What the Post-Trump Right Will Look Like
Conservative intellectuals will end up focusing on China, the internet and the left.
By Tyler Cowen
Bloomberg Opinion
July 12, 2020
Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of economics at George Mason University and writes for the blog Marginal Revolution. His books include “The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream.”
The upcoming U.S. election raises a question also asked the last time around: What will the intellectual right look like a few years from now? Even if President Donald Trump wins re-election, the jockeying for 2024 will begin almost immediately — and the smartest and best-informed thinkers on the right will have to decide which views and attitudes to emphasize.
Here are a few predictions about what might happen, as distinct from claims about what should happen.
One principle will be to view China as a major threat not only to global liberty but also to long-term U.S. interests. When I speak to younger people on the right, I am struck by how many of them report “becoming a China hawk” as a formative intellectual experience. If you are in your early 20s, your China news feed has been disturbing for some time: the Xinjiang camps, the full takeover of Hong Kong, saber-rattling with Taiwan, the spread of the coronavirus. The thrill of China’s liberalization, and the prospect of its further opening to the world, was not something you experienced or expected.
Yet I do not see people converging on any particular solutions to the China problem. It will suffice to say, “Something must be done.”
Contrast this burgeoning hawkish view of China with more left-wing attitudes, which see the American state and American heritage itself as more significant threats to liberty, most of all to American Blacks. By focusing on China as a threat, the new American right is downgrading these domestic worries, implicitly or explicitly, and making a broader statement that America still exemplifies the ideals of liberty.
Another view that will characterize the right is the idea that the internet as a communications medium is OK, perhaps even a positive force for good. Of course that is what much of the left believed when Barack Obama was president, but many left intellectuals have since turned against social media, most of all Facebook and YouTube.
The calculus here is not hard to understand. Social media helped Trump get elected (to the shock of many), and the most prestigious media outlets, such as the New York Times, stand to the left of the American public. Aside from Twitter, which tends to be left-wing, social media generally represent and amplify a broad cross-section of what the American public believes. So the left will tend to see social media as a corruption of popular opinion, while the right will view it as a corrective to elite opinion.
I don’t think we have quite arrived at this point, as many segments of the right are still suspicious of the high proportion of left-leaning employees at technology companies. But the moment will eventually arrive. The import of this issue will grow as the reach of the internet spreads.
Last and perhaps most significant, the intellectual right will dislike the left. It pretty much does already, but the antagonism will grow. Opposition to political correctness and cancel culture, at least in their left-wing versions, will become the most important defining view. As my colleague Bryan Caplan succinctly put it four years ago: “Leftists are anti-market. … Rightists are anti-leftist.”
The intensity of this dislike will mean that, within right-wing circles, free speech will prosper. As long as you take care to signal your dislike of the left, you will be allowed to hold many other heterodox views without being purged or penalized.
It is striking what does not make my list. Social conservatism animates many voters on the right, but it is less likely to influence the relatively elite right-wing intellectuals.
Libertarian thought was a major influence on the American right starting in the 1970s and running through the Tea Party movement, and there are significant libertarian strands running through the points listed above. But libertarianism as a comprehensive approach to policy faded with the onset of the financial crisis and the pandemic.
I also don’t see “Sam’s Club Republicanism,” the economic populism promoted by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, as being ideologically animating. A future Republican Party may well present and even enact such policies to help working-class voters, and that would count as a significant triumph. But such policies will not define the right or its intellectuals.
Similarly, I don’t see communitarianism coming back as a core right-wing intellectual view, even though Americans will practice community successfully at many levels.
In the coming years, three things will dominate the attention of the intellectual right: the main international rival (China), the main domestic rival (the left), and the main thing they stare at all day long (the internet). That bundle of concerns may not be terribly surprising. All the same, it would represent a true break from the Reaganite and Trumpian ideology of the present and recent past.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
Tyler Cowen at tcowen2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Michael Newman at mnewman43@bloomberg.net
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