Nate, congratulations on your tremendously interesting New York Times piece on the new, secular Right. I agree with your fundamental premise that the axis of the culture war has shifted away from sexual morality per se to issues of national identity. I offer a few additional thoughts for discussion and perhaps clarity, though.
One is that it’s possible to draw overly sharp distinctions here. For instance, Phyllis Schlafly, whom you note as an exemplar of the old, more religiously oriented social conservatism, would presumably be largely comfortable with today’s less religiously social conservatism. She hated elites, free trade, open borders, and was always up for a fight over the direction of public schools. Indeed, in important respects, she can be seen as an old New Right forerunner of the new New Right.
Also, evangelicals remain absolutely essential to the conservative coalition. Donald Trump wouldn’t have gotten elected without them in 2016 (and he knew it), and he wouldn’t have come close without them in 2022. Glenn Youngkin benefited from record evangelical turnout.
Donald Trump blew up a lot of assumptions in winning the Republican nomination in 2016, but he confirmed the core importance of the single most important issue to social conservatives — abortion. He could stray on a lot of other issues, but if he had strayed on this one, there’s no way he would have won the nomination.
Another complication is that some of the architects of the main new post-Trump intellectual current, national conservatism, want to return to the old religiously oriented social-conservative issues and believe that they weren’t fought hard enough, or at all, the first time around.
Then there’s the question of winning. I think the fight against CRT has been extremely important — credit Christopher Rufo and Tucker Carlson with catalyzing it. And I’ve been heartened by the incredible grassroots ferment and organizing around this issue. But we shouldn’t exaggerate to what extent this is a fight that only the new New Right would have taken on — any conservative of any stripe would have been on the ramparts of this battle any time over the past 60 years. Bill Bennett and Lynne Cheney, among many others, did engage in the precursors to this fight, as did our own stalwart Stanley Kurtz (see his war on the biased AP history standards, for instance).
And we shouldn’t exaggerate what has been accomplished here. The fact that we are now in a position of fighting a battle over whether or not racialism will be taught in the public schools isn’t a sign of tremendous strength. In fact, it’s more a sign of how much the culture has continued to slip away from us.
An analogy might be if ten years from now conservatives organized to defeat an initiative to mandate that every public-school student in America be referred to by the pronoun “ze.”
One reaction might be, “Wow! We’re finally winning! Our forebears never thought to fight the battle against mandatory gender-neutral pronouns.” A more appropriate reaction from the perspective of 2022 would be, “Dear God. How is it possible that things got so bad that the conservatives of the future considered that a resounding victory?”
To use Phyllis Schlafly as an example again, the latter would surely be her attitude to our current victories against CRT and some of the transgender excesses. She, by the way, was in no way a loser. No, she didn’t reverse a massive cultural tide toward more permissiveness. But she won on the ERA, forced busing, creating space for homeschooling, unilateral disarmament, and common core.
Anyway, all of this to say is that there’s much to chew on in your very well done, thought-provoking piece.