Right-Liberalism Won’t Cut It

“Given the potential for a more populist conservatism that appeals to those seeking to reweave America’s weakened bonds of social and economic mutual loyalty, the right-liberalism of Murray and others is exactly the opposite of what is needed and wanted.”

The American right is experiencing a ferment of ideas and coalitions with the potential to reorder fundamentally the way conservative politics is done in the United States. Or the swirling tumult could be tamed, bought off, and subsumed by the forces of capital and vested business interests that still guide the hand of GOP policymaking toward neoliberal ends. The outcome is uncertain, the tale not yet written. But one can say that things are happening, even if not all of us are liking what we see.

One of those with doubts is British writer and political commentator Douglas Murray. Having appeared on a panel at the NatCon II conference alongside Yoram Hazony, Sohrab Ahmari, and Dave Rubin this past fall in Orlando, Florida, Murray published a recent piece at UnHerd asking “Why is the Right so Unattractive” to so many non-conservative people. Unfortunately, the piece is badly argued and hinges on a misrepresentation. It also demonstrates the fundamental divide between right-liberalism and a more communitarian conservatism.

Murray begins by asking why left-liberals like Bari Weiss and Bill Maher do not want to join the nascent New Right. Given that many left-wingers made the journey over to the Right in the 20th century, chiefly the first generation of the neoconservatives, why, Murray wonders, is this not happening now? After all, those like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter and Gertrude Himmelfarb, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and James Q. Wilson were hardly intellectual slouches, so there must have been something attractive to them in the mid-20th century American right. So what is missing, and what is repulsing those in a similar dissident liberal position from now making the journey?

Referencing a speech made by Patrick Deneen at the same conference, Murray writes that Deneen proclaimed “a lament for the Fifties; for the change in people’s habits of dress, manners and sexual etiquette.” Murray says that he “could not help thinking that here in a nutshell was the main reason why disenchanted liberals like Maher would never in a million years join the American Right.” For Murray, the American right is too focused on illiberal issues relating to reproductive rights (and other red-hot social issues) to attract anyone from across the aisle.