Does the New Right Needs Conservative Eclecticism?

Isn't the intellectual vitality and syncretism of the American Right is its great strength?

By Samuel Hammond, tomklingenstein.com (EXCERPT)

In a rousing speech last summer, Vivek Ramaswamy presented the New Right as at a crossroads between two competing visions of American conservatism: “National Libertarianism” or “National Protectionism.”

In his telling, the former is focused on dismantling the administrative state and restoring national greatness through low taxes and regulation, akin to an American Javier Milei.

The latter, in contrast, favors a kind of American Peronism that would harness the administrative state to promote conservative ends, including through the aggressive use of tariffs and industrial policies that go beyond dealing with narrow security threats.

Setting aside the extent to which either of these descriptions are straw-men, my immediate reaction was to ask: why not both?

In a symposium for Modern Age several years ago, I argued that “Conservative Thought Needs a Marginal Revolution.”

By that, I meant conservatives should embrace a pragmatic mixing and combining of ideas from across its factions, rather than insisting on one definition of conservatism to rule them all.

As I wrote at the time,

The emerging conservative realignment won’t have the internal consistency of an Ayn Rand protagonist, but so what?

For conservatism properly understood, that’s a feature not a bug.

Indeed, the intellectual vitality and syncretism of the American Right is its great strength.

Whether you’re a traditionalist, populist, techno-libertarian, barstool conservative, or something completely different, there’s likely a glossy journal of ideas and several podcasts made just for you.

These varied ideologies inevitably create tension and conflict, as recently seen over the issue of skilled immigration and the H-1B visa program.

But rather than evidence of disunity or dysfunction, the Right’s propensity for vigorous and often heated debate is, if anything, core to its current ascendancy.

We live in transitional times…

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