There was a time when the American right was conservative: appreciative of inherited wisdom, skeptical of rationalism, wary of excessive government power, and against radical change. Exemplified by figures like William Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan, American conservatism is, in the words of The Dispatch's Jonah Goldberg, a political philosophy that defends "the revolutionary ideals of classical liberalism."
The New Right is not interested in defending these distinctively American ideals. Drawing instead on collectivist, nationalist, and even monarchist traditions from continental Europe, this New Right seeks to wield the tools of government to advance its own social, cultural, and religious priorities. For years, the New Right, by its own admission, has rejected the tenets of classical liberalism, including individual liberty, mutual toleration, and limited government. But, following the recent assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, the New Right has doubled down on its authoritarian tendencies by reviving the cultural teachings of Carl Schmitt, one of Nazi Germany's chief legal minds.
The friend-enemy distinction, pioneered by Schmitt in The Concept of the Political (1932), first published as a journal article in 1927, sorts people by collective identities pitted in a struggle for control of the decision-making powers of society. Schmitt, who has been called the "crown jurist of the Third Reich," argued that a political community's ability to govern, or indeed survive at all, depended on a powerful executive wielding the power of the state against those who opposed the people's interests. Liberalism, be it classical or modern, challenged such Manichaean distinctions and restricted the ability of a political community to govern by centralized decree. Schmitt saw rights-based individualism, a preference for private over political decision making, and a legal order rooted in universal rules as sources of social paralysis that impeded decisive action.
