The American New Right Looks Like the European Old Right
When conservatives reject constitutional limits on executive power and foment civil conflict, what exactly are they conserving?
There was a time when the American right was conservative: appreciative of inherited wisdom, skeptical of rationalism, wary of excessive government power, and against radical change. Exemplified by figures like William Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan, American conservatism is, in the words of The Dispatch's Jonah Goldberg, a political philosophy that defends "the revolutionary ideals of classical liberalism."
The New Right is not interested in defending these distinctively American ideals. Drawing instead on collectivist, nationalist, and even monarchist traditions from continental Europe, this New Right seeks to wield the tools of government to advance its own social, cultural, and religious priorities. For years, the New Right, by its own admission, has rejected the tenets of classical liberalism, including individual liberty, mutual toleration, and limited government. But, following the recent assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, the New Right has doubled down on its authoritarian tendencies by reviving the cultural teachings of Carl Schmitt, one of Nazi Germany's chief legal minds.
The friend-enemy distinction, pioneered by Schmitt in The Concept of the Political (1932), first published as a journal article in 1927, sorts people by collective identities pitted in a struggle for control of the decision-making powers of society. Schmitt, who has been called the "crown jurist of the Third Reich," argued that a political community's ability to govern, or indeed survive at all, depended on a powerful executive wielding the power of the state against those who opposed the people's interests. Liberalism, be it classical or modern, challenged such Manichaean distinctions and restricted the ability of a political community to govern by centralized decree. Schmitt saw rights-based individualism, a preference for private over political decision making, and a legal order rooted in universal rules as sources of social paralysis that impeded decisive action.
As a jurist, Schmitt put these principles into action by building the legal arguments for German Chancellor Franz von Papen to rule by emergency decree during the 1932 Prussian coup d'etat. The resulting political settlement weakened the country's constitutional order and centralized power under the chancellor, giving Adolf Hitler all the tools and precedents he needed to establish himself as führer a year later. Schmitt dutifully obliged the Nazi regime as its leading legal philosopher, penning elaborate defenses of the Night of the Long Knives murders and the suspension of the German constitution. In an August 1934 defense of Hitler's actions, "The Führer Protects the Law," Schmitt railed against liberal constitutionalism's inability to "muster the courage to treat mutineers and enemies of the state properly under the law." He argued that only a führerstaat, a leader state, whose führer "creates law by virtue of his leadership…as the supreme judge," possesses "the strength and will to distinguish friend from enemy." Schmitt saw the total state of Nazi Germany and its decisive government action to crush its designated foes as a direct consummation of his theories.
Libertarians have long commented on the authoritarian streak in Schmitt's worldview. Friedrich Hayek would summarize Schmitt's career as "a fight against liberalism in all its forms," culminating in his role as "one of Hitler's chief legal apologists" in the first volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973). Despite this sordid record, Schmitt has undergone a rehabilitation within the New Right, where his theories are regularly invoked to justify aggressive state action against all who are designated as "enemies."
One of the more vocal neo-Schmittians is Auron MacIntyre, podcaster and writer for The Blaze and internet popularizer of postliberalism. MacIntyre has a long-running affinity for Schmitt, describing the friend-enemy distinction as "the true essence of the political." His 2024 book The Total State denounces the classical liberal conception of democracy as America's "founding myth" and turns to Schmitt as the antidote, although he brushes aside Schmitt's Nazi affiliations as "deeply unfortunate." In the wake of Kirk's assassination, MacIntyre's podcast has transformed into a full-fledged Schmitt show.
Examples of the friend-enemy distinction abound. MacIntyre said on September 19 that "companies like Discord need to pay a severe price for going out of their way to allow an organization of terrorist networks on their platform." ISIS propagandized, fundraised, and recruited via Facebook, Twitter, and Google, but the Supreme Court rightly ruled in Twitter v. Taamneh (2023) that the social media companies were not guilty of aiding and abetting. "Social media firms do not owe a duty of care to all potential victims of terrorism even though they knew…that several terrorist organizations were using their platforms to recruit new members," explains University of Florida law professor Jane Bambauer.
Supreme Court precedent notwithstanding, MacIntyre insists that "Action needs to be taken [because] too many people are dead." He says, "We don't have time to hesitate; I do not care about your pearl clutching….A new type of politics is here, and if we ever want to go back to the other style of politics…then we have to stop the people who are trying to shoot guys like Charlie Kirk. And that's going to take some stuff that might make you queasy."
Despite this ominous remark, MacIntyre says he has "plenty of principles [which include] taking care of [his] country and [his] family and [his] community and [his] faith." To defend these principles, MacIntyre says, "we're going to need to make sure the left knows there's a cost for what they've done.…Thousands of people need to go to jail—they need to be bankrupted." Unless MacIntyre believes in punishing the innocent for crimes they did not commit, he's promoting the subversion of principles to maintain principles. He compounds this illogic with the fallacy of misplaced concreteness; "the left" didn't kill Kirk; an evil gunman did.
(MacIntyre does caveat his remarks by saying "there's nothing that [President Donald] Trump can't do under the law that he needs to get done right now." But this is cold comfort because the law can be used to excuse moral atrocities. Schmitt was, after all, a legal theorist and made a habit of defining a supreme executive as the personal embodiment of the law.)
It's unclear to whom this nonspecific plural third person extends—and that's the point. MacIntyre intends to create an us-vs.-them paradigm that subverts America's moral order of mutual respect and reciprocal recognition of rights, replacing it with a friend-enemy paradigm in which even the most outrageous abuses are justified so long as they're done to the "enemy."
This is not idle speculation: The day after Kirk's assassination, MacIntyre posted that "the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy," and liked a comment on the aforequoted video that ominously reads, "Friend/Enemy distinction time." (Per his own admission, libertarians fall squarely in the "enemy" bucket for MacIntyre.)
MacIntyre isn't the only New Right pundit calling for an end to a classically liberal toleration. Curtis Yarvin, the de facto founder of the neo-reactionary movement and one of MacIntyre's intellectual idols, regards the bellicose speech delivered by Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller at Kirk's memorial service as insufficiently incendiary. Yarvin believes "It's not time to create. It's time to destroy" and asks why we can't have "an actual army" instead of a metaphorical one "in each of us." Yarvin credits Schmitt with proving the inadequacy of libertarianism's commitment to non-aggression and the rule of law. MacIntyre, in his 2024 book, also regards Schmitt as having articulated the strongest arguments against classical liberal and libertarian visions for society.
To the rest of the New Right, MacIntyre has emerged as a popularizer of Schmitt, known for adapting his friend-enemy distinction to draw a line against the dual foes of classical liberalism and the progressive left. Christian nationalist writer C. Jay Engel often directs his readers to MacIntyre's writings as a primer for applying Schmitt to the present day. Schmitt also occupies a central position in the worldview of The Martyr Made Podcast host Darryl Cooper, an amateur historian who attained notoriety for calling Winston Churchill the "chief villain of World War II" on The Tucker Carlson Show. Unsurprisingly, Cooper ranks MacIntyre among the leading pundits on the right today, stating that he "sets the tone more than most prime time cable news hosts."
Whether wittingly or subconsciously, the Schmittian friend-enemy distinction has been adopted not only by public intellectuals but also by those in positions of political authority. Vice President J.D. Vance has said repeatedly in the two weeks following Kirk's assassination that political violence is "not a both-sides problem,"and has cherry-picked survey data to argue that liberals justify and celebrate political violence against pundits with whom they disagree. He's even told Americans to snitch on those who celebrate Kirk's murder by reporting them to their employers. Trump, meanwhile, has suggested that TV networks that oppose him should have their broadcast licenses taken away, and his federal regulators have pressured ABC to cancel Jimmy Kimmel's show after the late-night talk host made light of the president's reaction to Kirk's murder.
Less extreme New Right thinkers have also begun to embrace this distinction. Two days after Kirk's assassination, Yoram Hazony, organizer of the National Conservative Conference, advised the Trump administration to "outlaw and destroy Antifa, the Muslim Brotherhood, and similar groups" because there is no "magical path to restoring domestic tranquility in America without the vigorous use of the law and law enforcement." Hazony, to his credit, has condemned Schmitt in the past over the legal theorist's Third Reich connections. More recently, Hazony has taken flak for equivocating about the attraction of racists to the New Right intellectual circles he cultivates. Indeed, MacIntyre's Schmittian sympathies and other bigotries have not precluded him from recurring invitations to speak at Hazony's National Conservatism Conferences.
America's "radical defense of classical liberalism" has made the United States exceptional. With Schmittian philosophy resurgent on the New Right, it's time for conservatives to defend our founding principles from a vicious ideology that seeks to arrogate supreme power to the state and abrogate the natural rights of the individual.