What’s So New About the ‘New Right’?

Over the last few years, a loose coalition of conservative thinkers, journalists, publications and think tanks have emerged under the banner of the New Right. With Senator JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, as its flag-bearer, this still-disparate group has been hailed as the intellectual heft behind the MAGA movement, and even as the future of American conservatism. Its very name declares a radical break with the Republican past — “very nascent, very bleeding edge,” is how Vivek Ramaswamy, a former presidential candidate, described it. But how new is the New Right?

It is risky to ascribe coherence to a grouping like this, especially when its ranks range from the relatively buttoned-up Vance and his Senate colleague Josh Hawley to a ragtag assortment of self-described neo-monarchists, techno-libertarians and right-wing Marxists.

Still, there are some unifying features. At the heart of the New Right is a belief that most of what ails America can be blamed on a liberal elite that has burrowed into the federal government, the news media, Hollywood, big business and higher education — what Vance calls “the regime,” and Curtis Yarvin, one of his New Right influences, calls “the Cathedral.”

The New Right’s position goes beyond rhetorical populism about out-of-touch bureaucrats: To them, liberalism is actively hurting the country, funneling fortunes from hard-working Americans into Washington and Wall Street and then casting any criticism as racist or fascist.

In contrast, the New Right posits a nationalistic nostalgia for a small-town America of decentralized government — a “front porch republic,” in the words of another Vance influence, Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame — in which “good” jobs are available to all and faith is the cornerstone of society.

“If conservatives care about healthy towns and schools and churches, as they always say they do, they should support the kind of work and wages that nourish those institutions and make them possible,” Hawley wrote earlier this year in Compact, a leading New Right outlet.