Classical liberalism vs. The New Right – Marginal REVOLUTION
It has become increasingly clear that the political Right in America is not what it used to be. In particular, my own preferred slant of classical liberalism is being replaced. In its stead are rising alternatives that don t yet have a common name. Some are called national conservatism, and some (by no means all) strands are pro-Trump, but I will refer to the New Right. My use of the term covers a broad range of sources, from Curtis Yarvin to J.D. Vance to Adrian Vermeule to Sohrab Ahmari to Rod Dreher to Tucker Carlson, and also a lot of anonymous internet discourse. Most of all I am thinking of the smart young people I meet who in the 1980s might have become libertarians, but these days absorb some mix of these other influences.
I would like to consider where the older classical liberal view differs from these more recent innovations. I don t so much intend a cataloguing of policy positions as a quest to find the most fundamental difference, at a conceptual level, between the classical liberal views and their New Right competitors. That main difference to cut to the chase is how much faith each group puts in the possibility of trustworthy, well-functioning elites.
Tyler Cowan on the New Right. A pretty good take, but one I find somewhat irritating, as I find many of Cowan’s pieces, in its slightly chirpy optimism. Tyler definitely does not know what time it is; I would date him as, oh, 2004 or so.
I call myself a classical liberal too, but one who is more sympathetic to national conservatism than Tyler is. What he gets right is the possibility that national conservatives in power would soon be just as corrupt as our current rulers are. They would be.
I did not see where Tyler criticized Rod Dreher’s and Tucker Carlson’s somewhat sympathetic (though that’s too strong) take on Putin and the Russians — Russia is an utterly corrupt kleptocracy inspired in part by their KGB owned Orthodox Church. Look at Ukraine.
Most elites — and by this I mean those in power, not necessarily the best or the smartest — are, for the most part, evil and pernicious. See Dr. Tony et al. Mostly this is just human nature, original sin and all that. Jesus, St. Augustine, Pascal etc. were basically correct, it seems to me. Tyler might have an essentially liberal Jewish Weltanschauung. Lovable but sadly wrong. The market works, not by producing optimas, but by causing the downfall, eventually, of various robber barons and tyrants. But only for a while. We have the bad luck to live towards the end of our particular world order. I hope it gets better in time for my kids to see it.