This piece originally appeared at tomklingenstein.com.
In a rousing speech last summer, Vivek Ramaswamy presented the New Right as at a crossroads between two competing visions of American conservatism: “National Libertarianism” or “National Protectionism.” In his telling, the former is focused on dismantling the administrative state and restoring national greatness through low taxes and regulation, akin to an American Javier Milei. The latter, in contrast, favors a kind of American Peronism that would harness the administrative state to promote conservative ends, including through the aggressive use of tariffs and industrial policies that go beyond dealing with narrow security threats.
Setting aside the extent to which either of these descriptions are straw-men, my immediate reaction was to ask: why not both? In a symposium for Modern Age several years ago, I argued that “Conservative Thought Needs a Marginal Revolution.” By that, I meant conservatives should embrace a pragmatic mixing and combining of ideas from across its factions, rather than insisting on one definition of conservatism to rule them all. As I wrote at the time, “The emerging conservative realignment won’t have the internal consistency of an Ayn Rand protagonist, but so what? For conservatism properly understood, that’s a feature not a bug.”
Indeed, the intellectual vitality and syncretism of the American Right is its great strength. Whether you’re a traditionalist, populist, techno-libertarian, barstool conservative or something completely different, there’s likely a glossy journal of ideas and several podcasts made just for you. These varied ideologies inevitably create tension and conflict, as recently seen over the issue of skilled immigration and the H-1B visa program. But rather than evidence of disunity or dysfunction, the Right’s propensity for vigorous and often heated debate is, if anything, core to its current ascendancy.
We live in transitional times; times that cry out for new frameworks and fixed-points on which to orient our aspirations. Older frameworks, from the conservative fusionism of the Cold War era to the End of History politics of the 1990s and 2000s, have been trammeled under history’s unrelenting march. Peak woke is behind us. Left and right are scrambling, such that a Kennedy and a former DNC vice-chair stand ready to enter a Republican presidential cabinet. Meanwhile, the boomer and silent generations are aging out less than gracefully, leaving behind governing institutions made in their image and for their time, and thus encumbered by a parallel sort of bureaucratic senility.
All the while, multiple trends are coming to a head that are each unprecedented in their own way. To name just a few, birth rates are plummeting, China is encircling Taiwan, and a datacenter in the radius of San Francisco appears on the verge of birthing a digital demigod. In this tumultuous context, navigating the old regime’s decay and eventual transition into whatever comes next will require a combination of new ideas and timeless ones applied in novel ways.
For its part, the American Right is supplying many of the memes and concepts for grokking the current moment because of its internal tensions, not just despite them. Debate and disagreement is fundamentally generative in a way that inoffensive consensus-building is not. Among my center-left friends, the notion that one’s policy views should be embedded in some deeper philosophical commitment is often totally absent. For generations, American liberalism’s cultural hegemony provided a kind of cheat-sheet; a set of conventional wisdoms one could safely parrot without thinking too hard. Even woke ideology, despite its supposed roots in “theory,” only went viral to the extent it channeled a kind of primordial indignation into a series of catchy slogans.
It is worth reflecting on how unusual this is. The standard Left-Right stereotype inherited from the French Revolution juxtaposes the Left as the intellectually minded stewards of Reason against the Right’s clinging to tradition and mindless “common sense.” These themes are still present today, from the “in this house we believe in science” yard sign to the mythic Gen-Z tradwife. What has changed, however, is the extent to which the former, “trust the science” worldview has become paradoxically associated with a kind of blind obedience to authority, in contrast to a conservative countercultural milieu that — by dint of being outside the liberal mainstream — must draw upon more rational, intellectual resources.
Marx said that philosophers had so far only interpreted the world when the point is to change it. But with the world already in such chaotic disequilibrium, perhaps interpretation is what is now most under-rated. So I say let the intra-conservative debate rage on. Just as iron sharpens iron, whatever bundle of ideas ends up defining the New Right will likely be understood in retrospect as a synthesis of perspectives that today seem in fierce competition but which are secretly but parts of a greater whole.
