Forty years ago, I wasn’t even born. Joe Biden still had his own hair. Scott Hahn was a Presbyterian. And I know this is hard to believe, but the Republican Party in Washington was focused on tax cuts, inflation, and fighting proxy wars against Russia.
That’s the first lesson in conservative politics. The more things change, the more the GOP establishment stays the same. So one answer to the question, “What’s new on the New Right?” is simply, “The times.”
Frankly, I’m not even sure “New Right” is an accurate description of the populist, nationalist energy now driving the conservative movement. Republican leaders of Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney’s vintage may be disoriented by a grassroots base skeptical of free trade, hostile to concentrated power in the public or private sector, and suspicious of globalist utopianism and military adventurism. But Calvin Coolidge and Robert Taft would be perfectly comfortable in such a coalition.
Don’t forget that the Moral Majority, Laffer curve, Cold Warrior, fusionist conservatism of the 1970s itself was once called the New Right, as it should have been. Ronald Reagan was different from previous conservative leaders and succeeded mostly because he answered his moment in history. He updated conservatism to meet the Soviet aggression, stagflation, and malaise that defined Jimmy Carter’s America.
But fusionism, for all its successes, isn’t holy writ. It was simply a pragmatic clustering of interests to form a political coalition in its time.
Update Your Agenda, People
The problem conservatives face today isn’t necessarily Reaganism, or the old fusionism. It’s the Republican Party and the conservative movement’s refusal to move on from it. One need not condemn post-Reagan Republicans as soulless, unpatriotic, corporate stooges to say, simply, that they were wrong and naive about the world and America after the Cold War.
They supported George H.W. Bush’s New World Order, Bill Clinton’s push for the North American Free Trade Agreement and trade with China, and George W. Bush’s grandiose fantasies at home and abroad. They high-fived each other for economic booms that turned out to be bubbles. And they ignored what was happening all
