The Liberal Tradition and The New Right
13 Sep 2025
The discussions I see of the growing threat to American democracy are often framed as attacks by the right (GOP, conservatives) against the left (Dems, liberals, progressives). I see this framing as both inaccurate and unhelpful. Here I will offer some history and suggest a different perspective.
For nearly 2 million years (beginning with the origins of humanity), humans existed as hunter-gatherers. Governance in hunter-gatherer society was decentralized (specific to a particular band), egalitarian rather than hierarchical, and relied on informal leadership and consensus forming. Chiefs or permanent leaders and hierarchy were largely absent. Individual autonomy and empathy were key values.
Around 10,000 years BCE the development of agriculture and domestication of animals marked the beginning of the Neolithic Era. Agricultural communities marked by permanent and increasingly dense population centers required increasingly complex societies with more organized systems than was needed with nomadic populations: hierarchical social classes and leaders, shared defense, management of resources with public works, monetary exchange and taxation. and formalization of social norms into laws.
For the next roughly dozen millenia (through the Middle Ages) society and its governance were based on various forms of absolute power and strong hierarchy: religious theocracies or autocratic monarchies where power was justified by inheritance or divine right. Individuals were referred to as subjects rather than citizens and lacked inherent rights or political agency. The value of any individual was defined by their utility to the leader and/or the stability of the regime. Subjects were simply sources of labor, revenue, and military service. Security was dependent on the whims of the ruler. Dissent from the imposed official religious or secular orthodoxy was not tolerated; subjects were expected to be obedient. Truth was defined by myth, magic, mysticism, and religion. Religious persecution and warfare were common.
This changed quite dramatically during the European Enlightenment, sometimes called the Age of Reason (late 1600s to early 1800s) with the birth of what was to become the liberal tradition, a philosophical, social, and political set of beliefs and practices that focused on: (1) individual worth, autonomy, freedoms (conscience, speech, religion) and the universal nature of human rights; (2) empiricism and reason rather than faith or dogma as the source of truth (leading to the scientific method); (3) democratic government based on consent of the governed and featuring the rule of law with separation of powers and a separation of church and state.
Today we are conditioned by recent history and our media to think of politics in terms of conflicts between liberals and conservatives. This is politically and historically inaccurate and quite limiting. The liberal tradition evolved over 2 centuries, giving rise to multiple different but related and overlapping versions. The liberal tradition includes not just FDR's New Deal, but also Buckley-Reagan conservatism and the various flavors of Libertarianism. These disparate cultural, philosophical and political approaches prioritize and interpret their goals differently but share to a significant degree a commitment to the core of the liberal tradition: individual autonomy and freedom, democracy with consent of the governed, human rights, and the rule of law.
The opposite (and enemy) of the liberal tradition is not conservatism. It is despotism or autocracy in its various forms: communism, fascism, theocracy, oligarchy.
The current threat to democracy is not conservatism. It is something that is not new, but is disturbingly ascendent: The New Right.
The New Right is NOT the same as (or even, really, part of) American Conservatism. The New Right is an umbrella term for a collection of factions and philosophies that reject the liberal tradition and its core principles of universal human rights, truth based on empirically derived knowledge, and democracy based on consent of the governed and requiring the rule of law with separation of powers and separation of church and state. The New Right includes (an incomplete list):
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Claremonteans, originalists who revere the Founders and blame liberalism for destroying the ideal society with progressive and constitutional change.
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Post-liberals, a mixed group that believes that liberalism is doomed by its emphasis on individuals and universal human rights because this precludes forming a moral and stable society based on some imposed moral (often religious) orthodoxy.
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National Conservatives, a 'blood and soil' group that believes that America is not founded on a philosophical idea but is the birthright of the white, Christian, European settlers who founded a new nation and are entitled to keep it for themselves.
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A number of other 'single-issue' groups who are strongly opposed to some aspect of the liberal tradition but may not explicitly want to discard all of the liberal tradition but who are willing to destroy it in service of a more narrow goal: racism, antisemitism, traditional gender identity (homophobia, anti-transgenderism, misogyny).
This New Right is not interested in dialogue or compromise. They are fighting a culture war against the liberal tradition that served humanity well enough to become the largest and most productive cultural and political philosophy in human history. They want a cultural and political revolution that replaces principles of universal human rights, individual autonomy and freedoms for all, empirically derived truth, and governance based on consent of the governed and the rule of law with an imposed moral or religious or sectarian orthodoxy in their own image. They worship power rather than reason. They reject empathy and the universally accepted moral precept of The Golden Rule.
Do not expect them to recognize or play by the rules and norms of the American democracy they wish to destroy. Do not surrender in advance.
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