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, The New Right, looks at the history of the New Right, the matters that define it, the movement’s major players, and its future.
New Right has meant different things to various people across time periods. For example, it was used to describe Arizona Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign and applied to the views of unorthodox 1990s political figures such as Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh.
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Nowadays, it refers to ideas that have become increasingly popular in the Republican Party and conservative movement ever since Donald Trump famously descended the Trump Tower escalator in 2015.
His policy views on immigration, trade, family, and foreign policy have broadly become the pillars of the New Right in the 2020s and have spawned their own set of intellectual leaders and think tanks advancing the cause.
Read more from the Washington Examiner.
Part 2: The key players in the New Right movement
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.
Read more from the Washington Examiner.
Part 3: Can the New Right coexist with the old — and with itself?
Over the last decade, the Republican Party has become the party of Donald Trump and his New Right acolytes, beginning with Vice President JD Vance and extending through a range of political thinkers and online influencers who support his worldview.
But, as dominant as Trump and his way of thinking are on the Right, no political coalition is permanent, and internal debates are already rumbling over issues such as immigration and trade that could split the movement within a few years.
Such disagreements have spilled into the open on social media for all the world to see, publicly exposing rifts between some of Trump’s biggest backers in the early months of his second term. Not everyone is convinced that debate is a problem, especially for a party that now prides itself on its embrace of unfettered free speech.