What the New Right Actually Believes: Identity, Sovereignty and the Political Realignment

The New Right is a broad, transnational constellation of parties and movements that share a core set of ideas about national identity, sovereignty, economics and culture. While national contexts differ, the movement is unified by a set of consistent themes: a "thick" conception of nationhood, a sense that the nation is under existential threat, and a preference for majoritarian decision-making and a national political economy.

A "Thick" National Identity

The New Right defines the nation not primarily as a legal-political unit but as a community bound by shared descent, language, history, customs and a transgenerational attachment to territory. This conception of identity is collective and inherited rather than voluntary or purely civic. It may be exclusionary — making outsider integration difficult — or selectively open to gradual assimilation, but it rejects radical pluralism and atomized individualism.

Perceived Existential Threats

Adherents argue the nation faces existential threats that justify elevating national survival above other policy goals. The most commonly cited threats are large-scale migration (framed by some as a demographic replacement), economic globalism, and modern technologies and media that foster cultural homogenization. These perceived dangers are often described in urgent terms and serve to mobilize political support.

Sovereignty, Institutions and Democracy

The New Right treats the nation-state as the institutional expression of a self-governing people. In practice this means strong support for popular sovereignty and majoritarian democracy, and opposition to ceding authority to supranational bodies (for example, pooled sovereignty arrangements like the EU) or to judicial or international constraints on domestic policy.

Economics: Neo‑Mercantilism and National Collectivism

Economic goals are subordinated to collective national objectives. The New Right favors protectionism, state-led industrial policy, and policies that privilege manufacturing and agriculture over tradeable global services. This program—often called national collectivism or neo-mercantilism—rejects both laissez-faire global capitalism and classical liberalism’s border‑blurring market ideal. Finance and certain globalized sectors are treated with skepticism or hostility.

Immigration, Multiculturalism and the Welfare State

The movement’s most visible policy is opposition to large-scale immigration, motivated primarily by demographic and identity concerns rather than only by economic arguments. Multiculturalism is rejected when it threatens the dominance of the host national culture. At the same time, many New Right actors strongly support the welfare state — but argue that social benefits should be restricted to members of the national community as they define it.

Foreign Policy: Realism and Multipolarity

Historically skeptical of U.S. neoconservative nation‑building, many New Right parties favor a realist foreign policy and a multipolar world of competing powers. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has fractured earlier pro‑Russia sympathies in some parties, producing both pro‑Ukraine realignments and continued pro‑Russian stances in others, depending on national history and strategic position.

Culture, Family and Anti‑Wokeness

Cultural policy centers on preserving and transmitting a nation’s historical culture. Opposition to "wokeness" and left‑wing identity politics is widespread; the New Right advances its own identity politics rooted in presumed natural or inherited traits (birthplace, family, language, religion, biological sex). The family is valorized as the primary vehicle for transmitting national values, often accompanied by pronatalist policies and support for traditional gender roles.

The Professional‑Managerial "Enemy Class"

Many New Right movements identify a professional‑managerial class — officials, senior managers, lawyers, some media and NGO professionals — as an entrenched elite that promotes cosmopolitan or globalist values. Political programs often call for institutional reform to reduce the influence of this class and reassert majoritarian control over administrative and cultural institutions.

Electoral Geography and Social Base

Support tends to concentrate in rural areas, small towns, former industrial regions and among groups less integrated into globally traded service economies. Metropolitan, globally connected centers and university towns are the primary bastions of opposition. The New Right draws support across income groups, with notable gains among lower‑income voters.

Potential Rivals and Future Alignments

Immediate opponents are defenders of the technocratic neoliberal order. Possible challengers include radical-left globalists who share critiques of elites but favor cosmopolitan solutions, a revived working‑class left that accepts cultural conservatism, or a reinvigorated classical liberal cosmopolitanism that defends pluralism, migration and decentralized, pro‑market institutions without the technocratic neoliberalism of the post‑1990 era.

Conclusion

The New Right combines a powerful cultural and identity politics with a distinct economic program and a claim to represent the national community against perceived elite or globalizing forces. Whether it becomes one pole of a durable political realignment depends on how rival forces—especially a renewed liberal cosmopolitanism or left globalism—respond to the movement’s core questions about identity, sovereignty and the distributional consequences of globalization.

Source: Adapted from The Great Realignment: Why the New Right Is Here To Stay (Polity). Originally appeared on Reason.com.