This New Right youth movement has so far produced little beyond warmed-over surliness and bombastic triumphalism that mimics the president’s exhausted affect.
After Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts scolded the “venomous coalition” of conservatives who recoiled from Tucker Carlson and the cavalcade of bigots he so often features, but before Roberts’s organization melted down like a Soviet reactor, Heritage’s president tried to mollify his critics with an act of human sacrifice.
With Roberts’s scandalizing remarks inflaming passions on the right, he revealed that his chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus, had been reassigned to a less visible post within Heritage. Within a week of his humiliation, Neuhaus resigned. Still, Heritage’s spokespeople insisted there was no bad blood and that Neuhaus would doubtlessly “serve the movement in another capacity.”
Neuhaus resurfaced this week as the head of a new political organization, American Ascent. Its mission statement, according to Politico, is to “replace the outgoing generation of politicians with a younger crop of America First-aligned lawmakers,” and it counts among its “allies” MAGA-aligned outfits like Turning Point Action and figures as prominent as the vice president.
This New Right youth movement has so far produced little beyond warmed-over surliness and bombastic triumphalism that mimics the president’s exhausted affect.
“For too long,” Neuhaus declared, “the Republican Party has relied on rerunning candidates over and over again.” That’s an oddly hostile way to describe incumbency. Neuhaus claims the 2026 midterm results show voters want new blood, but reasonable observers might expect at least one Democrat to have lost their reelection bids to a relatively inchoate anti-incumbent sentiment. That voters spared Democrats complicates Neuhaus’s narrative, so he’s endorsing a different set of facts.
Politico’s piece is replete with quotes that are indicative of the self-radicalizing solipsism that became a feedback loop in the Trump era. For example, persuasion is a “suckers’ game,” in Claremont Institute board member Thomas Klingenstein’s words. “America needs statesmen who understand we are fighting against an enemy that wants to destroy us,” he said of the Democrats.
But it was one-time RFK Jr. aide and incoming American Ascent Vice President Jackson Hines who managed to produce the most redoubtable quote in a report glutted with them. “We watched a complete rebuke of the type of Republicans that were in Congress,” he told Politico. “Old ideas are for old people.”
What a rare expression of profound ignorance.
These remarks present two equally mystifying delusions. The first is that the New Right is operating under the misconception that top-down statism and social engineering are new ideas. They’re not. The second and far more disquieting misapprehension to which Hines is apparently beholden is that the wisdom of the ancients is a spent and disposable commodity.
This is, of course, another rear-guard action designed to remind conventional conservatives that their time is over — an action that would not be necessary if their time were, in fact, over. It comes as a new audience tunes in to their critique of the GOP in the Trump era as a party beholden not to timeless, enduring principles but to the whims of one uniquely inconstant man. Their argument isn’t purely philosophical, either. A fixed ideology is a practical tool. It’s replicable, and candidates can articulate it without checking in with the White House to see whether a social media post invalidated this or the other ageless principle overnight.
But philosophy matters, too. Sure, the primacy of the individual, the virtues of liberty, and the maximally beneficial theory of social organization around limited constitutional government and the rule of law are “old” ideas. They also have not been improved upon over the centuries since the American Founding, in which humanity experimented with revolutions that sought to alter not just systems of government but human nature itself. Likewise, “old” ideas like moral seriousness and personal responsibility, which offer their adherents only the promise of opportunity commensurate with one’s merit and labor, are a hard sell when the other guy is promising utopia. But the old virtues have the advantage of being realizable in a just society that does not privilege accidents of birth, class distinctions, and ideological purity.
One way to read Hines’s comments is that they are a particularly vapid but otherwise unremarkable offering unto the cult of youth. It’s not the first time we’ve heard aspiring political organizers flatter the next generation’s benighted pretensions. But those who fancy themselves mentors fail our young people when they assure them that the olds have nothing to offer. The young people who want to believe them are doomed to navigate life unmoored from anything durable, groping for meaning as shipwreck victims would grasp at flotsam.
Our young people are getting bad advice.