt’s version. 

 

In 2006, I wrote:

 

Why has this happened? The answer is that we live in a progressive world. If you live in Japan, you’ll be hard-pressed to persuade people of anything if you don’t speak Japanese or understand the culture. Similarly, conservatives must speak the language of progressivism in order to persuade progressives that they are wrong. The danger in this is that you can go native. John Blackthorne in James Clavell’s Shogun becomes more Japanese than many Japanese people. So, too, conservatives can end up more progressive than the progressives.

 

Timeless until inconvenient.

 

I got to thinking about this because a friend sent me this piece by David Azerrad for a symposium in The American Conservative. Azerrad begins:

 

What is conservatism in America today? It’s hundreds of millions of dollars a year spent fiddling while Rome burns. It’s ideas with little to no consequence. It’s getting trampled all over by History, but while yelling Stop!

 

Conservatism is the seven cheers for capitalism and the deafening silence on demographic change, feminism, and corporate malfeasance. It’s the same tired cast of speakers blathering about limited government almost a century after the New Deal. It’s the platitudinous Reagan quotes and the worn-out Buckley anecdotes. It’s the mindless optimism and the childish exhortations—if something can’t go on forever, it won’t!

 

If it were only that, conservatism would simply be a harmless persuasion for nostalgic Baby Boomers. Or to be more generous, one big Benedict Option to offer a semblance of an alternative to the pervasive progressivism of our age.

 

He goes on railing and wailing about people—well, like me (though I am not named)—who are cowards and free trade fetishists, as well as the “foolish libertarianism that hates the government more than it loves America.”

 

We the “court eunuchs and other members of the controlled opposition” live in fear of being called racists. 

 

And so on. 

 

Now, I think the whole essay is self-congratulatory grandstanding nonsense in nearly every regard. But I’m grateful for it because it’s so illustrative. The “manly” New Right is “counter-revolutionary” and “understands not just ideas, but power,” he explains. What intellectual dissidents there are in the old right are “drowned out by those of the conservative establishment.” Someone has got to point out this conservative establishment at some point, because this strikes me as straw-manning for the benefit of some hotheads in a dorm room. 

 

Of course, there are no new ideas here. None. It’s all atmospherics and chest thumping about how they’re fighters who fight the way the left does. The only figure quoted by name is Patrick Buchanan, who didn’t offer any new ideas (he at least admitted his ideas were old) but said some stirring things about fighting. 

 

I’ve met Azerrad a few times and got along with him just fine back when he was at the Heritage Foundation. But one of the reasons I got along with him—other than the fact he was a fairly personable guy (as befits a Canadian)—was that his old routine was to talk a lot about “timeless principles.”

 

“The Framers may be dead and gone, but their timeless principles endure,” he wrote. He excoriated Barack Obama for his novel reinterpretations of the Constitution on the simple basis that “times change.” Those principles, as he explained at length over the years, were about limited government, free markets, etc. 

 

Now that it’s a “century” after the New Deal (more like 90 years, but whatever), talking about limited government is cowardly folly, the stuff of craven eunuchs and corrupt buffoons. The cause is lost, so we must become like the left and use the state for our purposes. 

 

Was the cause not lost when the New Deal was a mere 75 years old? What happened in the last 15 years that made it futile to fight for … checks notes … timeless principles?

 

Now, I understand that Azerrad will likely claim he and his fellow counterrevolutionaries are fighting to restore those timeless principles—or some such pabulum—once they get behind the wheel of the state. But that is wildly unpersuasive given the scorn he has for people who still talk about limited government and free markets. It’s also unpersuasive given how many of his confreres heap scorn on those timeless principles and the documents and thinkers that elucidate them. You can say I’m letting the bad apples define the New Right barrel, but Azerad is the one denouncing criticism of “enemies to the right.” This presupposes that everyone who likes capitalism and limited government is somehow to his left—which makes it fine to call them cowards and eunuchs. But complaining about protectionists, living constitutionalists, and other statists of the right is a corrupt violation of this new popular front that he wants. 

 

But David knows his intellectual history. He knows that his definition of conservatism here is wholly contestable and he would have contested it a decade ago. 

 

The irony here is that less than a generation ago, the idea that you could adopt liberal (i.e., statist) means for conservative ends was precisely the sort of idea that aroused so much condemnation of “big government” and “compassionate” conservatism from the right. It was, in some quarters, even proof that the perfidious neoconservatives (which etymologically kind of means “new right”) were secretly closet Trotskyists. 

 

The important point is that the whole argument about “timeless principles” wasn’t to say that they would always endure, but that they were, axiomatically, timelessly correct and therefore timelessly worth fighting for. David’s position now is that it’s cowardly to keep fighting for them when the new priority is to fight for power as its own reward. Crushing your enemies—not persuading them—is another booby prize. 

 

The idea that the Progressive Era and the New Deal did lasting damage to the application of those timeless principles is hardly new—some of his colleagues at Hillsdale have been making that argument for decades. What is new is the idea that surrender is the new courage, and timeless principles can be checked at the door if that’s coverage charge for power.