Around lunchtime on Tuesday, the former Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, trailed by a phalanx of aides, stepped out of the sun on the plaza outside Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum, where the Republican National Convention is being held, and sat down at a sports pub named the New Fashioned. The evening before, the Ohio senator J. D. Vance, who was a classmate of Ramaswamy’s at Yale Law School, had been formally nominated as Donald Trump’s running mate, and all the talk around the Convention was about the ascent of the so-called New Right, the cohort of Republican intellectuals, operatives, and politicians who have been working to transform the basic ingredients of Trumpian nationalism into a coherent ideology—a group that includes both Vance and Ramaswamy. A prominent New Right policy thinker, after pointing out that he and others had spent a decade trying to move from the fringes of the Party, said, “I mean, it’s amazing!” One longtime Republican told me that he’d listened to a podcast on the New Right on his morning run, to try to get up to speed. Ramaswamy, for his part, was eager to talk about the New Right’s central tension: “The single most important topic for the next four years of the conservative movement is the distinction between the national protectionists and the national libertarians, both of whom reject the neoliberal consensus.”
Outside, the far-right millennial operative and media personality Charlie Kirk was interviewing Ben Carson, an improbable clash of Republican generations. Inside, digging into lunch, Ramaswamy spooled out his theory. What members of the New Right shared, he said, was an opposition to what Ramaswamy called the “neoliberal consensus” that had promoted immigration, military support for foreign allies and democracies, pro-corporate economics, and free trade. This movement, he went on, rejected “growth for its own sake, economic growth at the expense of national identity, national security.”
Ramaswamy cuts a distinctive figure—a slim, fast-walking, thirty-eight-year-old biotech millionaire with a high forehead and a widow’s-peak pompadour. In person, he was less showy and more down-to-earth than he’d been on the stump, an entrepreneur with a wonkish side, but he also displayed a tendency of up-and-coming élites from time immemorial to ambitiously carve up the future. Vance, he said, embodied the national-protectionist outlook—committed to a retreat from international trade in favor of a domestic reindustrialization program, and to a weaponization of the federal government. (In 2021, Vance had called for a “de-Baathification program” within the U.S. bureaucracy, saying that conservatives should fire “every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our own people.”) Vance has also supported populist initiatives in the Senate, such as reductions in the price of insulin and cuts to the pay of C.E.O.s, and has advocated for a stringent social conservatism.
Ramaswamy positioned himself as the representative of the New Right’s libertarian wing. There was room within America First, he thought, for a trade break from China that stopped short of a full retreat from the international system, and for a smaller federal bureaucracy instead of a weaponized one. “I do not want to replace a left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state,” Ramaswamy said. “I want to shut down the nanny state.” Trump, he went on, shared elements of both visions. The former President was more in Vance’s camp on trade and more in Ramaswamy’s on government. “Drain the swamp is the national-libertarian,” Ramaswamy told me.
Carson stopped by the table, and he and Ramaswamy briefly chatted. I asked Ramaswamy which coalitions were behind each of these factions, and he said that it was too early to say. “This is very nascent, very bleeding edge,” he said. It was still a debate among élites. No wonder the New Right has clung so closely to Trump. He has the legions. They are theorists in search of an army.
The Republican Party has lost the popular vote in six of the past seven elections, but as delegates gathered in Milwaukee this week they seemed confident that they would win this one, so complete has been Joe Biden’s crisis. The rolling protests and counter-protests outside the hall, and the furious fights between anti- and pro-Trump factions inside of it, both of which characterized the Republican Convention in Cleveland in 2016, were entirely gone. I left Ramaswamy and milled through the crowd in the plaza. Reporters wearing yellow lanyards chatted amicably with delegates, who wore red lanyards. Games of cornhole were in progress despite the midday heat. The ominous atmosphere of Trump’s first Convention had given way to the late-middle-aged day-drunk familiarity of a rich beach town. This was happy MAGA.
Any discernible notes of tension at this Convention have tended to include an element of generational conflict: Mitch McConnell, the Party’s eighty-two-year-old leader in the Senate, was booed when he spoke on Monday. Matt Gaetz, the bratty, forty-two-year-old, ultra-right Florida congressman, crashed a CNN interview with the recently deposed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who had no speaking slot on the Convention stage—his time had passed. “What night are you speaking?” Gaetz shouted. When Ramaswamy addressed the Convention, the Never Trump conservative Jonah Goldberg disparaged him on CNN: “I don’t believe his sincerity on anything. But he’s very good at telling people who want to like him what they want to hear. And he’s another one of these younger guys who is a very old person’s idea of what they want young people to be like.” Perhaps that was a good read on the New Right—that they are less of a mass movement than an effort to try to solve an aging party’s enduring problem of how to imagine a future.
One reason this brainy-sounding rhetoric about ending neoliberalism has appealed to rank-and-file Republicans is that most of its proponents have paired it with an exacting social conservatism. Vance, for instance, implied in a 2021 interview that victims of rape and incest should be required to carry pregnancies to term, but he has softened his position more recently to match Trump’s. Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri whose politics are similar to Vance’s, told me that Republicans needed to shed their affiliation with corporate interests and Wall Street—“I mean, there’s just no future there,” he said—but he still maintained that religious voters are the “true base” of the Party. Working-class voters, he went on, whether or not they go to church, consider themselves religious and “associate religion with a form of nationalism. It’s sort of, like, ‘America is a country blessed by God.’ ”
Outside of the Convention zone, Milwaukee can seem eerily vacant. On Tuesday afternoon, I sat down in the empty courtyard of an insurance company’s complex and spoke with Elbridge Colby, a defense official in the Trump Administration and a prominent China hawk, who had just finished a panel inside. (Earlier this year, Politico had named him one of the two likeliest selections as Trump’s next national-security adviser.) The week before the Convention, Colby had addressed the New Right at the National Conservatism Conference, an annual gathering that attracts the anti-internationalist, anti-immigrant, and anti-corporate wing of the Republican Party. There were plenty of interventionist foreign-policy thinkers still active on the right, he told me, but there were also signs that neoconservatives might not dominate the Republican donor class for much longer. That same day, the Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk, who reportedly had urged Trump to pick Vance, planned to give forty-five million dollars per month to a pro-Trump super PAC. (On X, Musk called the article “FAKE GNUS.”) “There is a spectrum,” Colby said, “but I do think it is moving our way.”
Is it? Trump is a variable and dissolute figure. The day after he picked Vance for Vice-President, triggering a cascade of stories about the financial industry’s panic over a populist threat, Bloomberg published an interview with the former President in which he mused about picking the JPMorgan Chase C.E.O., Jamie Dimon, as his Treasury Secretary. Trump also reportedly intervened, against the wishes of religious conservatives, to remove from the Party platform a plank calling for a federal bill banning abortion. Hawley told me that decision “frankly mystifies me. I think it’s a mistake.” But when I asked Hawley which policies he might expect to be addressed first, if Republicans won full control of the government in November, he mentioned expanding energy production and securing the border. That didn’t sound like much of a break with the Party’s traditional priorities, but the senator said, “Let me just push back—tariffs, too.” Even on foreign policy, the revolution wasn’t immediately obvious. Just a few hours after I met with Colby on Tuesday, Nikki Haley was at the lectern in the convention hall saying that the source of all the problems in the Middle East can be “laid at the feet of Iran.” The New Right policy thinker had told me, “I don’t know anyone under the age of thirty who doesn’t treat the neocons with total scorn.” But it didn’t exactly seem like neoconservatism was dead.
For months, the Democrats have drawn attention to Project 2025, a nine-hundred-page document, compiled by a constellation of conservative groups, detailing a full-scale war on the bureaucracy which would follow a Trump victory, along with a list of candidates for a staggering array of posts who could be counted on to erode the government from within. (Trump has recently disavowed Project 2025.) Oren Cass, the founder and chief economist of the think tank American Compass, which promotes a retreat from neoliberal economics and which advised on the project, told me, “I could give a list of people for every single Cabinet position who I think would be great.” He added, “I could give you a list of people for every position who are plausible choices and very kind of normie, Paul Ryan-style Republicans. And I could give you a list of people who are, like, clearly unqualified, but also, for various reasons, plausible choices. And the reality is that the actual final Cabinet is going to be some combination of people from those three lists.” Cass said that, when Trump won the 2016 election, the G.O.P. had been like the dog that caught the car; now the Party was somewhat better prepared. But, still, it was Trump. Really, who knew?
Cass himself had once been the domestic-policy director for Mitt Romney’s 2012 Presidential campaign, which, he later said, “opened his eyes to the bankruptcy of market fundamentalism,” as New York magazine put it. (On Tuesday, Dylan Matthews, a senior correspondent for Vox who writes about economic policy, posted on X, “It’s 2000. There’s a new kind of conservative in town. ‘Compassionate conservatives’ are rejecting free-market orthodoxy. It’s 2013. There’s a new kind of conservative in town. ‘Reform conservatives’ are rejecting free-market orthodoxy. It’s 2024 . . .”) In other words, these ideas have been kicking around for a while. But that makes it all the more remarkable that their breakthrough into the mainstream has come with Trump, since the New Right’s leading politicians have also adopted Trump’s election denialism, his disinterest in the ideal of democracy, and his cruelty toward minorities. Hawley might have been in Vance’s spot had he not been caught on camera first raising his fist in support of demonstrators outside of the Capitol on January 6th and then scampering away from the mob once its members had breached the building.
A central irony of the New Right is that it is a campaign to remake conservatism for the working class undertaken by a tiny group of people who are obviously élites—an astonishing number of whom (Vance, Hawley, Ramaswamy, and Colby among them) graduated from Yale Law School, in the late two-thousands and early twenty-tens. Their success has so far hinged on how effectively they can capture the enthusiasm of other élites. Of course, this makes the fate of the New Right dependent upon the personal ambitions and political choices made by a very small number of individuals, one of whom is now running for Vice-President. Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist and Manhattan Institute fellow who was central to the campaigns against diversity-equity-and-inclusion programs and critical race theory, told me, of Vance, “What’s exciting about it to me is J.D. is still thinking, still learning, still positioning, and, like everyone in our generation, we’re still trying to arrive at a crystallized form of what our politics will be.”
Vance is not yet an especially compelling stump speaker. As he introduced himself at the Convention on Wednesday night, there was an asynchronicity in his interactions with the audience. He would try to make a serious point, and attendees would erupt into a football cheer; when Vance tried to give the crowd what they wanted to hear—insisting, for instance, that Trump had run for office, enduring “abuse, slander, and persecution,” because “he loves this country”—the response was polite applause. All day, the crowd had been getting revved up: the lusty cheers earlier that evening for Peter Navarro, who had recently finished a prison sentence, for contempt of Congress related to a January 6th investigation, were far louder than those for the Vice-Presidential nominee. Vance was quieter and more halting, but he was also making an unusual kind of appeal, based on his disputes with others in the room. “I think our disagreements actually make us stronger,” Vance said. His message to Americans, he went on, was that the country should be governed by “a party that is unafraid to debate ideas and come to the best solution.”
There was one moving moment in Vance’s address, when he introduced his teary-eyed mother, “ten years clear and sober,” and a funny one, when he recalled discovering that his grandmother had kept nineteen loaded handguns in various locations throughout her house, so as always to be in reach of one in case of an intruder. More important was a generational riff. “When I was in the fourth grade, a career politician by the name of Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico,” Vance said. “When I was a sophomore in high school, that same career politician named Joe Biden gave China a sweetheart trade deal that destroyed even more good American middle-class manufacturing jobs. When I was a senior in high school, that same Joe Biden supported the disastrous invasion of Iraq, and at each step of the way, in small towns like mine, in Ohio, or next door in Pennsylvania and Michigan, in other states across our country, jobs were sent overseas, and our children were sent to war.” This history, of élite failure and working-class suffering, has been the one told by liberals and progressives; reversing the trend has been central to the policy initiatives and identity of the Democratic Party since the Iraq invasion. The story is true, Vance was saying, but the right has a claim on it, too.
Not everything Vance said landed so smoothly or concisely. Implausibly, he tried to blame the increase in housing prices, at least in part, on rising levels of illegal immigration. When he attempted to invoke the experience of actual working-class Americans, he seemed to be describing political constructions rather than actual people: “the factory worker in Wisconsin who makes things with their hands and is proud of American craftsmanship.” An effective liberal political movement would note the New Right’s entanglement with a regressive social agenda, the compromises it has made with Trump, and its commitment to voting against working-class interests despite the rhetoric. (The A.F.L.-C.I.O., for instance, has scored Vance’s 2023 voting record at zero per cent.) But, given Biden’s struggles, there is no such effective movement right now. Vance had entered the hall to “America First,” by Merle Haggard, an anti-Iraq War ballad, and he had exited to Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop”—Bill Clinton’s campaign song. That Vance had co-opted the Democrats’ music was a hard-to-miss suggestion of what he and his cohort are up to, and a signal, perhaps, of the depth of the political threat. ♦
