The new right seeks more than electoral success. It wants to reorder borders, family, economy, foreign policy and the state around a culturally defined nation and a more obedient administrative machinery.
The policy agenda of the new right looks varied across countries, but its organising logic is surprisingly consistent. It is built around the belief that politics should restore the primacy of a culturally defined nation, discipline institutions that obstruct that restoration, and redirect the state towards the majority community as the rightful subject of public power. Mark Leonard’s account of the movement describes this as a project in which culture is not one issue among others but the principle that cuts through migration, trade, foreign policy and the state itself. What the new right wants is, therefore, more than a list of policies. It wants a reordering of public life.
| Domain | What the new right wants | How it tries to get it |
|---|---|---|
| Borders & demography | Hard borders and a demographically secure, culturally defined nation | Drastic cuts in immigration, faster deportations, externalised asylum, “national preference” in welfare, pronatalist family policies |
| Culture, speech, religion | Majority tradition restored as the normative centre of public life | Free‑speech campaigns against “censorship”, privileging public Christianity/Judeo‑Christian heritage, anti‑gender and moral legislation |
| Economy & production | National productive sovereignty and protection of strategic sectors and “insiders” | Tariffs, reshoring, local‑content rules, industrial policy, resistance to trade deals seen as hurting farmers/industry |
| Foreign policy & alliances | Civilisational blocs and conditional alliances serving national identity and interest | Recasting NATO/EU commitments, scepticism toward universal norms, preference for looser unions of “sovereign nations” |
| The state & institutions | A strong but politically obedient state aligned with majoritarian cultural project | Project 2025–style plans to “deconstruct” the administrative state, politicise bureaucracy, discipline courts/media/civil service |
| Infrastructure & personnel | Durable control, not just episodic wins | Dense networks of conferences (NatCon), think‑tanks, legal groups, curated personnel lists, activist media and training pipelines |
That reordering begins with borders.
Immigration occupies a central place because it condenses several anxieties into one issue: jobs, wages, housing, crime, religion, schooling and demographic change. Across the United States and Europe, new-right actors present open or relatively open migration regimes as proof that liberal elites value abstract rights, cheap labour and moral performance above the continuity of the nation. Leonard shows how this position is shared across parties that differ in history and style. In practice, the demand is for harder borders, fewer admissions, faster deportations, externalised asylum systems, and priority treatment for citizens in accessing welfare and public goods.
The point is not only simply administrative control but also demographic and cultural control. The National Conservatism Statement of Principles explicitly argues that each nation has the right to maintain its borders and pursue policies that benefit its people.
Traditional Family Values
The same document places the traditional family—defined as a lifelong bond between a man and a woman raising children—at the centre of civilisation and public policy. Immigration restriction and pronatalism, therefore, sit together. One limits perceived external dilution; the other seeks internal renewal. In Hungary, this logic appears in family tax incentives and fertility policy. In the United States and Western Europe, it appears in the fusion of anti-immigration politics with campaigns for family policy, anti-gender legislation and public Christianity.
That cultural framing extends into speech, religion and public morality.
JD Vance’s Munich speech in February 2025 attacked European governments for suppressing dissent, retreating from public concern over migration and eroding what he presented as democratic legitimacy. The speech treated “free speech” less as a neutral constitutional principle than as a political weapon against liberal gatekeepers, media norms and the exclusion of populist forces. This is a recurring move. The new right presents itself as the defender of speech, religion and conscience while seeking to narrow the legitimacy of feminist, queer, secular and cosmopolitan claims in public life. It wants a cultural settlement in which the majority tradition regains institutional preference.
On economics, the new right has moved well beyond the old conservative script of tax cuts, deregulation and global free trade. It still contains business-friendly and libertarian wings, but its centre of energy now lies elsewhere: in economic nationalism. The animating claim is that national independence requires productive capacity at home. Tariffs, industrial policy, local-content rules and strategic protection of agriculture and manufacturing are therefore defended as instruments of sovereignty rather than as merely economic tools. Leonard traces this logic in both the US and Europe, where parties increasingly tie trade policy to cultural and national survival.
This is why the new right speaks of workers and producers with unusual frequency. American Compass argues that conservatism should become “worker-friendly” by abandoning free-market orthodoxy and rebuilding domestic industry. The argument is selective and often contradictory, yet its strategic value is clear. It tells citizens that the nation has an economy of its own and that this economy should serve families, workers and strategic sectors before it serves abstract efficiency. In Europe the same spirit animates hostility to trade deals thought to threaten farmers, scepticism towards Brussels-led regulation when it hurts domestic producers, and support for industrial subsidies framed as national defence by other means.
Foreign policy follows the same principle. The new right does not reject power politics. It rejects liberal universalism as the moral framework for the use of power. It regards the post-Cold War order as a system that demanded military commitments, alliance discipline and economic openness without sufficient regard for the nation’s own cohesion. This is evident in the 2025 US National Security Strategy, which warns that Europe risks “civilisational erasure” and implies that alliance commitments cannot be separated from the domestic cultural order. In Europe, many new-right parties have shifted from leaving the EU to reshaping it from within into a looser arrangement of sovereign states. In both cases, the desired outcome is a world of civilisational blocs and strong nations rather than a universal rules-based order.
The core ambition becomes clearest in their theory of the state. The new right does not want a weak state. It wants a state that is politically obedient, culturally aligned and administratively capable of carrying out a majoritarian programme. That is why the struggle over bureaucracy matters so much to it. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s governing blueprint, openly states that the next conservative administration should move quickly to reshape the executive branch, control personnel, and “deconstruct the administrative state”. Its summary materials frame this as a Day One task tied to restoring the family, defending sovereignty and securing borders.
What that means in practice is not administrative minimalism. Scholars of regulation note that Project 2025 does not merely shrink the state; it reconstructs it in a more centralised and presidential form. Independent agencies lose insulation. The civil service becomes easier to purge and replace with loyalists. The Justice Department’s distance from the presidency is weakened. Public institutions are expected to follow the executive’s political mandate more directly. In Europe, parallel instincts appear in campaigns against public broadcasters, in threats to civil servants thought hostile to nationalist programmes, and in efforts to subordinate courts and universities to the elected majority. The common aim is to remove liberal friction from the machinery of power.
This is why the new right gives such sustained attention to personnel, training and institutional pipelines. Project 2025 combines policy design with databases of vetted staff and detailed transition planning. National conservatism supplies the normative frame. Conferences, media outlets, legal advocacy groups and donor networks supply repetition, discipline and recruitment. The movement understands a simple fact that many of its opponents still resist: electoral victory without institutional occupancy is temporary.
The new right therefore wants more than office. It wants duration: a people reproduced, an economy protected, a state aligned, and a civilisation defended.
It wants duration. It wants borders that define a people, a family policy that reproduces that people, an economy that privileges its producers, a foreign policy that serves its civilisation, and a state that acts with fewer internal restraints on behalf of that settlement. Taken together, this is why Leonard describes the movement as modern rather than nostalgic. It is not trying to relive the past. It is trying to build a successor order with the tools of the present.
Understanding the New Right
- 1. Politics after the “Liberal Moment”
- 2. The global context: looming wars, extraction race, and fragmentation
- 3. Anatomy of the new right: ideas and infrastructure
- 4. What the new right wants ← You are here
- 5. Beyond the West: resonances in Asia and the global South
- 6. Interim reflection: why this project fits this moment
