Is the New Right Actually That New?
Or is it just good old religious authoritarianism wrapped in a new package?
In recent years, much has been said about the populist, illiberal ‘New Right’, including by myself. Up until now, I have focused on the philosophical side of the New Right, which I have found quite scary. The philosophical New Right’s total repudiation of classical liberal values, all the way back to old British Whiggism, is of huge concern to anyone who supports freedom. I believe it is very important that we give some timely pushback to this philosophical movement to erode liberalism and justify the use of arbitrary power. However, today I will look at what the New Right actually does in terms of real world political actions. Surprisingly, it doesn’t actually appear to be so new, after all. And through this observation, I think we actually learn something important about the ‘New Right’.
First, we have the culture wars. Those are certainly not new. Boycotting companies for being too liberal isn’t new. Even the War on Disney isn’t new. In 1996, there was a boycott of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, not because of the movie’s contents, but because of Disney’s pro-gay policies. Manufactured outrage isn’t new. The supposed liberals’ War on Christmas was an annually recurring talking point during the nineties and the aughts. It was just as manufactured as this year’s Biden’s War on Easter. Book bans certainly aren’t new: when I was in high school and college, there were attempts at removing from libraries everything from Harry Potter to the Da Vinci Code. Moral panics and outrage are not new either: the right used to get very upset about everything from video games to rap music. Anyone who remembers the right in the nineties and the aughts would remember that they were certainly not live and let live at all.
Next, we have the anti-science and anti-intellectual attitudes. Those are not new either. Back when I was in college, there was a big push by the religious right to get schools to teach creationism, under the pseudo-scientific label ‘intelligent design’, and to paint evolution as ‘just a theory, not proven fact’. Earlier on, there was the attempt to hinder taking HIV/AIDS seriously, by promoting the idea that AIDS was ‘God’s punishment for homosexuality’. The conspiracy-minded thinking is not new either. Intellectuals and scientists, as well as Hollywood, were not to be trusted, because they were ‘Godless liberal elites’ out to poison your kids’ minds and turn them against Christian values. Almost every Democrat, from Bill Clinton to Al Gore to John Kerry was supposedly a closet communist. Not to mention all the talk about the ‘New World Order’, which was not that different from QAnon actually.
Even the idea that the state should wield its power over the culture wars is not new. Back in 2005, right-wingers across the American South advocated requiring biology textbooks to carry a sticker saying that evolution was not proven fact. The year before, state constitutional amendments banning gay marriage, and in some cases even civil unions, swept across America. Calls to increase censorship of the media and the music industry were frequent, often coinciding with waves of moral panic about hip-hop culture, rock music and Hollywood. And let’s not forget the attempt to end no-fault divorce through ‘covenant marriage’, which was quite fashionable on the right for a while during the nineties.
The fact is, what the New Right wants to do is basically what the old right was doing, up until around the mid-aughts. The main difference is that the old right did these things while paying lip service to individual freedom and Burkean conservatism, while the New Right has no such pretenses. The reason is because such hypocrisy could no longer stand up to scrutiny. Back in the aughts, the rise of libertarianism associated with the backlash to the 2003 Iraq War, and the rise of the internet as a platform for political discussion, meant that the hypocrisy of saying you’re for freedom while promoting authoritarian policies simply became untenable.
At first, there was an attempt to modernize the right. This would have finally aligned the right’s policies in reality with their supposedly long-standing commitments to small government and individual liberty. However, the reactionary culture warriors clearly didn’t like this plan, and began pushing back. The push to elect Trump in 2016 was the beginning of this. Afterwards, books against liberalism began to appear. Instead of realigning the right’s actions towards a true commitment to liberty, they want to realign the right’s philosophy to allow their own authoritarian agendas to continue.
During the right’s brief attempt at finally making good on their commitment to liberty, I had an opportunity to realize that the right was not entirely bad or wrong. In particular, I had the opportunity to appreciate how genuine conservative philosophy could provide important arguments for protecting freedom, against the onslaught of misguided radicals. It is sad that this more honest version of the right was cut short by the reactionaries. I guess the only way to bring it back would be by comprehensively defeating the illiberal New Right.
As for how we should fight the illiberal ‘New Right’, I think we could look at their philosophy and their real world actions sort of separately. We need to continue to develop arguments against their illiberal political philosophy, because it is indeed something new, and designed to justify real world authoritarianism in new ways. However, when it comes to their real world actions, we should recognize that they are not that new. We’ve seen it all before, and even defeated it with arguments from fact, logic, science, compassion, and yes, individual freedom. We just need to do it all over again. If the illiberal reactionaries could pick up where they left off in 2006, we can too. This would actually require us to re-embrace facts, logic and individual freedom, which would also mean a decisive rejection of postmodernism in all forms. This is why we can, and should, oppose the postmodern-critical left and the illiberal right using the same platform and the same set of arguments.
Here, we should note that there are two minor but important differences between the New Right and the old religious right. The first is their avoidance of overtly using religious justifications. A good example is the recently passed law in Louisiana mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in every classroom in every public school and public university by law. The US Supreme Court previously found laws requiring such religious displays unconstitutional in 1980, but this time they are justifying it on the importance of ‘foundational documents of our state and national government’. The law also states The Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, and the Northwest Ordinance as foundational documents, but they are not required to be displayed in the same way. This just demonstrates that it is not about foundational documents at all. If it was, then these documents, along with the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and perhaps the Magna Carta, among other items, would need to be displayed too. Classrooms would literally have their walls covered by text, from wall to wall. But no, they only require the Ten Commandments to be displayed. It is clearly about religion, not ‘foundational documents’. I guess going forward, we really need to take an ‘if is walks like a duck, if it quacks like a duck’ approach towards the religious right. If it looks like an act of forcing religion down people’s throats, then it needs to be treated as one, no matter how it is being framed.
The second difference, which is related to the first, is that the new religious right likes to argue that their policies are required to ‘fight wokeness’. Of course, this is utter rubbish, and also a dishonest attempt at distracting from the religiously inspired nature of their actions. What we need to remember here is that, while classical liberals and the religious right might both be opposed to wokeness, it is for very different reasons. Classical liberals oppose wokeness because we are concerned about its impact on individual freedom. On the other hand, the religious right oppose wokeness only because it often goes against their religious doctrines. If given half the chance, the religious right would seek to impose authoritarian policies that are no less horrible than what extreme wokeism would do. From an individual liberty point of view, the religious right is at least as bad as extreme wokeness, if not actually worse. There literally is no common ground between classical liberals and the religious right, even if we both oppose wokeness.
Finally, a word about the recently popular use of the term ‘Christian Nationalism’ to describe the religious right. Honestly, I’m not a fan. Not only does the phrase wrongly include Christians who also identify as nationalists who might not otherwise support authoritarianism, it also gives the religious right an undeserved aura of patriotism. Instead, I think we should just use what we used so successfully back in the aughts, i.e. the ‘religious right’, ‘fundamentalists’, or even ‘the Christian Taliban’, which used to be a favorite of many writers. The problem with these people is not that they are religious Christians, but that they want to shove their belief down other people’s throats. I think these descriptions make it clear what we’re concerned about here.
Originally published at https://taraella2.substack.com.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series, which argue that liberalism is still the most moral and effective value system for the West.
She is also the author of The Trans Case Against Queer Theory and The TaraElla Story (her autobiography).
