How Manly Is the New Right Man?

August 1st, 2023

One of the few joys of my inbox is the latest missive from Jonah Goldberg.

In his most recent piece, Goldberg takes on the New Right Man, who “presupposes that everyone who likes capitalism and limited government is somehow to his left—which makes it fine to call them cowards and eunuchs … The irony here is that less than a generation ago, the idea that you could adopt liberal (i.e. statist) means for conservative ends was precisely the sort of idea that aroused so much condemnation of ‘big government’ and ‘compassionate’ conservatism from the right.”

Goldberg discusses the old-is-new again progressivism of Teddy Roosevelt seeping back into the Republican mainstream. Sen. Josh Hawley is one who drapes himself in the mantle of TR. Not to be bound by old conventions like limited government, Hawley proposes massive increases in the funding and powers of the Federal Trade Commission, while outlawing all large mergers and acquisitions completely.

Now Sen. Lindsey Graham has joined with Sen. Elizabeth Warren to control the internet. Graham would institute a new agency and regulator that would purportedly give Americans control over their personal data. While giving Mark Zuckerberg a regulator would give some conservatives emotional satisfaction, it comes at the cost of supercharging government’s control of the market, the internet and speech itself.

It would be a tragedy if the radical, Frankfurt school of total government control were to be enabled by conservatives who’ve forgotten the timeless principles of free markets, limited government, and the Bill of Rights. As Jonah Goldberg notes, these old Republican principles “were, axiomatically, timelessly correct and therefore timelessly worth fighting for.” For the New Right, though, “it’s cowardly to keep fighting for them when the new priority is to fight for power as its own reward. Crushing your enemies—not persuading them—is another booby prize.”

Thus, this regressive, intellectual spiral twists principled conservatives into witless tools of progressiveness. It gives us ridiculous spectacles like Sen. Hawley fist-bumping his way up his San Juan Hill while hawking his book, “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.”

How’s this for masculine: Perhaps one way to assert manhood would be to quit allowing oneself to be used as a handmaiden of the Left.