President Donald Trump’s theory and, consequently, the modern Republican Party are now referred to as the” New Right,” opening the door for the development of liberal thought leaders like Vice President JD Vance. This Washington Examiner series did look at the history of the New Right, the things that determine it, the group’s big gamers, and its future.
People have different interpretations of the New Right throughout history. For instance, it was used to describe Republican Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 political campaign and to express opposition to Rush Limbaugh and other unconventional figures from the 1990s.
His plan views on immigration, industry, family, and foreign policy have largely grown into the foundation of the New Right in the 2020s, leading to the creation of their own generation of academic leaders and consider tanks dedicated to the cause.
The past
Like the season’s description, the history of the New Right is slightly different depending on who is asked. Beginning in the mid-2000s, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, authors, began to voice their dissatisfaction with the state of the Reagan-style Republican Party.
According to the commentators in” The Party of Sam’s Club,”” President]George W. Bush’s domestic legislation looks less and less like a creative twist on traditional conservative and more and more like an evolutionary dead close.” ” On local legislation, the group isn’t just out of contact with the nation as a whole. It is out of contact with its own population.
When the business collapsed, when former president Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, carrying about the whole midwest, plus North Carolina and Florida, and advancing to a 365 Electoral College victory, the calls for change grew even more.
The Republican community responded by launching the Tea Party movement, which proved effective in the 2010 congressional votes. However, the GOP nominated Mitt Romney as its nominee for president in 2012, and the GOP once more faced a crushing defeat against Obama. Mitt Romney is seen nowadays as the image of the corporate-focused creation Republican Party.
In a speech delivered last summer at the National Conservatism Conference, Republican member Vivek Ramaswamy argued that the party’s Reaganite rhetoric about limited government and restructuring had plainly become unpopular by that time.
” Our possess Republican presidential candidates, from George W. Bush to John McCain to Mitt Romney, didn’t know exactly why they were saying the things they were saying”, Ramaswamy said. ” All they knew was that they were supposed to say them,” they said.
A crowded Republican field of 17 candidates in 2016 generally endorsed the same conservative ideas about lower taxes, free trade, little government, and an aggressive foreign policy that did forcefully spread democracy and capitalism around the world.
Trump, on the other hand, promised to protect entitlement spending programs, favored tariffs to promote domestic industry, vocally opposed the Iraq war, and, most notably, pledged to crack down on illegal immigration and build a wall on the southern border. His message attracted a sizable following, at least among white, working-class voters.
According to Sam Hammond, chief economist at the Foundation for American Innovation,” there were these existing structure trends within the electorate, and it took someone like Trump, someone from outside the party, to point out them.”
Trump talked about politics throughout his real estate and media careers but was never tied to the existing GOP platform. He ran for president for a short time in 2000 on Ross Perot’s Reform Party platform and registered Democrat between 2001 and 2009.
” It was sort of the right place, right moment because the current Republican establishment was perceived as being controlled by corporations, multinational interests, the war machine, the failures of the Iraq war, and then the global financial crisis,” said Hammond. ” Those were discrediting events”.
” You had social media and the internet reaching out to everyone at the same time.” That made it possible for the various groups to collaborate, which the mainstream media would have rejected, he continued.
Trump was unafraid to call Jeb Bush a warmonger or make other departures from establishment thinking and could be rewarded for doing so by the electorate.
Turning Point USA President Charlie Kirk stated in 2022 that the grassroots energy created by the Tea Party would be used to support the Donald Trump campaign. Only Trump could radical change and upend GOP orthodoxy in a hostile takeover, which had actively fought the grassroots to take control of the party.
Though Trump does not use New Right to describe his views, they were clearly different from those of his GOP predecessors, with whom he formed an uneasy alliance during his first term in the White House.
Trump famously fought with his own administration throughout 2017 and 2018 and chose former Republican Mike Pence as his vice president. He was a foreigner to both the Republican Party and Washington, D.C., which caused him to become entangled in internal disputes and face Russian collusion allegations at the time.
He also left it to others to try and put an intellectual floor under his policy views. Vance wrote his memoir Hillbilly Elegy in 2016 that explored his upbringing in working-class Ohio, and it was widely regarded as a tool for politicians trying to understand Trump’s appeal.
Former Romney policy adviser Oren Cass published The Once and Future Worker two years later as a book to help bolster a post-Trump consensus of opinion in the GOP. Vance praised it as” a brilliant book, and among the most important I’ve ever read”.
Cass ‘ policy philosophy explicitly uses the term” New Right.”
Joe Biden’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election, of course, raises the question of whether Trump would have sustained appeal or whether his election resulted in a historical anomaly. He entered the 2024 GOP primary as quickly as possible, where he faced off against more establishment figures such as former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley.
Republican primaries quickly demonstrated that Trump could continue to rule the party.
On an” America First” platform of strict immigration enforcement, protective tariffs, and a relatively isolationist foreign policy stance, Trump triumphed decisively over former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. This time, he not only won white working-class votes but made historic inroads among minority voters.
Vance, who was once a Trump critic, took Pence’s place. Vance, a Yale law school graduate, has spent his first two years as vice president working to put policy skills behind Trump’s overt rhetoric. He has delivered well-known speeches on foreign policy and the economy.
Meanwhile, there are now entire think tanks dedicated to sharpening and promoting New Right policy, from Cass’s American Compass to the Claremont Institute and even the Heritage Foundation.
Dr. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, stated that” the New Right isn’t just a sliver of the Republican coalition anymore.” We are currently coordinating the movement against the Left’s growing totalitarian agenda and uniting people around policies that prioritize the protection of American citizens, the prosperity of American families, and the dignity of American workers.
The problems
There is some disagreement about what New Right policy is and should be, as with any political movement. In general, it advocates a” America First” perspective that includes a pro-family policy that encourages marriage and family formation, as well as a promotion of American manufacturing, and strict immigration restrictions.
Immigration is probably the most well-known of these views, and it has been Trump ‘s , signature issue , since the , beginning.
The New Right attempts to stabilize and increase wages by limiting the number of new hires entering the country, in contrast to the Chamber of Commerce’s policy of occasionally encouraging immigration to promote economic growth.
Vance typically speaks of the issue in terms of economic terms, despite some of Trump’s more colorful language on immigration.
” The fundamental goal of President Trump’s economic policy is, I think, to undo 40 years of failed economic policy in this country”, he said at the American Dynamism Summit in Washington, D. C.” For far too long, we got addicted to cheap labor, both overseas and by importing it into our own country — and we got lazy”.
All of the New Right’s economic thinking is directed at helping middle-class families, a common goal of many political ideologies. The movement is concentrated on domestic manufacturing in particular, which it claims benefits workers without a college degree, provides high-paying work that can support a family, encourages American innovation, and improves military readiness.
On the subject of tariffs, if limiting immigration shores up the economic prospects of blue-collar Americans, then limiting imports, especially from adversaries and low-wage countries, does the same thing on the foreign policy front.
In a recent interview with Jon Stewart, the host of The Daily Show, Cass said,” We went through a period of 30 or 40 years where conservatives simply had way too much faith in markets.” He further stated that trade with” an authoritarian communist government trying to hollow out American manufacturing,” such as China, is” not really a free market” and should not be encouraged.
New Right thinking tends to be much more limited in its views of America’s role in the world compared to the” Old Right”. Trump’s attempts to end the conflict in Ukraine show this, not to mention the revelation in the Signal group chat that Vance resisted saying” I just hate to bail out Europe once more” rather than spending billions of dollars on its defense.
The New Right is an effort to counteract the old right and replace it, according to Hammond, adding that there are factions and blocs in the country. ” It stems from a broader disillusionment with the elites, and once that happens, everything should be rethought”.
However, the New Right takes a more expansionist view of the government’s role on the domestic front, typically advocating a more aggressive role as opposed to the earlier view that the government should be limited to “get out of the way” of free markets.
The second Trump administration has put forth a more agressive approach to putting its recommendations into practice.
For example, even while slashing the workforce at the Department of Education, Trump has used the department to investigate allegations of race-based programming, launched a portal for parents and students to report race- or sex-based discrimination, and made an example out of Columbia University by canceling$ 400 million in grants over its handling of pro-Palestinian protests.
The Trump administration’s other moves included a number of examples of its commitment to New Right thinking and willingness to put it into practice.
Trump’s Federal Trade Commission has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, the Department of Transportation has emphasized marriage and birth rates in project planning, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer has been confirmed as union secretary.
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In a Bush or Romney administration, none of those maneuvers would have been likely, and they are testing out a proven, conservative guiding philosophy.
Ramaswamy criticized Trump’s Republican Party overhaul and the ideas that underpin it, calling it” an already existing system” and” an entire existing system”. ” What began as a challenge to the system became the new system”.
