The New Right, Vox writer Zach Beauchamp says (here), is “a loose grouping of conservative thinkers who advocate aggressively wielding state power to promote a more conservative culture.”
One of their apostles is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has presidential ambitions. He has aggressively pushed for restrictions on speech, books, and academic freedom. It’s hard to say where he’d stop if his power expanded beyond Florida.
The New Right comes in various flavors; the one Beauchamp’s talking about “rose to prominence after 2016 to put meat on Trumpism’s intellectual bones” (it’s news to me that it has any).
Now they’re thinking about “how best to prosecute the culture war” after their 2022 midterm defeats, and whether Trump or DeSantis represents the movement’s future; but those things are tactical, not ideological.
Thinkers, of course, are in the ideas business; so let’s see what they’re thinking. Some of it is pretty scary. They’re against democracy, but we knew that; digging a little deeper, here’s what we’ll find.
Declan Leary, editor of American Conservative magazine, is an “integralist,” i.e., “Catholic arch-conservatives who believe that the United States government should be replaced with a religious Catholic state.”
You read that right.
“Like most on the broader New Right,” Beauchamp says, integralists want “regime change.” But accomplishing it with elections “was always a long shot” in a country that’s nowhere near majority-Catholic (and where most Catholics aren’t integralists); and they think democracy shouldn’t “stand in the way of their goals.”
Harvard Law Prof. Adrian Vermeule, another integralist, says, “The common good is the common good notwithstanding the will of the people.” If I’m not mistaken, that argument has been bandied by despots since time immemorial. By the way, who decides what the “common good” is? Not us, according to them.
To the New Right, the 2022 midterms are evidence they need to “start thinking beyond democracy.” An essayist on American Greatness, a pro-Trump commentary site, argues, “The partisans of the Right need to lift weights, buy guns, and find comrades.” That’s right, he said guns.
We’ve known about their guns, and their intentions to destroy our democracy, for a while now. Knowing this is how they think, and their thinking infuses Trumpism, will help you understand Trump’s rejection of election results, the MAGA movement’s election denialism, and the right’s gun fetishism and threats of violence.
When Doug Mastriano, a Christian nationalist, but not a Catholic or integralist, ran for governor in 2022 he talked about turning Pennsylvania into a religious state. The fact this is unconstitutional and violates other people’s rights wouldn’t have stopped him from trying. And if people like them could get their way, neither would election defeats.
When I think of the New Right, I think of outfits like the Claremont Institute, where Trump plotter John Eastman hangs out, which openly despises democracy and our right to vote. The integralist movement in the New Right is news to me. There have always been theocratic movements in the U.S., but traditionally they’ve been eccentrics who posed no real threat to our freedom.
This is different. An organized movement to replace our constitutional democracy with a “religious Catholic state” is unsettling. The irony is that’s exactly what our forebears came to the New World to escape from.