By The Free Press | Created at 2025-03-31 18:01:39 | Updated at 2025-04-04 00:43:50
3 days ago
There’s a cohort of writers remaking liberal politics from the ashes of wokism, and they haven’t quite been named yet, but sometimes they’re called The Abundance Bros. Sometimes the New Liberals. They have started gathering and holding the absolute dorkiest-looking meetups. And I am completely, profoundly, abundantly in love.
They are technocrats, meritocrats, pragmatists, get-’er-done-’ers. They want a better, more fair society, but they do not think diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings or lighting billions on fire or banning privately owned property will get us there. This has made them the target of much progressive ire. You might call them old-school Dems. Or Republicans of the Jeb! variety.
Today’s piece is from one of my New Libs: Noah Smith. Noah is someone I hope we publish many more times, but until we can afford him, please subscribe to his excellent site. What you’ll read here is Noah’s analysis of the New Right, a nascent political movement that is to the right of Donald Trump. We’ll be covering the exuberant, wild, increasingly powerful New Right from many angles in the coming months, as it launches from podcasts and blogs into the American mainstream. — Nellie Bowles
“Now we are not outnumbered! Now WE have an army!” —Thorin, The Hobbit
Most of my pieces try to explain the facts of the world. Today I’m going to try to explain an ideology.
You can’t really understand policymaking without ideology. This is something most commentators intuitively grasp, but many academics don’t. If you sold tax cuts in 1981 as “Keynesian demand stimulus,” you wouldn’t have gotten anywhere, but “supply-side” arguments won the day. Ideology is the way most leaders, advisers, and commentators organize their thinking about policy; it serves as a coordination mechanism to make sure that a bunch of people are basically on the same page about what they ought to do.
Here’s an example. In the recent Signal group-chat incident, J.D. Vance seemed obsessed with the idea of not helping Europe:
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