Untangling the New Right
Untangling the New Right
Sharing a good explainer from Discourse Magazine, plus a couple other things
A couple readers commented on my post from yesterday that it was kind of incomprehensible, what with all the unfamiliar names of movements, especially on the New Right. Understandable! I’m new to all this myself and am still trying to figure it out.1
Discourse magazine (out of the Mercatus Center — think Tyler Cowen and Marginal Revolution), offers a good explainer of three of the main movements. (I did not know about the Neoreactionaries. Yikes.) The article starts with the old right consensus, the Reaganite “three-legged stool” I mentioned yesterday, moves quickly through how MAGA emerged from that consensus falling apart, and then briefly describes three of the new movements: national conservatism, integralism, and neoreaction. I believe
of The Upheaval belongs to the national conservatism movement. Patrick Deneen is part of the Catholic integralist movement. I cited both of them yesterday.
If you’re looking for a longer 20th century historical overview of American conservatism, you might consider the well-regarded book by Matthew Continetti: The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. Continetti has written a similar sort of survey article here: Making Sense of the New American Right (freebeacon.com). His categories are different, so you can see it’s all pretty fluid. Continetti’s essay is well-worth a read, especially on the Jacksonians and on post-liberals, which Continetti says he “did not see coming.”
I am less interested in conservatism redefining itself politically than I am in what happens when we can no longer fully commit to classical liberalism, which quite simply has been the west’s (and now the east’s) dominant political philosophy for more than a century. That philosophy, now that we are living in the Anthropocene, for all the good it has done — and I side firmly with those economists, techno-optimists, and modernists who think it has done plenty of good, the proverbial “lifted billions out of poverty” — and, yes, it has done plenty of bad, too — that philosophy now faces so many new challenges I’m not sure it can stand up to them, any more than pre-modern classical wisdoms can. Though I maintain that we should not (cannot, even if we should try) jettison them, turning them into so much flotsam and jetsam.
My preference in trying to untangle post-liberalism is decidedly British. Post-liberals across the pond are admittedly more pessimistic regarding the irrecoverable loss of classical liberalism, and they have less to offer by way of proposed alternatives — although Radical Orthodoxy (John Milbank, Adrian Pabst) has been around for a long while. In any case, the Brits are less rabid (as in angry and out for the kill), far more thoughtful about deeper political trajectories in both America and the UK and across Europe (when they’re not wrapped up in parochial British personalities and events), and far more articulate, erudite, and well-spoken. I keep thinking they’re like the ultimate classical liberal free-speech enclave, maybe one of Arendt’s island polities.
Who are these British post-liberals? I’m thinking in particular of the group of thinkers aligned with, or in the wide-ranging orbit (!), of outlets like UnHerd. See also UnHerd’s YouTube channel, which hosts surprisingly rich and open-minded interviews.
My favorite thinkers directly aligned with UnHerd would be John Gray and Jonathan Sumption. Other regulars have a presence here on Substack, like
and . When I say UnHerd’s orbit is wide-ranging, we’re talking regular interviews with people like Yanis Varoufakis, the firebrand left-wing Greek economist, who is always worth listening to!Just a quick note: if you check out UnHerd, please look past their rather click-baity and overly dramatic titles on posts and videos. It’s less their news reporting and more their philosophical and cultural interviews that are the most worth investing time and intellectual space into. I like that part of their mission is to practice slow journalism.
For what it’s worth, my first introduction came from Kevin Vallier. I can’t remember if it was a video I watched or article I read. I’ve plowed through a good part of his Kingdoms book critiquing the religious aspects of the integralist movement.
That Discourse article is fantastic. Really helps elucidate some of the shifts that I have felt but not grasped on the New Right. Although, as commented at the end of the essay, is not really Right anymore, as in not conservative. What is it? Certainly not Left and certainly not Center. I propose Down. Not a fan. That Vermeule fellow sounds scary af.