The Problem of the New Right

In the world of conservative thought, the intellectual energy lies with the New Right.

The New Right can be found in the society of Washington wonks, Silicon Valley dissidents, New York writers, and all manner of GOP politicos.[1] Many served in the Trump administration at one level or another; all are interested in taking the popular energies unleashed by Trump and forming them into a coherent Trumpism. In public their voices are most likely to be heard in publications like the Claremont institute’s American Mind and the Claremont Review of Books, though you will also find them writing in First Things, The American Conservative, and more niche publications. At their most intellectual you find them penning long policy reviews for American Affairs or seeking work at the American Compass; at the lowest intellectual tier you have figures like Tucker Carlson, who has learned to translate the New Right’s most interesting ideas into Fox-worthy bombast.

There is no New Right catechism. Each man of the New Right has his unique obsessions. Yet there is a broad set of shared attitudes and policy prescriptions that draw New Righters in. The New Right likes to think of itself as a band of class warriors. Of tariffs and industrial policy, they are unequivocally in favor. Government economic intervention is to be lauded, if such intervention revitalizes the heartland and secures the dignity of the working-class man. Both tech companies and high finance are viewed with suspicion. New Right figures are the conservatives most likely to be calling for Section 230 reform and least likely to care about corporate tax rates. The New Right distrusts capital.

This is partly because capital has become woke, but there are deeper concerns: the New Right is a response to the loss of a way of life (or an imagined way of life, for the New Right’s younger legions have never experienced personally what they yearn for), and when they survey the causes of heartland malaise (the horrors of the opioid crisis, the despondency of the deindustrialized boomtown, and so forth) everywhere they find the wicked hand of avarice. They believe that America’s corporate class has subverted American culture and betrayed the American people. The problem with financiers, they say, is that they have no roots. The financier is a flighty being who cares for nothing but lucre. He will follow the gold-laced trail wherever on the globe it might take him.

“Globalist” is the favorite epithet for the New Right’s enemies. They hate meritocratic climbers whose motives and mores mirror those of urban professionals in London or Singapore, not those of “normal” Americans in Chattanooga or Cleveland. The fantastic rise of Chinese power is the most dramatic proof of the greed, hubris, and disloyalty of this globalized class. If the New Right type is hawkish at all, it will be hawkish on China (though for many their hawkishness has less to do with animus towards Chinese communism than in their hope that that economic and technological competition with Beijing will force Washington into the sort of reforms they seek). Otherwise, the New Right is against foreign adventuring. They admit the last thirty years of geopoliticking were a disaster; they want no more wars in the Middle East. They see those wars as an outgrowth of liberal internationalism, itself a bloody bastard-child of the dominant liberal ideology at home. This ideology is just as dangerous to the American people as America’s traitorous elites. The New Right’s first war is against ideas.

To understand the philosophical enmities that unite the New Right, one must understand the historical narrative New Right thinkers have built their movement on. Their story goes something like this: modern American conservatism is a product of three separate intellectual strains that came together in the early post war world. Communism forced together the champions of the American social order (the social conservatives), critics of statist power (libertarians and free market ideologues), and geopolitical realists (neoconservatives and foreign policy hawks) into one common enterprise. The defeat of communism was the child of their union. But the union has lasted too long. The neoconservatives burdened the conservative political movement (to say nothing of the American people) with the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan. So disastrous were these wars that this faction has lost all credibility with the right, and many of its leaders now march with the left.

The free-market fundamentalists are a different matter. They are still given purchase in the conservative movement, though the New Righters wish this were not so. According to these voices, libertarians and their enablers have had just as destructive an influence on American life as the neoconservatives: not only have their favored policies hollowed out the middle class and created Chinese superpower, but their allergy to state power prevents social conservatives from using the state for their own ends.

This is the true cause of New Right consternation: the conservatives lost the culture war, and this loss, they maintain, was their own side’s fault. The left never shies away from using government to make the world woke, but we have never been allowed to reply in kind. The libertarian dogmas of Milton Friedman and Frederick Hayek have handicapped conservativism. Libertarian ideals—which champion the sovereign individual unfettered by community, tradition, or obligation—are sugar coated poison pills. They promise to beat back a grasping federal government, but attempt to achieve this aim by sacralizing the same fatal lie that makes progressivism possible in the first place. There is no notion of common good, goes the lie, that can ever justify violating your right to individual self-realization.

Some on the New Right will trace this lie further back in time. I am reminded of a conversation I had with the editor of a New Right publication. He expressed regret over the role that the American Revolution plays in American political theology, a “ghost” he wished Americans could “exorcise.” As long as we associate revolution with foundation, he told me, it is difficult to have any kind of “pro-society worldview.” When I asked which founding mythology he would rather Americans celebrate, he pointed to the Puritan colonization. This particular New Righter is not religious, but you can understand the appeal the Mayflower Compact has for his type: unlike the American Revolution, a paroxysm of death devoted to tearing down an unjust hierarchy, the Puritan colonization was a self-conscious attempt to found an integrated communal order. Theirs was a spiritual project, a community united towards one teleological end—and it is in just such a sublime gathering the young New Righter wishes his own life could be sublimated into.

Perhaps the most ballyhooed version of this critique comes in Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed. Deneen is a political theorist. He beholds America’s ills through the lens of his profession. He discovers the origin of all that ails us in the thought of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Francis Bacon, early modern philosophers who reimagined liberty as lack of external restraint and recast humanity as a collection of autonomous and rational self-maximisers. Nowhere have these ideas had more power than in America, whose government “was instituted among men” to secure the “pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” for its individual citizens. In Deneen’s mind this is America’s original sin. Though America’s founding fathers could not have imagined Drag Queen Story Hour, by endorsing the liberal political project and the theories of selfish individualism this project was built on, they guaranteed that, sooner or later, something like Drag Queen Story Hour would occur.

This then is the spectrum of thought seen on the New Right. At its least radical end we have figures like Oren Cass, who would accept something like the Reagan coalition with industrial policy thrown in; at the other end we have folks like Gladden Pappin, eager to mainstream Catholic integralism. Everyone on this spectrum rejects the fusionist platform of yore. Some would accept conservative liberalism, if only the libertarians can be kicked to the curb; others reject liberalism outright, and look forward to a post-liberal future. All wage a bitter war against errant philosophy.

The enemies are well defined: Hayek and Friedman, Locke and Jefferson. The New Right is ever ready to debate first principles and first philosophers. This should not surprise: where leftists eagerly describe their coalition in terms of demographics and voting blocs, conservatives, even at the grassroot level, understand their movement to be a coalition of ideas.[2] But there is something self-defeating in the New Right’s fight against the philosophers. It puts too much faith in ideas as such. The real forces of history lie elsewhere.

Which brings me to the work of historian David Hackett Fischer.

Fischer’s most important work is Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. The themes introduced in Albion’s Seed are further explored in his later books Bound Away and Liberty and Freedom, and are the implicit subtext of his award-winning narratives Washington’s Crossing and Paul Revere’s Ride. The thread that connects all of these works is a careful attention to the folkways of the American people. Fischer defines these folkways as the “values, customs, and meanings” that exist beneath high politics and intellectual life, yet carve the channels through which both must flow.[3] Folk traditions are less articulate than the philosophical texts that Deneen and his sort like to argue over. They can be seen in clothing, housing, farming, sports, religious ritual, social hierarchies, sexual practices, and favored images, symbols, or metaphors. These things are inexact. They offer none of the intellectual rigor of a Hobbes or a Hayek. But they embody the beliefs and assumptions a people have about the way their world works, and the way they dream it could work. The meaning of words like justice, order, and freedom are determined at this level of society.

Fischer makes this point with the story of Levi Preston, a minuteman who fought in the Battle of Concord. In Paul Revere’s Ride Fischer quotes an 1848 interview of the ailing veteran:

“Captain Preston, what made you go to the Concord Fight [on 19 April 1775]?”

“What did I go for?”

“Were you oppressed by the Stamp Act?”

“I never saw any stamps, and I always understood that none were ever sold.”

“Well, what about the tea tax?”

“Tea tax, I never drank a drop of the stuff, the boys threw it all overboard.”

“But I suppose you have been reading Harrington, Sidney, and Locke about the eternal principle of liberty?”

“I never heard of these men. The only books we had were the Bible, the Catechism, Watts’ psalms and hymns and the almanacs.”

“Well, then, what was the matter?”

“Young man, what we meant in going for those Redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.”[4]

Fischer discusses this scene in three of his books. Fischer’s discussion in Liberty and Freedom reads as if it were written in direct rebuke of Deneen:

Here is the central problem in American history, as liberty and freedom are essential values in American culture. Scholars have attempted to study it in many ways. 

The leading approach might be called the text-and-context method. It begins with American texts on liberty and freedom and fits them into an explanatory context that is larger than America itself. Historians have discovered many different contexts by this method. They variously told us that the meaning of American liberty and freedom is to be found in the context of Greek democracy, Roman republicanism, natural rights in the middle ages, the civic humanism of the Renaissance, the theology of the Reformation, English Commonwealth tradition in the 17th century, British opposition ideology in the 18th century, the treatises of John Locke, the writings of Scottish moral philosophers, the values of the Enlightenment, and the axioms of classical liberalism. 

All these approaches have added to our knowledge of liberty and freedom but none of them comes to terms with captain Preston. As he reminded us, the text-and- context method refers to books he never read, people he never knew, places he never visited, and periods that were far from his own time. [5]

The New Right critique of the American tradition assumes that liberalism and libertarianism are rationalist abstractions foisted by ideologues onto an unsuspecting people. Fischer, with his eye towards Captain Preston, would argue the counter case: America’s libertarian tracts were foisted on no one. Rather, they are simply an attempt to articulate in the language of philosophy the common-sense attitudes and practices long embedded in the customs of the people themselves.

An easy example—which Fischer does not focus on—is the Anglo-American understanding of marriage. A legal regime that allows children to freely choose their own marriage partners has been a far more efficient engine of atomization than all the Enlightenment theorists put together. Such a legal regime—and the nuclear family system it supports—predate Locke by centuries. [6] So it is with all the bugbears of the New Right. The detachment of the suburban home, the egoism of individualist striving, over-rationalist notions of social contract, the ceaseless whirring of the capitalist machine—all have clear antecedents in English society, many reaching back to the 1200s.[7] In America these antique individualist folkways met the realities of frontier living. No other explanation for the American people’s libertarian impulses are needed.

This is the first problem with the New Right’s proposed post-liberal turn. They might, with Deneen, attack liberalism for “liberating all from the constraint of custom.”[8] In Hungary, Poland, or some other country where liberalism is a foreign import, that charge has merit. But in America? In the United States liberalism is the constraining custom. The folkways that comprise America’s liberal regime are centuries older than America’s liberal constitution. It is not clear to me that commercialism, individualism, and so forth can be excised from the American mind. Short of a massive social engineering project, by what means could this be accomplished?

The usual response of the New Right to this line of thought is to argue that it distorts history. Liberty-as-autonomy was not the “liberty” of founding era. Deneen claims that liberty-as-autonomy was in fact present in the founding era, but only so he can the extend the New Right’s general argument to an earlier point in time. For him, the enlightenment is the watershed of Western thought. On the far side of that divide, liberty was

believed to be the condition of self-rule that forestalled tyranny, within both the polity and the individual soul. Liberty was thus thought to involve discipline and training in self-limitation of desires, and corresponding social and political arrangements that sought to inculcate corresponding virtues that fostered the arts of self-government. [9]

It is in the face of arguments like these that the second theme in David Hackett Fischer’s work must be considered. Fischer does not study the folkway of the American people but the folkways of the American peoples. His central thesis is that America is, and always has been, a pastiche of nations. Four very separate cultures, with distinct and separate folkways, settled in America. To this day, Fischer maintains, these folkways (though somewhat changed by time and circumstance) shape American politics and society.

One of these four founding cultures were the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay. As my editor friend intuited, the “politics of the common good” that the New Right strives for aligns warmly with the Puritan’s communitarian conceptions of ordered liberty. I will return to these Puritan ideas in a moment, but to understand the challenge that faces the New Right we need to turn to one of America’s other founding nations.

The “backcountry” of the British colonies were settled by Scots-Irish immigrants from the borderlands of England and Scotland. The men and women who survived these war-torn marches did so through cultivating a reputation for savagery. The backcountryman put clan over community. Not for him was the New England township or the small groups of farmsteads that dotted the Delaware River Valley. Instead, backcountrymen spread their farms across the mountainsides, careful to build their cabins miles apart from those closest to them. The backcountryman honored strength and charisma, but had no respect for rank or hierarchy. Authority was weak in his world, and that is how he liked it. He rejected outsiders. He rejected the learning of the university men.[10] The backcounty wrapped its patriotism in the imagery of rattlesnakes, hornet nests, and alligators; they did not invent the phrase “Don’t Tread on Me” but nowhere was it more popular than among America’s Scots-Irish migrants.[11] 

Patrick Henry was an early backcountry leader. Fischer’s reflections on Henry and his people’s view of liberty are worth excerpting at length:

The traveler Johan Schoepf was much interested in ideas of law and everybody which he found in the back country. “They shun everything which appears to demand of them law and order, and anything that preaches constraint. Altogether natural freedom is what pleases them.” 

…[When] Patrick Henry was a member of the first Continental Congress, he startled that body by arguing that as a result of the passage of Parliament’s Intolerable Acts, “government is dissolved.” Henry insisted that “we are in a state of nature, Sir!” Congressmen from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts were as shocked is Virginia Burgesses had been [when they encountered Henry a decade earlier]. One described Patrick Henry as “in religious matters a saint; But the very devil in politics.” 

…Patrick Henry’s ideas of natural Liberty were not learned from treaties of political theory. His idea of a “state of nature” was not the philosophical abstractions that it had been for Locke. Thomas Jefferson said of Patrick Henry with only some exaggeration that he “read nothing, and had no books.” Henry’s lawyer-biographer William Wert wrote, “of the science of law he knew almost nothing, of the practical law he was wholly ignorant. He was not only unable to draw declaration or a plea, but incapable, it is said, of the most common or a simple business of his profession, even the mode of ordering a suit, giving a notice, or making a motion in court.” Patrick Henry’s principles of natural Liberty were drawn from the political folkways of the border culture in which he grew up…. 

The libertarian phrases and thoughts which echoed so strongly in the back country had earlier been heard in the borders of North Britain. When the back country people celebrated the supremacy of private interests they used the same thoughts and words as William Cotesworth, an English borderer who in 1717 declared “you know how natural it is to pursue private interests even against the darling principle of a more general good.”[12]

See these backcountrymen articulate the same liberal platitudes that the New Right detests! At one point in Liberty and Freedom Fischer even describes their conception of freedom with the words “liberty as individual autonomy.”[13] This conception of freedom was developed without any knowledge of Enlightenment texts. Most of these 18th century pleasure-maximizing, autonomy-seeking egoists could not read. [14]

This culture and its ideals did not disappear with the American Revolution. It probably reached maximum political influence in the antebellum era, when the backcountrymen first secured one of their own as president. This was also the age of the backcountry’s maximum cultural influence: in the Jacksonian era, the libertarian and egalitarian impulses of the backcountry became the ethos of almost every white man in the country. Holdouts against these folkways persisted only in the exhausted tidewater aristocracies of South Carolina and the Chesapeake, and in the federalist strongholds of New England (European travelers regularly described Boston and environs as the only place in America where the lower orders seemed to understand their place).[15] Over the following centuries the cultural descendants of the backcountrymen—be they called “butternuts,” “hillbillies,” or something else—would occasionally rear up to make their mark on American politics once more. Their support made the careers of several famous American statesmen. Here are a few you may have heard of: Stephen Douglas, William Jennings Bryan, and Donald Trump.

That last name on that list leads us to the fundamental dilemma of the New Right. It was the literal descendants of the “butternut” settlers who delivered Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa to Trump; their cultural descendants helped tip Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan into Trump’s hands. Trump strongholds in contested states like Maine, Arizona, Texas are found in the places Scots-Irish settled; hillbilly country is the reddest place in the nation. The cultural descendants of the backcountymen are the base of the Trump coalition. The New Right faces a fundamental mismatch of means and ends: they hope to build a post-libertarian national order on the backs of the most naturally libertarian demographic in the country!

The tensions of this position are sometimes apparent in the New Right’s writings. Consider Gladden Pappin’s essay “From Conservatism to Post-Liberalism: The Right After 2020.” At its base, this long essay is an attempt to make Catholic integralism, or something like unto it, palatable for America’s non-Catholic conservatives. To do this Pappin must discredit the various conservative strands not on board with his project.

Allow me to quote at length:

Finally, many “standard” conservative activists have rebranded as being “pro-Trump.” The largest activist conferences, leaders, and media figures—like the Conservative Political Action Conference, Turning Point USA (and its leader Charlie Kirk), media figures like Ben Shapiro and countless others—have all rebranded as “MAGA” conservatives. For the most part, however, these movements have not substantially updated their policy stances since before Trump. The conservative activists in this vein generally have no intellectual background or interest in policy, but are rather media figures seeking to monetize the political moment.

Many of them operating today grew out of the Tea Party phenomenon, which formed at the beginning of the Obama administration to protest the government’s bailout of banks during the subprime mortgage crisis, and to protest the fiscal stimulus bills President Obama used to fight the consequent recession. The Tea Party tapped into a strongly anti-government view that had become associated with conservatism through the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater in 1964. 

Many of the student and young adult conservative activist groups like Young Americans for Freedom (founded in 1960) date from that generation and have the same laissez-faire ideology today. Thus most of the conservative activists wearing MAGA hats at Trump rallies or conservative political conventions are simply anti-immigration libertarians. Talk to them about the need for the state to support domestic manufacturing, or the need to boost family formation through a Hungarian-style benefit program, and they will probably call you a socialist. In general, aside from opposition to immigration and support for the American military, they have no vision of how the government is to be used at all. In different circumstances, they would revert to an anti-government stance along with opposition to increases in federal spending.

Ironically, then, many “MAGA” conservative activists do not reflect the constituencies that propelled Trump to victory in 2016. Their visibility on the president’s behalf will merely harm his reelection campaign. While the world of conservative political activism may seem impressive, since the 1970s and 1980s it has become heavily laden down by financial motivations and salesmanship. Going forward, more lean and nimble organizations, particularly of a “post-liberal” variety, will be needed to enable political actors on the right to formulate what to do next.[16]

After castigating Turning Point USA for not “reflecting the constituencies that propelled Trump to victory,” Pappin argues that the first thing the New Right must do to “reflect” these constituencies is—dear reader, I do not jest—“decency laws that could restrict the distribution of pornography.”[17]

Now look folks: I am strongly in favor of anti-porn legislation. I argued for it in past columns and am happy to argue for it again. But I also have no illusions about how little most Americans—including most Americans who voted for Trump—care about this. (Or, for that matter, the second item on Pappin’s list, “directing American investment toward strategic sectors”). Pappin’s despised “anti-immigration libertarians” who support a “strong military” but otherwise have “no vision for how the government is to be used at all” are not aberrations; their philosophy is not some sort of snake oil being sold to unsuspecting voters. The “salesmanship” of these activists succeeds only because of existing demand for their wares. Who is Pappin’s monster, this “anti-immigrant, pro-military libertarian with no vision for how the government is to be used at all?”

That, my friends, is a perfect portrait of the average Trump voter.

The libertarian streak of the median Trump voter is not refined or well-reasoned. It is more a product of instinct than intellect. It is the impulse that caused backcountrymen to cry for “elbow room” two centuries ago, causes modern Trumpists to yell “get off of my lawn!” today, and led both groups to embrace the slogan “don’t tread on me” when they felt like their way of life was under siege. Andrew Jackson became president because he honored white working men yelling for elbow room, promising to use his power to fight haughty East coast elites that seemed too eager to dictate to the backcountrymen how they ought to live.[19] Donald Trump was voted into office by the cultural descendants of these people, and for all the same reasons. Trump’s decision to hang a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office was a tacit acknowledgement of this reality.

In contrast, the New Right adorns their movement with the words of Jackson’s bitter enemies. There is something of a pattern here. The kinship between the New Right’s communal project and the Puritan settlement has already been noted. But they are not the only figures in the New Right hall of exemplary Americans. Alexander Hamilton is the New Right’s favorite founding father; the Whiggish “American System” is their most cited policy precedent. Theodore Roosevelt is the hero of every second young man on the New Right; the habits, education, and worldview of the pre-Boomer WASP elite is one of their constant obsessions.

Do you see the common thing that strings these all together? When I read New Right writings and meet with New Righters in person I cannot help but notice how Northeastern their vision of politics is. They do not like to admit this, but it is true. They are the spiritual heirs of the New England Whigs; when they find anything sympathetic at all in the American tradition, it is in the Boston Brahmins’ lost aristocracy.

In sociological terms, I suppose the best way to understand the New Right is as Puritan heretics. The Puritans were the most communitarian of Fischer’s four founding nations; their cultural descendants (found in places like Boston and Portland) are the Americans most willing to live for the Holy Cause today. Like the New Right, the left’s modern-day Puritans also lionize the Federalists and Whigs.[19] It makes sense, in a way. Most of the New Right’s leaders either come from or immersed themselves in Puritan milieus. The number of Ivy League degrees claimed by New Right thinkers is one proof of this. That Claremont is based in California—instead of, say, Texas—is another example of the phenomena. Yankee thinking seeps into the thought of those who long swim through it.

About a year ago I met with a young post-liberal who expressed a passionate loathing of everything American. American culture was not home to her. And how could it be? New England born, Ivy-educated, committed to the politics of the “common good” — here was a spiritual descendant of the Puritans if there ever was one. But of course all the other Puritans, whose religion now runs woke, would not have her. She has no place at their table. This outcast was instead forced into the other coalition, the coalition led by the raucous individualists of the backcountry tradition. Enemies of one’s enemies are friends they say, but tactical allies make poor bosom-mates. My post-liberal friend has no choice but to work for the living antitheses of her deepest convictions.

That is the problem of the New Right. I doubt most New Righters feel quite so alienated from the Trumpfolk they lead, but her problem is theirs. Pity the Whig who wishes to lead the Jackson masses! Spare a prayer for the post-liberal politico who must herd the backcountry crowd. The pillars of the New Right’s rising moral order are the most licentious and rebellious people in the nation. This is an unstable foundation for a post-liberal body politic if there ever was one.

[1] If you are completely unfamiliar with the term or the movement, Park MacDougald’s “The New American Millennial Right,” Tablet (24 February 2020) is as good an introduction as any; to get a sense for their priorities, I suggest poking around the American Moment’s website. 

[2] Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins, “Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats: The Asymmetry of American Party Politics,” Perspectives on Politics 13, no. 1 (March 2015): 119–39.

[3] David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 7.

[4] David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 163, 397.

[5] David Hacket Fischer, Liberty and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 2.

[6]  This point was first made to me in Michael Lotus and James Bennett, America 3.0 (New York: Encounter Books, 2013), 54. I expand on it in “Against Patrick Deneen (II),” Scholar’s Stage (3 June 2018).

[7] On individualism and family patterns, see Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020); on the antecedents to suburb life, Michael Lotus and James Bennett, America 3.0 (New York: Encounter Books, 2013); on commercialism and the antecedents of commercial law, Alan MacFarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family Property and Social Transition (London: Blackwell Publishers, 1989); on notions of social contract, M. Stanton Evans, The Theme is Freedom: Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition (Washington DC: Regenery, 1994), pp. 167-185.

[8] Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 148.

[9] ibid., 23.

[10] Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 754-777.

[11] Fischer, Liberty and Freedom, 75-84

[12] Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 777-782.

[13] Fischer, Liberty and Freedom, 75.

[14] Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 715-720.

[15] On Boston, see Robert Wiebe, Self Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 57; on the tidewater aristocracies, William Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 162-197; 213229.

[16] Gladden Pappin, “From Conservatism to Postliberalism: The Right after 2020,” American Affairs Journal 4, no. 3 (Summer 2020).

[17] ibid.

[18] This is of course a simplification. If a New Right thinker were to take this seriously, however, and ponder over how to direct the Jacksonian impulse their their own project, the book I recommend starting with is Lawrence Kohl’s The Politics of Individualism: Parties and the American Character in the Jacksonian Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

[19] There is an entire essay to be written on this topic. It would include, among other things, the Democrat’s decision to drop all Jackson-Jefferson dinners, Ron Chernow’s Hamilton, Washington, and Grant biographies, the musical Hamilton, the HBO special John Adams, and serious works of historiographical import like Daniel Walker Howe’s What God Hath Wrought and Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution.