The New Right’s Budding Romance for Neutral Principles

One of the distinguishing features of the New Right in its early twenty first century iteration has been leveling a certain charge against the conservative establishment. Classical-liberalism-inflected conservatism, argued traditionalists, common-good constitutionalists, and others, had become too fixated on neutrality and proceduralism.

The right-liberals were too satisfied with constitutional mechanics and insufficiently concerned with substantive moral goods. The Zombie Reaganites had allegedly stripped conservatism of its capacity to make moral judgments, becoming too libertarian in economics and eventually too insistent on freedom as the essential political principle – freedom, equally and neutrally afforded to conservative Christians and progressive libertines. If speech were free and procedures were followed, everything would be permissible. For that reason, fusionism – the idea that liberty and order are in enduring tension in a properly functioning free republic – was derided by Gladden Pappin as “rote cultural conservatism overridden by libertarian economics.”

This “dead consensus” of liberal proceduralism, critics insisted, was an incomplete politics. A conservatism incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, only between legal and illegal, was inadequate and sowed the seeds of the republic’s demise. What was needed instead was something much more aggressive; perhaps full-on friend-enemy politics, or at least a willingness to name adversaries of the common good and fight them without classical liberalism’s conciliatory instincts. It would naturally be a touch more collectivist, or communitarian, if you prefer, a little less concerned with individual freedom and more focused on using politics to advance the common good. Whether exercises of freedom were legitimate or not would depend on whether they achieved that aim.

The Heritage Foundation is, in many ways, the institutional home of this New Right sensibility. Under Kevin Roberts’s leadership, it positioned itself as the voice of a conservatism unafraid to abandon older pieties in favor of a more combative, moralized, and openly substantive approach to political and cultural conflict. It wasn’t looking to expand the realm of individual and associative freedoms; it was looking to govern in line with its deeply held values. That is not a bad thing. But it does make for powerful irony when you get caught in a difficult spot.

After crackpot podcaster Tucker Carlson invited struggling actor Nick Fuentes (in character as the leader of a movement of basement-dwelling Hitler Youth) to spout off for two hours, Roberts released a short monologue responding to apparent rumors that his institution would cut Carlson off. Among other things, the video appeared to be a weathervane for the future of the New Right — the faction that embraces friend-enemy distinctions and dismisses classical liberalism as too willing to compromise with leftist adversaries.

Carlson’s friendly conversation with Fuentes represented a test: How far could one go courting the most extreme voices claiming affiliation with the right? Heritage, the intellectual hub of muscular right-wing values-driven governance, faced a choice about how to respond. Yet tellingly, Roberts did not reach for the substantive moral vocabulary that the New Right claims to champion, but instead for the very proceduralist language it has long disdained.

“Canceling” Fuentes “is not the answer,” Roberts declared. “When we disagree with a person’s thoughts and opinions, we challenge those ideas and debate.” He promised that “attempts to cancel” Carlson “will fail.” (Put aside the non-sequitur with which the video opened, “Christians can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic,” and the references to the “globalist class” with its “mouthpieces in Washington,” and “bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda.”)

When making a simple moral judgment suddenly became complicated by personal loyalty, Roberts fell back on the familiar justifications of neutrality and process. The phrase “canceling” was a clear sign, especially combined with the refusal to make straightforward substantive distinctions. The conservative movement advocates a set of moral principles that neither Carlson nor Fuentes promote. However, like many aspects of our social and political lives, it’s more complicated. Letting go of someone like Tucker, who had been a dependable if unconventional advocate of conservative causes for decades, isn’t so simple. He now has a large audience of young Americans that seems highly persuadable. Clearly, some personal loyalties played a role. Roberts had also committed Heritage to a sponsorship agreement with Tucker Carlson’s show, which recently ended. Some argue that Heritage was contractually barred from criticizing Tucker. Proceduralism is everywhere.

Cutting through the bravado and putting aside the bizarre script, Roberts’s actual position was neutral – everyone should have a right to express their views freely, regardless of how odious — and procedural, emphasizing that if you don’t like someone’s views, you should debate them. No guidelines delineating the acceptable moral limits were in place. As long as everyone retains their ability to speak, all was as it should be. This is precisely the formulation that New Right intellectuals have spent years attacking when deployed by establishment conservatives.

A substantively conservative response could have gone like this: Nick Fuentes is a Nazi and an unserious person. Tucker Carlson has become unserious too, trafficking in conspiracy theories and anti-American messaging, and we will treat him the same way we treat Hasan Piker, Norman Finkelstein, or any other kook on a soapbox. Their right to speak is beyond debate. It is also beyond dispute. Nobody was asking Heritage to seize Carlson’s microphone or report him to police. The question has always been about judgment — whether Heritage can affirm what it stands for by articulating what it stands against.

The misstep does not mean that the New Right was always lying or is a mere cover for Nazi-washing. One Heritage staffer, granted anonymity, told The Hill: “Nick Fuentes is a disgusting, anti-American, antisemitic loser. He is not a conservative, not America First, and not an ally of President Trump or any conservative organization. In his own words, Nick Fuentes is an ally of Stalin, Hitler, and the Taliban. That is not someone with ideas worthy of debate.” Roberts has been quite clear throughout his public life that he does not share Fuentes’s beliefs, and there’s no reason to doubt him. What’s interesting about the episode is that when push came to shove, even the flagship of the New Right fell prey to Zombie Reaganism. It encountered disordered speech and erred on the side of liberty.  

Why did Roberts reach for that vocabulary? Ironically, because of its moral and substantive core, the one classical-liberalism-inflected conservatism has always possessed. As a double irony, it must be added that those who never strayed from fusionist conservatism would understand just how to articulate principled and distinctly conservative reasons for shunning Fuentes and disregarding Carlson. So if the whole fiasco doesn’t demonstrate that the New Right was a fraud, it does demonstrate its shortcomings.

Carlson has taken upon himself the duty of advancing a political program of global authoritarianism fundamentally incompatible with the liberty that is an essential American value. Fuentes is, though it beggars belief, a popularizer of the same, but with National Socialist characteristics. These are ideologies that Americans should reject because they undermine the core of the American project as embodied in our Constitution.

Nazism is wrong because it does not respect human dignity. Putinism is wrong for the same reason. Throwing dissidents from windows is not the same as industrial mass extermination, but they are wrong as similar matters of kind. They fail to respect freedom of religion, association, and speech, as well as the due process of law and equal protection.  And beneath the political program, such as it is, Carlson and Fuentes have helped construct a culture best described as the opposite of republican virtue. A free republic cannot stand with a populace that is so thoroughly snide, conspiratorial, and driven by grievance. It is inimical to the American principles our constitutional procedures were designed to instantiate and protect.

The classical liberal tradition, properly understood, has never been neutral about such questions. Its procedures are concrete expressions of profound moral commitments. When we speak of constitutional limits on government power, we insist that human beings possess an inherent dignity that precedes state authority. Freedom of religion acknowledges that the individual mind and soul possess a sacred quality that no political power may violate. Equal treatment under law affirms the equal moral worth of every person.

These procedural commitments emerged from centuries of hard-won wisdom about human nature and the nature of political life. They reflect a realistic anthropology: human beings are capable of both nobility and depravity, and any individual given unchecked power will eventually abuse it. In most cases, truth is better left contested than imposed. A political community exists to create conditions for human flourishing, as the New Right is fond of pointing out, but that requires giving ample if not unlimited space for individuals and institutions to pursue their own understanding of the good life.

Here lies right-liberalism’s great underappreciated insight: when values collide in hard cases — loyalty versus principle, order versus freedom, individual dignity versus the common good — leaning toward liberty helps resolve the tension by allowing as many people as possible to coexist peacefully. The New Right's criticism assumes these conflicts demand a strong hand to pick winners and losers. However, governing is difficult and often offers only a limited range of imperfect options. Pluralism provides a good solution—so good, in fact, that it remains intuitive even to those who claim to reject it. People should be free to speak and, in some cases, do things that are bad, but we can still uphold an objective moral order that clearly distinguishes between pro-social and anti-social actions. We can recognize the difference between inciting a coup (criminal), speaking like a Nazi (bad but not criminal), and speaking like a mensch.

This is why liberal proceduralism can condemn the crackpots without hesitation or compromise. They do not present alternative visions of the common good rooted in the American constitutional tradition. They subvert it, offering comprehensive rejections of the moral premises upon which the liberal order rests. They assault the foundational premises of human dignity for which our Constitution stands. Our insistence on neutrality, procedure, and the presumption of freedom represents a substantive moral judgment of the deepest kind, even if it doesn’t scream ‘comprehensive and morally thick system.’

The classical liberal framework clearly explains why Nazis are bad (they deny human dignity), why authoritarianism is evil (it treats individuals as means rather than ends), and why American conservatism must oppose such forces (because preserving anything worth having means protecting the moral foundations of a free society). Fusionist conservatism maintains that individual dignity is the primary principle of good politics, which often translates into liberal pluralism — while also affirming and fostering the virtues needed to sustain a republic through civil society.

When confronted with a hard case, most people reared in culturally liberal America (I don’t mean that as a pejorative) will share Roberts’s instinct to reach for procedural defenses. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we should learn how to do it well.

Tal Fortgang is a Legal Policy Fellow and Advisor to the President at the Manhattan Institute.

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