news-queue:

There’s a new, increasingly assertive, tendency on the Right. These conservatives are not rabid free marketeers, hawkish neocons, or religious fundamentalists. They hate Beltway elitism and think both major parties have sold out the working class.

This cohort has elements that flirt with the most reactionary segments of online conservatism, but its most well-known figures — like Julius Krein and Michael Lind of American Affairs, Saagar Enjeti of HillTV’s Rising, Oren Cass of American Compass, Chris Buskirk of American Greatness, and Fox News’s Tucker Carlson — have built audiences behind economic nationalist rhetoric.

As Tablet’s Park MacDougald summarizes, this new Right sees US economic decline and cultural malaise as largely the result of “a short-sighted American elite [that] has allowed the country’s manufacturing core — the key to both widespread domestic prosperity and national security in the face of a mercantilist China — to be hollowed out.” In response, they promote a modest economic protectionism in the hopes of restoring American manufacturing to its former glory. Writers like Gladden Pappin extend this ambition further and insist on corporatist political reforms — wherein big business, organized labor, and elected officials in government work together to negotiate the terms of national renewal.

These corporatists still pay homage to market efficiency but cast themselves as realists in the face of the threatening rise of China and the hollowing of the American core: as Dov Zigler puts it in American Affairs, “a more perfect market system in itself is not a substitute for an awareness of national priorities or the strategic pursuit of national goals.”

At first blush, their statist program sounds more sensible and attractive than most of what was politically thinkable — from either side of the aisle — before 2016. A radical reorganization of the American industrial structure is needed in order to deliver any real and enduring economic gains for working people. And it is undoubtedly true that too much of US policy is dictated by a professional class free from democratic accountability or the everyday experiences of working people.

But the new Right is not a promising new expression of working-class mobilization — it’s an intellectual symptom of mass political demobilization. The Republican Party is hardly on the verge of revolting against its wealthy anti-tax voters.

Read More