(FP) Ross Douthat on the midtern elections–How the New Right Failed

But at least those young men had plenty of options for gambling online and buying legal weed. Here we come to the territory where the new right simply failed. Many of its tribunes had promised cultural renewal, a more assertive religious conservatism to counter progressivism’s moral framework, a war on porn and other digital addictions. This was the aspect of the new right that liberals attacked as theocratic or “integralist,” but they didn’t need to worry, because in the second Trump administration it only showed up in social media posts about Reformation Day and St. Michael the Archangel.

Otherwise, the new right in power was a force for libertinism, with corruption in Washington, D.C., going hand in hand with policies that favored vice. The pro-life movement vanished, the quest for pro-family policy was stillborn, and the idea of a new patriotic elite for a new America dissolved into a grifter’s mindset, leering side-eyed at Sydney Sweeney’s bust. Any religious revival in the wider culture probably helped elect religious Democrats, not a sinful-seeming GOP.

Nothing in this sad story means that the new right is simply finished. It’s not like there is some other form of conservatism more attuned to late-2020s reality waiting in the wings.

But the movement will be starting over. It needs leaders who either find a way to separate themselves from the Trump record or else were on the outside all along. It needs to repudiate corruption and stupidity. 

Read it all.

Read @Douthat60 on how the new right failed.https://t.co/io5ZKvZWMU https://t.co/sTh251EKgl

— Oliver Wiseman (@ollywiseman) November 4, 2026