Conservatism

What Does the New Right Believe?

From trade to migration to personal freedom, the conservatives of the global New Right hold a philosophy incompatible with individualism.

Stephen Davies | 4.9.2026 10:15 AM

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(Illustration: Joanna Andreasson | Photos: iStock)

In every country where the New Right has become a significant force, its foundational issue has been a "thick" notion of national identity. A nation, its partisans argue, is a body of people with a shared transgenerational attachment to a specific territory, a shared language, a shared history, way of life, set of customs, and so on. Which features are considered essential varies, but the worldview is clearly distinct from civic nationalism, which defines a nation as the people living under a common law and system of government in a particular place at a given time.

This thick idea of a people can be exclusionary (in which case it is difficult or impossible for outsiders to be adopted into the nation) or more open to integrating new members over time. What it is not compatible with is radical pluralism or individualism.

The second core idea is the belief that the continued existence of the nation is under existential threat. The threat most often cited is large-scale migration, as in the "Great Replacement" theory. Others include economic globalism, the contemporary media system, and modern technology more generally. The opposition here is not so much to other cultures (with the exception for some of Islam) but to the way modern economic forces and technology move large numbers of people around the world and merge them in large city regions while simultaneously creating a kind of global "interface" or "airport lounge" monoculture. The perceived threat provokes political action, while the imminence and severity (often understood in apocalyptic terms) justify making this the most important and salient political question.

The New Right understands the nation-state as the institutional embodiment of a self-governing people or nation. In a democratic system, that means a commitment to popular sovereignty and majoritarian democracy, as these are the means by which the nation governs itself. That in turn means opposition to two trends that have become ever more prominent since 1945 and particularly since 1989. The first is handing over national sovereignty to supranational bodies, whether through pooling arrangements such as the European Union or by binding international treaties. The second is the practice of constraining political decision making by making it subordinate not only to international laws but to domestic ones, and subjecting those decisions to judicial oversight.

In economics, efficiency and maximizing growth, while important, are subordinate to collective national goals. There is also an emphasis on production rather than consumption as the main goal of policy.

This national political economy is not socialist or egalitarian but also not a free market. The best label for it is national collectivism or neo-mercantilism. This means support for protectionism and for a national industrial policy in which governments direct investment. It also means opposition to the trade agreements—regulatory harmonization deals that took a great deal of regulatory discretion away from national governments—that were popular after 1990, such as the [North American Free Trade Agreement]. There is a particular emphasis on manufacturing and farming, as opposed to globally traded services. There is skepticism or outright hostility toward finance.

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Two things should be noted here. Firstly, this vision is not compatible with the form capitalism has taken since the 1970s and the kind of international rule-governed order created since then. Nor is it compatible with the classical liberal ideal of a global market and trading system in which individuals and companies trade with each other in a way that makes national borders as irrelevant as possible. Both of those require global rules, however generated, and a removal of economic decisions from national governments in the case of actually existing........

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