Two Cheers for the New Right?
On family and community, they pushed in the right direction
I’ve been mostly critical of the “new right,” a hard-to-define strand of contemporary conservatism. One reason is that it’s hard to understand what exactly motivates this collection of populists, nationalists, neo-mercantilists, post-liberals, and integralists apart from a general frustration that the nation has been unable to solve a host of longstanding social and economic challenges.
But the components of the new right don’t always share principles, priorities, or policy preferences. When the movement has had some cohesion, its agenda has generally been too alarmist, bellicose, centralizing, and big-government for me.
But—in my piece recently published by the online journal Law & Liberty—I argue that the new right deserves some credit for nudging conservatism in the right direction on family policy and issues related to community. It elevated issues that had been ignored or deprioritized for too long, like the negative effects of globalization, the deterioration of families, the loss of solidarity, the struggles of men and boys, and the suffering of forgotten communities. And it was rightly unsatisfied by more traditional conservatives’ reflexive view that policy just shouldn’t touch a bunch of important matters.
I hope you read the full essay over at L&L. But here’s a digest.
Getting It Wrong, Getting It Right
In my view, the new right has generally been too friendly to a muscular state, and, therefore, too disconnected from the lessons of American conservatism. We have learned—often the hard way—that economic tinkerers are never as smart as they think; that a powerful government that’s your best friend today may be your worst enemy tomorrow; that the state is unavoidably slow, expensive, and clumsy; that uniform diktats from the central government quickly run afoul of American pluralism; that a bossy Uncle Sam pushes aside civil society and closer-to-home governing.
Because these lessons were given short shrift, some on the new right took some wrong turns on family policy. Some embraced national industrial planning. Others thought it was a good idea for the federal government to hand out free money to those with kids even if the parents didn’t want to work (“child allowances”). Others were receptive to even more aggressive Hungary-style family policies. All of the above would strengthen the hand of Washington and draw families closer to the central state. That is quite different from, say, the subsidiarity-style approach that I favor—in short, using local and state governments far more than the federal government, and using policy to capacitate communities and civil society.
Nevertheless, the new right deserves kudos for three reasons.
First, the post-Nixon GOP had mostly viewed government with suspicion. Although conservatives’ tax-cutting and bureaucracy-fighting muscles got plenty of exercise, the muscles needed to develop and implement policies that smartly use government power had atrophied. Young conservatives simply never got much experience learning how to mobilize state authority to get things done while respecting limiting principles like federalism, localism, capitalism, and deference to civil society. Once the new right rejected their conservative predecessors’ government-lite proclivities, they saw a strong state as a possible ally. In this way, we might understand the new right’s early forays into policy development as less wrongheaded than green—they had good instincts and admirable passion but needed some seasoning.
Second, the new right helped change the conversation. I run a fellowship program on conservatism and governing, and our curriculum includes a good bit of material from the conservative revival of the 1950s. It is remarkable how seldom the authors of that era, like Russell Kirk and Friedrich Hayek, mention family and community. In fact, the famous “Sharon Statement,” authored by William F. Buckley and other young conservatives in 1960, never even mentions the words “family” or “community.”
It is true that family and community were front and center for Robert Nisbet, communitarian conservatives like Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, and the mid-2010s “reform conservatives.” But their ideas got too little traction policy-wise. But something important happened after the new right’s agitation. In 2023, a group of “freedom conservatives” released a statement of principles pivoting from and invoking the influence of the Sharon Statement more than 60 years earlier. This group of “conservatives, libertarians, and classical liberals” emphasized the importance of family and community in their second bullet out of ten. “Most individuals are happiest in loving families, and within stable and prosperous communities in which parents are free to engage in meaningful work, and to raise and educate their children according to their values.”
In 2023, when National Review issued a statement of its priorities, it too put family and community near the front of the line. A section titled “Moral Bedrocks” includes, among other things, statements such as “The traditional two-parent family is the most basic building block of our society” and “Community is a guard against atomized individualism and a source of countless other social goods.” The Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” also elevated these issues. For example, its introduction occasionally reads like a communitarian manifesto, and its chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services sets as a goal “promoting stable and flourishing married families.” All of these are simpatico (on the prioritization of family and community) with the new-right statement of 2022 by “national conservatives,” which, among other things, lauded the family as the source of society’s virtues and foundation for its achievements.
This is not to say that the new right caused other conservatives to suddenly care about these matters. Obviously, they already did. But often the greatest contribution of upstart political movements is galvanizing support for particular positions; that is, they influence the world by getting those in the mainstream to adjust their language and priorities. The new right deserves some credit for getting others to talk more about family and community.
Third, there’s not been a more important moment in the last generation for conservatives to have energy and backbone on these issues. American marriage and fertility rates are at or near all-time lows. Too many kids grow up outside of two-parent families. Boys continue to struggle in school, and men continue to struggle with labor force participation and deaths of despair. We are headed the wrong way on “victimless crimes” like gambling, drug use, and pornography. Our civil-society groups continue to deteriorate, especially in hard-pressed areas. For these reasons, conservatives need to think in terms of strengthening life’s smallest but most important associations—those built on relationships among parents, children, neighbors, educators, local volunteers, residents of towns, and so on. The new right has encouraged that thinking.
In the remainder of the essay, I discuss DOGE, Vice President Vance, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, The Quest for Community, To Empower People, the Reformocons, subsidiarity, localism and conservative social entrepreneurialism, and more.
I hope you head over to L&L to read the rest.
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