The year 2024 heralded the ascendance of a political New Right that defies the old paradigms of post-World War II conservatism. Across the globe, insurgent parties and leaders shocked the political establishment. Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the United States marked the most consequential comeback in American history. Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National emerged as the dominant party in France. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, the Reform Party obtained enough votes on the right that the oldest traditional conservative party in the world went down to a landslide defeat. From Italy to Slovakia, the story was much the same: the New Right is not merely rising—it is replacing an older order of things.

This tectonic shift raises a central question: How does the political New Right differ from the postwar political Right it seeks to supplant? The answer is not monolithic. Paradoxically, this New Right’s universal nationalism renders it deeply particular, shaped by the unique history of the nations it inhabits. Its vision varies from country to country depending on national identity, historical grievances, and local traditions.

France offers a case study in continuity as well as its potential extremity. The old French political Right, defined by Gaullism, was never a friend to classical liberalism. It championed dirigisme, the belief in an expansive and interventionist state, alongside an ethos of cultural unity and national independence—often skeptical of NATO and disdainful of American influence. The Rassemblement National radicalizes this legacy. Economically, it calls for more state spending and tighter control. Geopolitically, its embrace of Russia reflects an intensified version of Gaullist autonomy from the United States. Culturally, its anti-Muslim stance transforms the old republican secularism into a harsher, more authoritarian vision of national identity. The New Right in France is not a rupture but an amplification—a louder echo of familiar themes.

The political New Right in the United States diverges from its French counterpart because the American Right has never mirrored France’s rejection of liberalism. The United States was born as a liberal state, its founding principles rooted in individual liberty, free markets, and religious pluralism. Unlike France, where conservatism was often synonymous with nationalism and statism, American conservatism largely sought to preserve the classical liberal order.

Modern American conservatism emerged as a fusionist project—a synthesis of libertarian ideas and traditional moral order. It rested on the conviction that liberty requires virtue: without personal responsibility and adherence to shared moral values, freedom risks decaying into license and disorder. This principle echoes the nation’s Federalist origins, where conservatives like George Washington and John Adams argued that moral virtue, undergirded by religion, was indispensable to the American experiment in self-governance.

The power of this tradition is evident in the nature of the political New Right in the United States. While some intellectuals on the right and an increasing number of right-wing activist groups and think tanks openly repudiate the fusionist project, much of the practical politics of the New Right—led of course by the once and future President Donald Trump—may be understood as pursuing long-term goals of the project in a very hostile world. Nowhere is this clearer than in its response to the administrative state, a long-standing foe of the American Right. For decades, conservatives have understood the dangers of an unaccountable bureaucracy. They opposed the New Deal for granting expansive, discretionary powers to unelected officials. In the 1950s, they fought for procedural safeguards like the Administrative Procedure Act. By the Reagan era, conservatives recognized that mere procedural checks were insufficient, leading to reforms like cost-benefit analyses overseen by the Office of Management and Budget.

The political New Right, building on this legacy, sees structural reform as the key to restraining a bureaucracy that increasingly leans ideologically left, particularly in domestic agencies like the EPA and HHS. The Trump administration’s first term made headway by prioritizing regulatory rollback and curbing agency discretion. A second term promises to go further, tackling the structural obstacles that frustrate conservative governance. Two measures stand at the forefront of this agenda.

First, the administration will likely seek greater control over independent agencies by curbing their insulation from presidential authority. This idea is not new—it has been debated in every Republican administration since Reagan—but the New Right views it as a necessity to ensure agencies reflect presidential rather than bureaucratic control.

Second, the Trump administration will likely reintroduce Schedule F, a classification that allows for the replacement of entrenched career bureaucrats with political appointees. Critics argue that such a measure risks cronyism and incompetence, but the structural risks of an ideologically homogenous career bureaucracy may be graver. The challenge is to weigh the dangers of political patronage against the dysfunction of an administrative state immune to electoral accountability. If the New Right succeeds, it will restore the primacy of democratic accountability over bureaucratic inertia, safeguarding the promise of limited government. If it fails, the administrative state will likely continue to grow, impervious to the political will of the people.

The American political New Right’s emphasis on tax cuts and limiting the size of government is not an innovation but a long-standing feature of right-leaning administrations for over a century. Critics argue that its current program lacks the spending reductions necessary to render these tax cuts fiscally sound. Yet such objections are hardly novel. The Reagan administration faced identical accusations when its sweeping tax cuts expanded the deficit. The logic underpinning this approach is the familiar “starve the beast” strategy: by reducing revenue, the growth of government can be constrained, especially when left-leaning parties inevitably return to power. However, one salient critique remains—the New Right seems to have largely abandoned entitlement reform, even as entitlements drive unsustainable government spending in a rapidly aging nation.

The political New Right’s answer to this charge lies in both policy and politics. On policy, its vision prioritizes radical deregulation to unleash economic growth, which, in theory, may generate sufficient wealth to sustain entitlements. On politics, the reality is more sobering: curtailing popular entitlements seems an electoral impossibility. A conservative movement can resist political gravity only so far before being broken as the Federalists and Whigs learned to their peril. Thus, the New Right opts for economic expansion over entitlement reduction, aiming to navigate between fiscal prudence and political survival.

This New Right’s embrace of social conservatism also reflects continuity with the fusionist vision of classical liberalism that once defined American conservatism. What distinguishes the New Right, however, again is its structural focus—this time on cultural institutions—institutions that, since Reagan, have been increasingly dominated by the left. Unlike their predecessors, the political New Right sees these institutions not merely as battlegrounds but as systems requiring reform or replacement. It seeks to break the ideological monopoly of cultural elites by opening up existing institutions or building alternative ones.

The rise of social media has further catalyzed this transformation. In the modern age, digital platforms have become the public square, yet until Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, these platforms disproportionately suppressed right-leaning voices and curtailed legitimate debate. Confronted with this new reality, the New Right has grown more willing to wield government power at least ostensibly to protect free discourse on these mediating institutions, preventing them from becoming tools of ideological suppression.

It is with regard to foreign policy issues that the political New Right appears, at first glance, to diverge most sharply from the traditional American Right. It is less enthusiastic about military interventions abroad and generally more skeptical of internationalism. Yet this perception may reveal more about the exceptional nature of the post-World War II Republican Party than about the New Right itself. Before the mid-twentieth century, the Republican Party maintained a healthy wariness of international entanglements. This skepticism was not merely partisan but deeply rooted in America’s founding principles.

George Washington famously warned against “foreign entanglements,” and John Quincy Adams articulated the quintessential conservative American political posture in global affairs: “Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” The political New Right’s approach to international affairs thus reflects a return to an older tradition—one that prioritizes national sovereignty and prudence over moral crusades and global adventurism.

The more interventionist foreign policy of the Cold War was justified by a singular and existential threat: totalitarian communism’s relentless drive for world domination. That struggle shaped every corner of America’s foreign policy, from military alliances to proxy wars. Today, the geopolitical challenge is fundamentally different. While nations like China, Iran, and Russia are authoritarian and expansionist, their ambitions fall short of global conquest. These powers seek regional dominance, not world hegemony. Still, when their actions directly threaten American interests or its close allies—such as China’s attempts to turn the South China Sea into its private dominion, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, or the Houthi’s efforts to interfere with the freedom of the seas—the political New Right demands a sharp and decisive response, supported by robust military capabilities. It rejects military adventurism but embraces military strength. Unlike the neoconservative commitment to nation-building, the New Right understands the classical liberal truth: governments lack the foresight to reconstruct foreign societies and the steadfastness to see such grand projects through.

The New Right’s departure from free trade similarly reflects a return to older American instincts. The pre-World War II Right was staunchly protectionist, and today’s enthusiasm for tariffs flows from two other premises of the New Right. First, if the United States limits its military interventions to conflicts where vital interests are at stake, economic tools such as tariffs become more central to its foreign policy arsenal. Second, the fiscal realities of New Right governance impose constraints. If personal and corporate taxes are cut while entitlements remain untouched, tariffs provide an alternative revenue stream.

Many Reagan-era conservatives now feel like Federalists in Jacksonian America—without a political party that fully represents them. The disorientation is understandable. But it can be argued that the political New Right confronts a world defined by different challenges—the rise of China, entrenched bureaucracies hostile to conservative governance, and cultural institutions captured by an ideological monoculture.

There is room for vigorous debate about whether the political New Right’s adaptations honor or distort the principles of American classical liberalism and fusionist conservatism. Such debates are both necessary and healthy. Political movements cannot stand still; they must adjust to new circumstances while remaining rooted in enduring principles. For friends of liberty in America as opposed to France, this is a time for careful reflection rather than uncritical celebration or wholesale rejection.

The political New Right’s rise poses essential questions about the future of American conservatism: Can a new emphasis on United States economic independence coexist with classical liberal commitments to free markets and limited government? Can a political focus on maintaining a culture conducive to conservatism remain compatible with pluralism? These are questions worth answering, because the fate of American conservatism—and the classical liberalism it has long upheld—depends on striking the right balance.