I Was Right About the New Right

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, November 06, 2026

 

I’m going to start this in very personal terms, but I have larger points to make. I actually don’t hold onto slights and insults as much as you might expect. When I worked at National Review, I would often ask my friend and colleague Kathryn Lopez, “Hey, remind me why I don’t like this guy?”  

 

Still, the day after the election, I started what I intended to be the mother of all I-told-you-so stem-winders.

 

I’ll be honest—I feel entitled.

 

I have forgotten more insults, slights, disparagements, and condescending scoldings in the last decade than I have jotted down in my mental notebook of “Grievances to Nurture,” but that compendium is still thick enough to produce at least a sturdy pamphlet of “I-Told-You-Sos.”  

 

I hate self-pity almost as much as I hate sanctimony, even though, like all humans, I am capable of both. My problem, at least in this moment, is I don’t know how to write even a “Best Of” abridgment of that pamphlet without seeming either self-pitying or too sanctimonious. I say “too sanctimonious” because it’s impossible to avoid the charge entirely when talking about some of the people who embraced Trump and Trumpism.

 

That’s because Trump is a bad person of bad character, and you cannot say this without being accused of sanctimony, Trump derangement syndrome, or some version of “disloyalty” (to the GOP, to America, to conservatism, etc.). If you let yourself be held hostage to such opinions, your only option is to lie, join the cult, or get out of the business of offering your honest opinions. I’m not willing to do any of these things.

 

As I tried to write my cri de coeur of “I informed you thusly,” I felt like a character in Dune who drinks an elixir and is suddenly flooded with past memories all at once. The encounters with Fox News greenroom denizens, random people at airports, National Review cruisers, not to mention the thousands upon thousands of emails, tweets, and snail-mail letters, in which people told me I just don’t get how decent, heroic, brilliant, Christian, conservative, and/or fearless Donald Trump really is—or how necessary Donald Trump is to fend off one apocalyptic vision or another.

 

So adamantine was their faith—and it was a kind of faith—in the rightness or necessity of Trump and his cause that many could not imagine that I could hold my views sincerely or decently. They attacked my motives. They worked backward from the truth as they saw it, assuming that I must see the same truth, and concluded I was deliberately lying for personal financial advantage or virtue-signaling to get in good with The Enemy.

 

Then there were the politicians, activists, intellectuals, and right-wing media types who conceded some of Trump’s flaws while simultaneously insisting that Trump was an incalculably valuable instrument for the cause. There were also the folks who were skeptical about even that (in private, of course) but insisted that we need to put our reservations aside for the good of the team or because we had no choice. My offense in their eyes was that I was either naïve or moralistically self-indulgent, unserious about how power and politics work. If only I understood the stakes the way they did, I would join the Popular Front. It was a version of the same argument from the true believers, only with more cynical and partisan foundations. Of course, they conceded, Trump isn’t a world historical genius savior anointed by God to save America, but the rubes believe it and we gotta ride it out for the team (or the ratings).

 

These are the ones that stand out in my mental accordion file of grievances. But it’s a spectrum. Scattered among them were decent people just trying to navigate confusing times, putting the best spin on the situation, doing what they thought best, choosing to see the rosy scenarios and take victories where they could. And there were victories. Not everything Trump did was bad. For example, his Supreme Court appointees—to his lasting regret—are excellent jurists. I am glad he killed Qassem Suleimani, pulled out of the Paris Accords, etc. The branch of Never Trumpism that can brook no nuance or concessions always struck me as the mirror image of Always Trumpism.

 

But it’s worth pointing out that many—most—of the good decisions Trump made, he made because those hated “Zombie Reaganite” conservatives midwifed them. The conservative legal movement, Mitch McConnell, et. al., carried the ball to the 1-yard line for him. His first term economic successes were the fruit of Paul Ryan and his colleagues handing him something to sign. In his second term, the Trump voluptuaries insisted that the gatekeepers and grown-ups were the problem. “Let be Trump be Trump” was the order of the day. Let us submit to the rule of Trump’s instincts that passed for wise political judgment.

 

Regardless, some of these people are still friends, and a great many are good and smart people, our disagreements notwithstanding. But here’s the thing: They were wrong. I thought so then, and I know so now. I don’t want to single anyone out or make this any more personal than it already is. So I’ll put it in cinematic terms: Looking at the election returns and the fetid dysfunction of the White House that yielded those returns, the scene that keeps coming to mind is from Scarface. Tony Montana shoots the Bolivian assassin in the face and then shouts at the man’s bloody maw: “You stupid f–k! Look at you now!”

 

Behold the wreckage.

 

So rather than wallow in retail score-settling, I think it’s worth surveying the damage. I don’t just mean the electoral carnage, which is the political equivalent of the Dresden firebombing. Whether or not the GOP goes the way of the Whigs or simply limps along as a rump party for a generation now depends almost entirely on whether or not the Democrats blow the opportunity Trump and his enablers handed them on Tuesday. Which is to say, for good or ill,  the GOP has a chance.

 

But not with Trump and Trumpism. In our system, there are only two ways to make it out of the wilderness: if the other “side” massively screws up and/or if your side has a better argument and better ideas. It usually requires a good deal of both.

 

And that’s where the real damage has been done. The new right has waged a relentless war on the accumulated wisdom that essentially defines American conservatism in pursuit of power. Whether it was the nationalists, postliberals, populists, or careerist climbers, as a group they saw—accurately—that the rules, dogmas, sentiments, and principles defining conservatism were impediments to their agendas. And so they sought to delegitimize them.

 

In Liberal Fascism, I wrote a chapter titled “Adolf Hitler: Man of the Left.” It still invites scorn and mockery. So be it. But the argument I made is one I still largely stand by. Hitler was “right-wing” in the sense that he occupied the right-wing space in German politics because the Communists occupied the left, and the democratic liberal center was discredited by inflation, and by Germany’s loss in World War I and the conspiracy theories the left and right spun up about it. But if one looked at the categories of thought that defined Hitler’s Nazism, they were essentially left-wing as understood in the Anglo-American context. Hitler was a champion of identitarianism. He was a socialist, perhaps not as much as doctrinaire Communists, but in the American context he was indisputably a socialist (it’s in the name: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party). He was anticapitalist in word and deed. He was antiliberal in all the ways Communists are antiliberal: opposed to democracy, liberal constitutionalism, individual rights, property rights, etc.

 

This is not an argument about how Trump is Hitler; he isn’t. And that isn’t a defense of Trump, but a defense of moral and intellectual clarity.  

 

Rather, my point is to illustrate an analogy. The new right in America wants to supplant the Reaganite right and the traditional conservatism, which stretches from Abraham Lincoln to Calvin Coolidge and Robert Taft. To do so, those on the new right have not moved further right in their categorical thinking, they have moved decidedly left. The new right is identitarian—just ask the fools who prattle about “the Indian Question” and “Heritage Americans.” It is antiliberal in its understanding of the Constitution and the role of government. It is for a style of economic planning that until a decade ago would be called socialist or at least socialism-lite by mainstream conservatives. When J.D. Vance pretended that socialism in America means importing foreign workers to replace real Americans and letting boys play on girls’ teams, he was trying to detoxify the actual meaning of socialism, because he is sympathetic to nationalistic socialism.

 

When Vance and his allies elevate Richard Nixon as a better lodestar for the right than Ronald Reagan, they are doing so not just because they want to take the sting out of presidential corruption, but because they want to rehabilitate the idea that presidents should be free to expand government, reward friends and punish enemies, and violate free-market principles in the name of political expediency. Steve Bannon, Sohrab Ahmari, et al., want to rehabilitate the New Deal for the same reason. “Common good” constitutionalism, stripped of its rhetorical rationales, is indistinguishable from the old left’s “living Constitution” claptrap.

 

I am happy to debate these intellectual projects on the individual merits of the policies. But the point is that the intellectual project is to move the GOP and the right into left-wing categories of thought that are culturally coded as “right-wing.” I can’t argue against the “right-wing” label, but I’ll be damned if you expect me to concede the idea that this radicalism is meaningfully conservative. The Birchers were right-wing; they weren’t conservative. And neither is much of the new right.

 

But that’s what the new national conservatism is doing. That’s what postliberalism is doing. And that’s what Trump and Vance have been doing. I will say this in defense of Trump: His project has almost nothing to do with an intellectual argument or ideological program. He cares only about personal advantage and glory, but the intellectuals and activists around him think they can use him toward their project’s ends.

 

This is the only area where Trump and Trumpism are recognizably right-wing in the traditional sense. He wants to be a strongman, a caudillo, an antiliberal great man of history. That doesn’t fully exonerate him from the charge of moving the country leftward—after all, there have been plenty of dictators and strongmen who consigned their countries to socialist economics under the label of nationalism. But Trump is not tapping into socialist ideas to justify his Caesarist will-to-power. He is perfectly happy to employ socialist means, however, from outright bribing voters to nationalizing industry. And the new right apologists have encouraged that, too. They prattle on about Carl Schmitt and Francisco Franco, and the desirability of monarchs and “Red Caesars.”

 

They celebrate his lawless pursuit of power and dominance on the world stage. They had no objection to his imperial forays into Venezuela and his imperialistic threats to Greenland, Canada, etc. They do object to the Iran war, however, not on consistent ideological principles, but because any war in the Middle East must, somehow, be on behalf of you-know-who. They don’t all believe that the Jews—sorry, “Zionists”—control America and sacrifice American lives for the benefit of Jewish ones, but they are happy to have the people who do believe this in their coalition. That’s the upshot of Vance’s wicked, and wickedly stupid, “explanation” of the midterm election results.

 

Likewise, they don’t all think Indian Americans are an enemy within, but they are eager to keep those who do in their coalition.

 

Indeed, I should say that the new right is a diverse movement with manifest internal contradictions. They are not all racists, neosocialists, postliberals, nationalists, authoritarians, antisemites, or corrupt grifters. Some are actually thoughtful when they stay out of partisan politics. But when they do apply their ideas to a political program, their energy and organizations are dedicated to the idea that even the most radical factions should be inside the tent, part of the coalition, members of the Popular Front. And the people who complain about it aren’t welcome.

 

I accept their terms, of course.

 

But the damage they’ve done is to teach a generation of young right-wingers that being authentically conservative is to sympathize with some or all of these ideas. (Again, I don’t want to make this about me, but this is at least timely. I’m currently being mobbed on social media for sarcastically criticizing Turning Point USA for its abject and clear failure to mobilize the youth vote for Trump. Given how young people voted massively for Democrats virtually everywhere, I think this is objectively true. TPUSA endorsed Ken Paxton in Texas and has already declared, along with the rest of the new right outfits, that J.D. Vance is the only acceptable choice to replace Donald Trump. But their more substantive failure is to turn from being a champion of limited government and Reaganite principles to the sort of place that proudly promotes a racist, conspiracy theorist, Francisco Franco superfan, and alleged secret lobbyist for Qatar. I made no mention of TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk, who was heinously murdered more than a year ago, but apparently TPUSA is eternally immune from criticism because to criticize it is to besmirch his memory, or something. Such is the sophistication of this organ of new right thought leaders.)

 

The new right created institutions and platforms that traffic in every kind of bilge. They have promoted the idea that being an ass, a bigot, a bully, or a conspiracy theorist is proof of your conservatism. They have sacralized the Nietzschean idea that politics is about power, dominance, and cruelty. They’ve legitimized the Critical Trump Theory approach that says that failure to win a contest is proof that the system is rigged against the righteous. They’ve endorsed the belief that enriching yourself while in power is justified because the other side does it, “norms” are for suckers, and Trump is not bound by any rules.

 

I don’t think a majority of Americans know much about the ideas animating the various factions of the new right. The midterm results weren’t a referendum on Yoram Hazony, Curtis Yarvin, Kevin Roberts, Chris Rufo, Adrian Vermeule, or Steve Bannon.

 

But they were a referendum on Donald Trump and the politics these people defended and promoted. They were a referendum on what Donald Trump has done and said, freed from the constraints of the traditional right, the gatekeepers and grown-ups, the normies and Zombie Reaganites. The grand coalition of enablers who, either through sustained effort or cowardly inaction, “let Trump be Trump,” got what they wanted, and America rejected it. The voters didn’t draw fine intellectual or political distinctions between Trump and the GOP, the conservative movement, Fox News, CPAC, TPUSA, the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, et al. What the voters saw was the bad person the new right elevated to the presidency and gave free rein—and reign—to and said: no more. Trump wanted to be on the ballot, and Americans voted accordingly.

 

I am torn about the election results. On the one hand, I am very angry about the damage done. Because I am an actual conservative, I would much rather the GOP be poised to be a new majority party, if the GOP could be a sane, principled, responsible political party in the tradition of Lincoln, Coolidge, Eisenhower, and Reagan. That is clearly not an option for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, I’m modestly hopeful. If the Democrats were going to win the House and Senate at all, I think it’s arguable that a big win of this scale is better than a narrow one. I would rather have a Democratic Party that has the option to marginalize the Abdul El-Sayeds and democratic socialist types. Democrats in Congress won’t need their votes, so if they choose to follow their lead, it will be a clarifyingly ideological choice, not one dictated by the demands of a narrow majority. And that will offer a path back, hopefully for sane Republicans. The fact that successful moderate red-state Democratic candidates outperformed hard-left blue-state ones is a very hopeful sign that the Democrats can afford to be sane. And if they are, that might induce the GOP to compete on those terms.

 

I’m out of hands, but I have more feelings. There’s also the schadenfreude. No party in living memory has more deserved the drubbing the GOP got this week. But I also have no small amount of dread. A rejection of this magnitude should be discrediting to everyone and everything that made it inevitable. I was a skeptic of Vance’s chances to get elected in 2028 from the outset. My view used to elicit “you just don’t get it” eye rolls. Not anymore. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Trump has so deformed and distorted the GOP that the vice president may still be able to pull it off. Too many people are invested in the new right to countenance the idea that they are the GOP’s problem, not its solution.

 

But right now at least, I am more hopeful than fearful. Trump’s cult of personality formed the coalition that got him elected, and his actual personality destroyed that coalition beyond repair. The election proved that partisan identity is not an immutable characteristic. Millions of people who voted for Trump once, or three times, voted to reject Trump and what he created. That is profoundly healthy. Oh, and while I was writing this, Trump appointed Stephen Miller, the single figure most responsible for the coalition’s destruction other than Trump himself, to be his new chief of staff. A more idiotic choice I cannot fathom.

 

I’ve been saying for more than a decade that this experiment will end badly. I think I’ve already been vindicated on that score, but with Trump and Miller driving what’s left of the Trump train for the next two years, I am confident that there’s more vindication to come.