The term New Right has come to define the philosophy of President Donald Trump and, by extension, the modern Republican Party, paving the way for new conservative thought leaders such as Vice President JD Vance. This Washington Examiner series will look at the history of the New Right, the matters that define it, the movement’s major players, and its future.
The movement launched by President Donald Trump during his 2016 election victory was ill-defined when he first took office, but it has been shaped and molded in the years since by Trump himself and by a host of politicians and intellectuals helping define the New Right.
The Republican electorate was hungry for a set of different views during that historic election year, and it took an outsider such as Trump to give voice to the issues that mattered to them. Such is often the case with new political movements, as is what tends to happen next.
“The way I understand history is that you have a ‘great man’ type of figure, they see something that’s off balance, a market opportunity, and they basically seize that opportunity,” Intercollegiate Studies Institute President Johnny Burtka said. “And in the wake of that move that they make, then comes along the intellectual class who gives cohesion to the ideology.”
That “intellectual class” has now formed within the new-look Republican Party through figures ranging from Vice President JD Vance down to media personalities and public intellectuals looking to form and shape thinking on the political Right.
Trump’s predecessors
While Trump has almost single-handedly revolutionized the GOP, he also holds a lot in common with political candidates from the past when it comes to trade, manufacturing, and the role of the United States in world affairs.
Two contenders from the tumultuous 1992 presidential election stand out in particular.
One is Ross Perot, the independent candidate who campaigned hard against the North American Free Trade Agreement and drew a third-party record 20 million votes in the process.
Perot warned repeatedly that there would be a “giant sucking sound” of jobs going south to Mexico if NAFTA was ratified, an argument Trump is still making today with his promotion of protective tariffs and opposition to trade deals that leave the U.S. getting “ripped off.”
The other is Pat Buchanan, a former aide to Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan who entered the Republican primary promising to bring back manufacturing and make America victorious over its foreign competitors.
“We are losing industries like autos and steel, we have lost TVs, VCRs, radio,” Buchanan said on the ’92 campaign trail. “Where is the [Bush] administration plan to make America first again in manufacturing?”
Trump later battled Buchanan to represent the Reform Party, which was founded by Perot, in the 2000 presidential election. And as Buchanan called for, Trump is trying to bring back U.S. manufacturing of autos and steel today through the use of protective tariffs.
Elected officials
Trump’s rise has coincided with the fall of many prominent GOPers of the past. The likes of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former Rep. Liz Cheney have been dispatched from the spotlight, with a range of younger, Trump-aligned politicos now rising to take their place.
“The New Right, as I see it, is the intellectual and political infrastructure that developed after Trump came down the escalator to give cohesion to the principal issues that animated Trump,” Burtka said.
First and foremost among them is Vance, who was first elected to political office in 2022 and is now the nation’s first millennial vice president. He began as a Trump critic, but now he articulates the president’s policies, ranging from foreign policy to economics, as well as anybody.
“Obviously, Trump is the New Right,” Burtka said. “It wouldn’t exist if not for Trump. But Vance is his protege and an intellectual thinker in his own right.”
Vance’s ascendance coincides with the rise of the New Right broadly, and he has worked with a range of other figures now influencing the movement. For example, Vance has allied himself with Oren Cass, the founder of the influential New Right think tank American Compass, and sat on the board of American Moment, a think tank dedicated to recruiting staffers to serve Republicans in Congress and in the White House, before joining the Senate in 2023.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio also backed New Right ideas during his tenure in the Senate and has been rewarded with a prominent spot in Trump’s Cabinet. Rubio, 53, had served in the upper chamber of Congress since 2011 but began his transformation toward the end of Trump’s first term.
In 2019, Rubio gave a speech at Catholic University arguing that the U.S. government had neglected workers and calling instead for “common-good capitalism.”
“Common-good capitalism is about a vibrant and growing free market, but it is also about harnessing and channeling that growth for the benefit of our country, our people, and our society at large,” Rubio said. Six years later, he was chosen for the coveted secretary of state role and is articulating Trump’s foreign policy views for the nation.
Other senators who have championed the cause include Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), whose pro-union stance sets him apart from many of his GOP colleagues, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH), a staunch defender of Trump’s tariff policies, and Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN), who openly describes himself as part of the New Right.
On the House side are figures including Rep. Riley Moore (R-WV), who introduced the Respecting Parents’ Childcare Choices Act. The bill is reflective of the New Right’s approach to family policy and would provide vouchers to families with young children that could be spent on daycare, paying a parent directly if they choose to stay home, or paying a relative for child care. Banks introduced a companion bill in the Senate.
“For decades, conservatives have rallied around being pro-life, but far too often, the policy framework that came with it lacked strong, substantive ideas to reduce the burden on American families,” Moore said upon introducing the bill. “Being pro-life means being pro-family, and with this legislation, we’re empowering families to choose what works best for them.”
One thing that unites them all, Catholic University political professor Justin Litke argued, is that Republicans are connecting with working-class voters in a way they have not in a very long time.
“It is pretty clear that the formerly deep-seated affinity between the working class and the Democratic Party has been largely lost and that, while it didn’t have to happen this way, a lot of this has been gained by the Republicans,” Litke said. “It’s been done, too, in a way that I think may stand the test of time.”
Intellectuals and Influencers
While many of them are not household names or even particularly famous in Washington, a surprisingly large number of public intellectuals are influential in the New Right, one way or another.
Vance is something of an intellectual himself, having studied at Yale Law School and written for a host of conservative-aligned news publications. He has said he is most comfortable engaging with people around ideas and has arguably done more than anyone to put an intellectual floor under Trumpism.
Cass is another leading figure on the intellectual side of the movement. He has written books on promoting the American worker and interviewed big-name media personalities such as Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, to outline his views on the economic landscape in particular.
Among the oldest and most obscure New Right influencers is Christopher Lasch, a University of Rochester professor and social critic who wrote several books on politics and culture before his death in 1994. Lasch was an influence on Patrick Deneen, a professor at the University of Notre Dame and the author of the 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed and 2023’s Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future.
While Deneen’s first book was praised by former President Barack Obama and the New York Times, his focus on religion and the nuclear family also won him acclaim on the Right. Deneen is one of several Catholic leaders within the movement, and Vance has cited him as a major intellectual influence.
Another prominent example is Adrian Vermeule, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University who has argued for “common good constitutionalism.”
Among the better-known figures are media personalities such as Tucker Carlson, and Steve Bannon, formerly Trump’s chief strategist and now the host of the War Room podcast.
Carlson “played a massive role in JD Vance’s career and gave him a spotlight during his Senate campaign,” Burtka said. “I think Tucker is kind of the connector and the chief ideologist of the New Right.”
Other leaders include Michael Lind, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who has been critical of both political parties, and Curtis Yarvin, a blogger who uses the pen name Mencius Moldbug.
Lind has been writing prolifically since the 1990s and began to write about the Trump phenomenon soon after he took office, arguing that Trump’s appeal was based largely on class dynamics.
“He made the case that when we think of culture war politics, it’s really class war politics,” said Sam Hammond, chief economist at the Foundation for American Innovation. “The culture war is a manifestation of the class war.”
Even within the Right, different personalities tend to speak to different factions of the coalition, according to Nathan Halberstadt, chief of staff at New Founding.
Halberstadt said that while Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen, and David Sacks speak to the “tech Right,” Bannon, Carlson, and White House policy adviser Stephen Miller speak to the populist Right, and people including Aaron Renn, William Wolfe, and Vance represent the evolving interests of the reemerging Christian Right.
Finally, there are entire think tanks dedicated in one form or another to New Right thought, including American Compass, the Claremont Institute, which has been around since 1979 but became an early backer of Trump during the 2016 campaign, and American Moment, the Vance-backed think tank looking to staff GOP political offices across Washington.
The New Right comes to define Trump and the Republican Party
What unites them all is not always ideological unity, Claremont Institute senior adviser Antonin Scalia argued, but a unified approach to politics that informs their worldview.
“The New Right is less of an ideological movement than it is a coalition,” said Scalia, the grandson of the late Supreme Court justice of the same name. “The most relevant and interesting similarity is the willingness to consider politics at the regime level, at the deepest, most fundamental level of political life: the way in which we as human beings organize ourselves in a society.”
