The New Right After Trump
Conservatives have an opportunity in 2022 and 2024 unlike any since 1980
*Essay adapted from a speech Whiton gave to the Women of Washington in Redmond.
The great Donald Trump is obsolete, as he probably fears. His political dominance was deflated not by Joe Biden, the Never Trumpers, congressional impeachment, Big Tech, or the lying media. It was Glenn Youngkin, now the governor-elect of Virginia, who flipped a blue state red and showed we can have the best of Trumpism while ditching the baggage.
Trump’s attempt to take credit for the Youngkin victory and invent relevance where there was none was pathetic and embarrassing. Among a flurry of emails he sent on election day, one read: “It is looking like Terry McAuliffe’s campaign against a certain person named ‘Trump’ has very much helped Glenn Youngkin. All McAuliffe did was talk Trump, Trump, Trump and he lost!” In another of his spastic missives, Trump wrote: “I would like to thank my BASE for coming out in force and voting for Glenn Youngkin.”
Youngkin’s victory came down to the former head of the white-shoe Carlyle Group skipping the usual establishment fecklessness and meekness. Instead, Youngkin ran an unapologetic campaign against the out-of-touch Democrats and their woke brand of cultural Marxism that views our children as future foot soldiers who need to be indoctrinated for the Left’s war on American meritocracy. Youngkin won rural voters and crucially added the suburbanites Trump repelled. Beyond that, the election had nothing to do with Trump, who lost the state in a 10-point landslide in 2020; several points more than he lost it by in 2016. Trump’s greatest contribution to Youngkin’s election was staying away, thankfully reneging on a previous vow to show up uninvited in, of all places, deep-blue Arlington County.
Watch for Trump eventually to criticize Republicans like Youngkin, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, and others as he realizes they have supplanted the 75 year-old former chief executive as leaders of the party and contenders for 2024. The increasing frequency of hints that Trump will run made by lingering Trump groupies and the former president himself reveal his sense that he is actually being left behind. In America, power is fleeting.
The key question now is what is the state of conservatism and the Republican Party after Trump’s presidency and a year after the 2020 presidential election?
As we look at our country and its place in the world, there are a surprising number of factors that seem similar to those that gave rise to Donald Trump in 2016. Take a look at the COP26, the hootenanny featuring the 26th year of globalists talking about their religion: climate change alarmism. Notwithstanding amusing news that Joe Biden produced the fart heard round the world in the presence of the Duchess of Cornwall, the gathering mostly involved the political elite of Old Europe and other wealthy nations plotting to raise the costs of energy for the rest of us. They did this at the exact time when Americans are grappling with out-of-control gasoline prices and the prospect of much higher heating bills this winter. Energy costs also drive up food prices. Floods that killed people last summer in New York City were not the product of climate change, but do show what happens when you waste money on nonsense instead of improving our resilience to weather. Wasting more money on nonsense is precisely what our elite intends to do.
The COP26 wasn’t the only place where the elite gathered recently to talk about its religion. They also did so ad nauseum at the G20, which was reminiscent of the equally pointless G7 earlier this year at which our feckless leaders got together to fist bump, prance around in their masks despite being double vaccinated, and declare an intent to redesign our economies despite no political mandate to do so. While the USA was represented by leftwing Joe Biden, Britain, Germany, and Japan were supposedly under conservative control at the time. But they all agree on just about everything—Joe Biden, the Europeans, and the biggest fool of all, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. It raises the question: Do elections matter?
More is on the way. Next month, the Biden administration will host a so-called Summit for Democracy. It will be virtual, again despite everyone being double vaccinated and probably boosted, and despite the USA having surmounted the peak of the WuFlu Delta variant wave in September. The administration is touting the summit as an effort to “stop democratic backsliding and the erosion of rights worldwide.”
You can be sure they’re not talking about your rights. No one will mention your right to free speech, which is under attack like never before with the collusion of leftists in Washington, DC, Big Tech, and the lying media. Your right to keep and bear arms would only come up as the punchline of a joke about uncouth American deplorables. Your right to have your vote counted and not diluted by the welcome mat the Democrats have put out for illegal aliens is not on the agenda. Your right to decide with your doctor how to govern your own health is also missing in action.
Instead, you can expect more of how the Taliban, should they not afford full rights to women, will miss out on international acceptance and a socio-economy like ours—two things about which they seem to care little. (Joe Biden and our failed national security apparatus seem not to appreciate that losing a war leaves us in a bad position to dictate anything to the victors.) Maybe the State Department will again tweet about “pronouns day,” when we pretend gender is whatever one wants it to be and cancel anyone who does not agree to contort basic factors of biology and our language to advance leftwing political goals. The summit is less about real democracy and more about post-modern neoliberalism with some cultural Marxism sprinkled on top.
Consider who is invited: Angola, Iraq, Ukraine, and Pakistan—places few Americans associate with freedom. Guess who isn’t invited: important bulwarks against the tyranny of political Islam like Egypt and the monarchies of the Arabian Gulf. Hungary was stiffed because its democratically elected president, Viktor Orban, believes in putting Hungary first, not allowing a lying media to tear apart his country, and defending his nation’s borders from an invasion of illegals. Taiwan, a thriving democracy, was also snubbed lest the Chinese Communist Party be offended. Given the threat from China that Taiwan faces, its exclusion is like holding a democracy confab in 1937 and not inviting Belgium, France, or Poland so as not to offend the Nazis. (Taiwan furthermore should be the Bidenistas’ type of democracy: it has gay marriage, a transgender minister of government, and a Fauciesque official hysteria over coronavirus that has kept the country closed to the world for nearly two years and will effectively keep it closed through most of 2022, imperiling its limited international standing.)
We are governed by fools. Far from learning any lessons from the shocks of the election of Trump and Brexit in Great Britain, they are trying to pretend that nothing is awry. Their choice to be alienated from their own people is just as bad as it was in 2016, maybe worse.
Closer to home, the economic factors that elevated Trump and Brexit in 2016 are also present again. Inflation, which is caused by government, is out of control and has eaten all of the progress workers of all income levels and races made through better wages under Trump. Confidence in the economy is at a ten-year low, and that is before asset bubbles like housing and the stock market pop.
We also face an elite that is determined to politicize everything and divide America. Did you think the end of the Soviet Union meant the end of people trying to make a religion out of politics? Apparently it didn’t. Political correctness, now better understood as cultural Marxism, has spread from college campuses to business and society at large. Remember the sudden ascendance of Antifa and Black Lives Matter in 2020? It wasn’t just in academia or in the cities that were violently assaulted by the two sides of this cultural Marxist coin. Even in lily-white rural Colorado, I saw people gathering under the banner of BLM—a unpatriotic, warped cohort that had been lying in wait, determined to force the young and old to accept lies about American history and our society—the greatest multicultural society in history since the Roman Empire.
The cultural Marxists wouldn’t have gotten far without acquiescence and outright collusion of the jellyfish who run our corporations. Remember when the Weather Channel was about weather and not the Left’s new religion, climate change alarmism? Remember when airlines hired pilots based on their experience and ability to fly instead of their skin color? Remember when the NFL was about football, not a bunch of multi-millionaire sissies complaining about our great country—the only one where they could have made it big? How about Nascar? “Let’s go Brandon” isn’t just a phase of disapproval of Joe Biden; it is a beautiful satire about the lying media and corporate activism against the American people. The fanaticism that turned up in our history during the Salem Witch Trials, Prohibition, and McCarthyism is back, even though Americans didn’t vote for it. The elite is out on a ledge with its anti-Americanism and fanaticism even more than it was in 2016.
A lot went right with Donald Trump, which we should remember and incorporate into the New Right. Tucker Carlson had Trump’s number in 2016 when he figured out why evangelical Christians were supporting Trump despite a demeanor that was hardly Dudley Do-Right. He wrote:
I doubt there are many Christian voters who think Trump could recite the Nicene Creed, or even identify it. Evangelicals have given up trying to elect one of their own. What they’re looking for is a bodyguard, someone to shield them from mounting (and real) threats to their freedom of speech and worship.
Trump was a bodyguard—and a catalyst. My friend Catharine O’Neill puts it another way that is similar: Trump was the battering ram. The army of rabble used it to break down the palace gate.
Afterward, that army did a lot that was right. Trump said he would kill ISIS and he did. He cut taxes and ended the Obama-Biden regulatory war on American business, leading to economic growth exceeding 3% (before the pandemic) and raising everybody’s wages. He slapped back Iran, Syria, and North Korea without getting into wars. He disrupted a decades-long love affair between our elite and the Chinese Communist Party by enacting tariffs on about half of Chinese imports. He appointed two good Supreme Court Justices and many good lower-court judges. Conservatives don’t win every case, but at least we now sometimes win on occasion.
But Trump also did a lot wrong. Most of his failings can be traced to his enormous capacity to choose bad people to implement his vision. I’m far from the only one to observe this. Keith Kellogg, a top Trump official and soldier’s soldier who remains very pro-Trump writes bluntly in his new book, War By Other Means:
The eventual director of presidential personnel, a critical hire, was Johnny DeStefano, a Reince Priebus selection from the Republican National Committee who told me that his preferred presidential candidate had been ‘any Republican.’ Not the answer I was hoping for.
Kellogg also asserted at the first transition personnel meeting, which tragically didn’t even occur until after election:
“We don’t need a team of rivals; we need a cohesive team that will support the president-elect and his vision.” I stressed the importance of loyalty to the president-elect, but it was clear that preference was being given to impressive resumes and shiny credentials, which I thought missed the point.
In fact, it was exactly contrary to the point. If you want people to help you conduct a revolution, those who attended Harvard and worked for Goldman Sachs are generally the exact people you do not want. There are always exceptions, but most people of pedigree have no capacity to enter a hostile work environment and implement changes that are deeply unpopular with the palace eunuchs who think they should run the place unhindered by the preferences of the American people.
I’ll cite just one example since the topic could fill a whole speech on its own: Fiona Hill, whom pointless H.R. McMaster hired for the National Security Council staff to be the top official on Russia. Her sterling resume boasts of Harvard, the Brookings Institution, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Hill’s job was to coordinate Trump administration policy on Russia, but as anyone who knew anything about Hill before she was hired could have told you, she was fundamentally opposed to what Trump wanted to do with Russia. Trump was clear that he favored deterrence against Russia, including through moral support for the crooks who run Ukraine (who often seem willing to fight Russia to the last American) and, beyond that, sending Kiev lethal materiel to fight Russians holding territory in eastern Ukraine. Despite his skepticism of Europe, Trump didn’t cancel a single deployment of U.S. troops to obsolete NATO in order not to appear soft on Russia. However, Trump made clear from the beginning of his campaign that we should at least try to talk to the Russians and have a working relationship at the presidential level with Vladimir Putin.
Hill and others at the White House like the Fat Colonel, Alexander Vindman, charged with helping the president do his job, did the opposite. Someone at the NSC leaked classified information taken out of context to the press, and Hill and Vindman would go on to be the star witnesses in the sham impeachment against Trump.
Trump’s incompetence in choosing good people extended throughout the executive branch and his reelection campaign, and has followed him into retirement.
It is time for the New Right to take the best of Trump and move on, which seems to happening with gaining speed. As I’ve written before, Trumpism wasn’t a set of specific policies, but a willingness to fight, a refusal to accept the terms of political debate set by the Democrats and the media, and a realignment of the party toward blue-collar workers. On foreign and trade policy, Trumpism was defined as America First—a simple and elegant formula followed by most American presidents and most countries throughout history by which we expect our own government to put our own interests first.
In adapting this approach the future, the New Right needs people who aren’t afraid to fight, even on uncomfortable cultural issues. Culture is the central contest today: whether we’ll have a meritocracy that builds on our glorious past or allow a radical minority to inflict an Orwellian, politically ordered society on us is far more important the capital gains tax rate. We need more Glenn Youngkins who embraced cultural conflict, and fewer John McCains, who was too grand to make hay out of the fact that his opponent, Barack Obama, received spiritual inspiration from someone who hated America.
Fundamentally, the New Right must also be comfortable using the power of government to undermine its opponents. We have virtually no cultural power, which is a shame since culture drives politics. We aren’t just in the minority in Hollywood, publishing, network TV, etc., we are effectively locked out. For every Daily Caller, Encounter Books, or Hillsdale College, there are dozens or hundreds of better-funded cultural properties dominated by the Left. Hopefully this will change, and that can happen faster if conservatives stop wasting money on things like the Heritage Foundation, the college they attended, or the local ballet—and instead fund conservative writers, producers, actors, distribution channels, etc.
But until then, we will have to rely on our political power. Yes, we have no cultural power, but at times we have considerable political power, and it should increase markedly in 2022 and 2024. We need to use that power. Some conservatives and most libertarians have the quaint view that the free market will cure all. If Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube cancel conservatives, then they can go elsewhere and start their own competitive distribution channels. If the government teachers’ unions overreach, then they will be exposed and pushed aside. If corporations repel half of America by lecturing them with false insinuations of racism, capital and customers will instead flow to businesses that focus on good products and services instead of politics. These optimistic scenarios may come to pass one day, but in the meantime the trend is going in the wrong direction. The Left’s cultural domination is trumping competitive forces that should disempower the Left. And these progressive-dominated monopolies and oligopolies have assumed positions similar to the trusts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
We need to use the power of government to break up Big Tech, separating content-production and management from networks and dividing companies that are too big. We need higher taxes on technology and finance and the elimination of taxes on manufacturing, combined with high tariffs to return our country to a place where we make things. We need to have a free market in student loans, so that banks will prudently finance promising students in promising fields, not worthless degrees from corrupt universities and a lifetime of debt for any kid who can sign a piece of paper. We need to require each voter in every election to show a picture ID and be a citizen of the United States. We need to ban government unions and privatize government schools, giving parents vouchers and school choice. We need to build the border wall that Trump envisioned and not just deport most illegal aliens, but all of them, restoring fairness and the rule of law to our generous immigration program. We need to pass a balanced federal budget, directing the cuts that would be necessary to trim or eliminate federal bureaucracies that advance or perpetuate progressivism. The budgets of the Justice Department and FBI should be cut 20% each year until they stop playing politics and acting like a Praetorian Guard for Democrats and the deep state.
As I’ve previously argued, a Republican Congress needs to bring back the House Un-American Activities Committee and create a Senate equivalent. Even if gridlock prevents the legislative enactment of a New Right agenda, a Republican Congress can expose and undermine what the Left is doing to America. Congress should bring not just the CEOs of companies engaged in woke activities, but also their boards of directors to explain why they are using shareholder resources to advance a progressive political agenda. Administrators of schools could be given the opportunity to explain why they are discriminating against white and Asian children and teaching their pupils to hate themselves and their country. The financial and corporate interests that continue to advocate selling out to China could also have their activities exposed as they explain their thinking to Congress.
Finally, in foreign affairs, a New Right should take a new look at our vital national interests and the alliances and military we need to secure them. Doing so requires getting past emotion and trying at least to understand the interests and views of other countries.
For example, Russia is a hazardous country that does many wicked things, and politically challenging its president, Vladimir Putin, is a perilous task. However, in Russia’s view, it supported the unification of Germany on the basis that NATO wouldn’t move farther east, and in fact NATO moved right up to Russia’s border. Moscow’s unfortunate decision to seize small parts of Ukraine and Georgia were to prevent those countries from joining NATO. (Crimea has been a part of modern Russia since 1783 and its Russian-speaking population only became politically linked with Ukraine because of a Khrushchev-era administrative shuffle.) Putin is not a new Adolf Hitler and Russia today is not the Soviet Union or Third Reich. We have little interest or real ability to joust with Russia east of Poland or Turkey, and need to focus our attention and resources on China instead. We should try to find more common ground and shared interests with Russia—especially in fighting political Islam and cultural Marxism—and stop expecting Russia to resemble European or American democracy.
Our primary adversary in the world is the Chinese government, followed by Iran’s Islamist regime. Considering that we are now more indebted than France and have squandered our military capacity fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, while maintaining pointless garrisons on Europe, Africa, and South Korea, we ought to dramatically shift our military to the Pacific, redesign it to counter China, and also make life as hard as possible for Iran’s terrorism-exporting government.
Much of this domestic and foreign agenda simply requires taking the views and instincts of Donald Trump to their logical application. But doing so will require a New Right that is politically nimble, good at communicating, willing to fight as hard and dirty as the progressives, and able to elevate policymakers and legislators who actually share this vision and know how to get it implemented. The elements of this New Right exist and the opportunity on the horizon in 2022 and 2024 is like no other since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. The question is who will lead the New Right, especially since we can increasingly conclude it will not be Donald Trump.