This authoritarian worldview is gaining momentum in America. What’s to stop its ideas taking seed in the UK?
In British politics, the term “new right” conjures memories of the philosophy of the Thatcher years: individualism, free-market economics and a small state. In today’s US, it conjures a radical break with such views. Broadly speaking, denizens of the American new right advocate an industrial strategy, welfare programmes consistent with the traditional family unit, a crackdown on immigration and using the power of the state to enforce rightwing moral values. Its most worrying common strand is an apocalyptic fury at “woke” leftists and their supposed totalitarian hold over corporations, colleges and culture – with some proponents even believing that doing away with democracy would be a price worth paying to stop them.
Although the new right is not synonymous with Donald Trump, it has certainly built on his authoritarian worldview and the scorched intellectual earth he left behind after setting fire to the Republican party. Key figures associated with the new right have hitched themselves personally to Trump’s wagon, while others have bolstered his conspiracies about the 2020 election. Its ideas are gaining serious momentum now, attracting many young adherents and inspiring a rush of trend pieces in mainstream US media. JD Vance, a new right darling, has just won the Republican nomination for a Senate seat in Ohio. Tucker Carlson, a big Vance booster, has built one of the most racist and possibly most successful shows in the history of cable news, as the New York Times put it.
Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today
