Last Friday, Amity Shlaes reviewed Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream by New York Times writer David Leonhardt. In his book’s detailing of the economic and social distress Donald Trump called “American carnage” and its advocating centralized, statist solutions à la the New Deal, Leonhardt has performed a useful service — for a certain political group.

The group consists of those who claim to be on the right yet reject Reagan-Buckley conservatism, especially those among them who identify as “national conservatives.” And Leonhardt’s service is to “draw out some of their conclusions” on those matters, especially economic, where they differ most with Reagan-Buckleyites. Their policy program there — pro-union, pro-industrial policy, anti-trade (Senator Josh Hawley embodies all three) — amounts “to a call for converting America to an official European-style, group-oriented, class-divided social democracy,” Shlaes argues. Reagan would have had no time for this program. Hence the hesitation among some of its advocates to acknowledge its full implications, or their preference dishonestly to contort Reagan into a champion for it. For all their tired claims that the Right needs to move past “Zombie Reaganism,” the Gipper rightly retains a powerful hold on their imagination. But Leonhardt, a man of the Left, has no such burden, allowing him to realize these schemes in full.

By pointing this out, Shlaes has performed a service of her own: exposing the weaknesses of the intellectual tendency and political faction to which national conservatism belongs. It sometimes goes by the unhelpful and unoriginal label “the New Right” (of which there have been several). Some, such as Saurabh Sharma of American Moment and now also of the Edmund Burke Foundation, like to claim that “National Conservatism has won the intellectual argument” and all that remains is to “make it the governing consensus of the American right for the next 100 years.” But Shlaes is far from alone in recognizing that the opposite is closer to the truth: The intellectual and political debilities of this tendency are, in fact, becoming more obvious.

National conservatism and its related ideologies, in their most discernible forms, suffer from a disjunction with the conservatism of the post-war period. Leading figures such as Yoram Hazony, also of the Edmund Burke Foundation, have condemned National Review founding fuser Frank Meyer for having authored “one of the worst books of political theory of the 20th century.” Such sweeping denunciation is misguided, though intelligible as an inevitable consequence of arguing that more or less the entire post-war conservative project has been a failure. Less explicable is this faction’s uncertain relationship to the American political tradition, particularly as animated by the Declaration of Independence. The National Conservatism Statement of Principles, a 2022 document featuring many of this movement’s luminaries and intended to convey consensus, does not mention the Declaration at all, perhaps a consequence of chief organizer and signatory Hazony’s professed distaste for it and for the “Lockean doctrine of universal rights as ‘self-evident’ before the light of reason” that it represents.

This is not a one-off oversight. In a recent essay for Commentary, Matthew Continetti notices something interesting. One entry in a political anthology (titled “Up from Conservatism”) for this would-be movement argues that “‘propositional-nation conservatism,’ inspired by Abraham Lincoln’s adherence to the equality clause of the Declaration of Independence, is ‘a source of political failure for the Right — indeed, of the kind of failures that threaten the security of our civilization.’” That the author of this contribution to the anthology is affiliated with the Claremont Institute, whose longtime guiding spirit, Harry Jaffa, so strenuously advocated propositional-nation conservatism and Abraham Lincoln as its chief herald, is unsettling.

This unmooring from the American political tradition, rightly understood, has led many in the “New Right” to seek inspiration and allies in strange places. Some have taken kindly to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, whose government has cultivated some New Right luminaries even as it makes friendly overtures to Russia and China. Others, as Shlaes observes, end up economically left-wing to the point of either mirroring the modern Left or hearkening back to the New Deal. So it is not a surprise to see New Right figures unenthusiastic about federalism (belittled merely as a way “to allow greater variation, experimentation, and freedom” in their statement of principles) or outright enthusiastic about using and even expanding the anti-constitutional administrative state.

Uncertainty at the level of principles can encourage rhetoric and posturing over sound thinking. In the case of the New Right, it often results in a very online echo chamber drenched in (almost parodically) male weirdness. “They inhabit a social-media cocoon where they talk a lot about manhood, and strength, and manliness, and push-ups, and masculinity, and virility, and weight-lifting, and testosterone,” Continetti writes. He quotes another entry from Up from Conservatism: “Wrestling should be mandated in middle schools. . . . Students could learn to build and shoot guns as part of a normal course of action in schools and learn how to grow crops and prepare them for meals. Every male student could learn to skin an animal and every female to milk a cow.” Well-formed masculinity is important; conservatives ignore the issue at their own peril. But for a movement to dwell on it in an overly aesthetic manner raises questions about its intellectual rigor. “The aesthetic and tonal qualities admired by the new right social media grifter class” are proof that they “live in a hermetically sealed political bubble,” David Harsanyi argues in a recent article for the Federalist. In such environs, the exchange of shibboleths — “know what time it is,” “if you’re taking flak, you must be over the target,” etc. — and the indulgence of undirected anger pass for reasoned argument. The edgier you can be the better. You can say a lot of things about such mental gestures, but you can’t say that they have “won the intellectual argument” — unless you’re just hoping to will that reality into existence without doing the legwork.

So what about the New Right’s political prospects? These, too, are grim. Its adherents like to claim that the 2016 presidential election heralded a new working-class coalition for the Right, and that the wind has been at the back of this coalition ever since. There are many reasons to doubt that. Each subsequent election is making 2016 look like less of a surefire case for the theory. “When Trump won Michigan and Pennsylvania in 2016, right-wing institutions convinced themselves that populist messaging was the future,” Harsanyi recounts. But now, “those states are gone, and the GOP is going to end up losing Arizona and Georgia and others, as well.” Few political champions of this tendency have, moreover, been able to secure office successfully, a necessary prelude to genuine and durable political influence. “Zombie Reaganites” and normie Republicans have done a lot better. Besides, as Harsanyi points out, “voters already have a big-spending, pro-union, big government, welfare state party.”

The political calculus at the root of this faction’s belief in its own inevitable rise is looking compromised at best and a failure at worst. Many have taken to citing political scientist Lee Drutman’s quadrant-based division of the American electorate: socially conservative and fiscally conservative, socially conservative and fiscally liberal, socially liberal and fiscally conservative, and socially liberal and fiscally liberal. The argument then goes something like this: Trump won in 2016 by winning over both the first and second quadrants, whereas before Trump too many Republicans focused on the third quadrant, which is, in fact, the smallest of the four and to a considerable extent mutually exclusive with the second.

The problem with this argument, as James Patterson argued in a recent article for Law & Liberty, is twofold. First, the New Right faction is nowhere near as preponderant among conservative voters as it claims to be. And second, the “fiscally liberal and socially conservative” quadrant is not full of Trump voters in waiting or even pre-Trump Republicans. Rather, “it is full of non-white Democrats who are often strongly supportive of the Democratic Party.” They are “Devout and Diverse” Democrats, “a population of politically disengaged, socially conservative racial and ethnic minorities,” who are anti-regulation and pro-entitlement, isolationist and skeptical of immigration, yet in favor of Black Lives Matter and government action to help minorities. Given how central opposing the latter two ideas have become to New Right adherents, it seems unlikely that these voters will facilitate their long-desired realignment.

And this does not even get into the complications that the person of Donald Trump introduces to the New Right’s political aspirations. Many of its members support him. He only seems to reciprocate to the extent they validate his whims and indulge his fancies about “retribution” and the 2020 election, which have become his main criteria for political engagement. “One searches in vain for evidence that Trump has any intention of campaigning on policies advancing National Conservatism,” Patterson notes. Yet office seekers who embrace those whims fare poorly electorally. The former president may be popular among Republicans, Harsanyi observes, but “he is not particularly popular with Americans.” Nor are those who focus on indulging his obsessions. And even if he is more popular than the failing Joe Biden and becomes president, Trump’s fancies are no useful guide to governance.

A worldview shot through with conceptual and electoral defects has not curtailed the New Right’s ambitions. Continetti quotes the introduction to Up from Conservatism: “Ruling requires taking responsibility for the good of your people and defending them against their enemies. Ruling in this sense is inspiring, invigorating, and beautiful to behold. The New Right must become the party of beauty, vitality, strength, truth, high purpose, and fierceness.” So where does a movement that is so obsessed with “ruling” yet cannot succeed politically, that is becoming increasingly unmoored from the American political tradition of ordered liberty, and that grows ever more contemptuous of the American people go? Nowhere good, Patterson argues in a separate essay.

Shlaes headlined her review “NatCons: All That Is Old Is New Again.” A Calvin Coolidge scholar such as herself understands that novelty in itself is not a political selling point, especially for conservatives who revere the Founding. Is there really anything “new” about a political movement whose relationship to the best of the American political tradition is at best uncertain and at worst “corrosive” of that tradition (to use Continetti’s word)? The ideas of those who would deviate from this tradition are not “more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.” To the extent the New Right tries to move past that tradition, it would not deserve the descriptor of “new.” The word is, anyway, mostly employed as a rhetorical bludgeon against those who its adherents say deserve the label of “old,” even as they themselves look back to older ideas.

There is plenty within the existing conservative tradition that emphasizes those issues pertaining to national sovereignty and public morality that New Right adherents have claimed to revive in salience. Conservatives are better off turning to those sources than to an intellectually compromised, politically ineffective faction that has no business being the Right’s “governing consensus” for the next century.