Reagan was the insurgent. Now the New Right is resurrecting the GOP establishment he fought and calling it a revolution. Meanwhile, It calls its conservative critics “neocons” and its political opponents “progressives.” Yet those are the very traditions it draws much of its domestic agenda from. Teddy Roosevelt laid out the Progressive half in his 1910 New Nationalism speech, arguing that private property could be regulated “to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.” The New Right calls the same idea the "common good." Josh Hawley wrote his first book about Roosevelt; just last year he teamed up with Bernie Sanders on interest rate price caps. Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism, called the welfare state consistent with conservatism, wanted it to reinforce conservative virtues, and counted Roosevelt among its heroes. This was the governing tradition movement conservatives fought. They broke with Nixon in July 1971, weeks before he froze wages and prices and imposed a 10% tariff on imports. In 1964, Reagan warned, “A government can't control the economy without controlling people.” He challenged that establishment in 1976 and beat it in 1980. The establishment then spent a generation running on Reagan's name but governing like the men he beat, right through George W. Bush signing Medicare's biggest expansion since its creation. From 30K feet, the New Right's calls to strengthen families and restore marriage sound like traditional conservatism. But the differences emerge when those ambitions become government policy. Last month, the admin drafted a plan to pay eligible married SAHMs from a federal childcare fund. Many panned it as redistribution, and they were right. It would let some families make a choice at the expense of others who can’t make the same one, from single parents who can’t qualify to taxpayers who can’t yet afford a family of their own. Add a new class of claimants to an already stretched fund, and a fixed pot becomes a bigger one Nearly every conservative agrees families matter. But the agreement ends when gov't decides which families get paid. The New Right’s great innovation was changing the battlefield, bringing the neocons’ crusade home and arming it with the progressives’ administrative state.

Trump broke the old conservative intelligentsia’s hold on the right. The rival that filled the vacuum was built on X follower counts — that's where Franco enters the chat. Conservative commentary became a lucrative market for grievance. Audiences sought it out, algorithms amplified outrage, and influencers happily met the demand. But outrage is a much cheaper product than serious analysis. It takes little research and doesn’t require telling the audience anything it doesn’t want to hear. Once follower counts became credentials & cash, dissent got expensive. Crossing the audience meant risking all of that. Those who mastered the rage cycles became the new right X intelligentsia, with book deals and political access to match. One even got a blurb from the now Vice President for a book that calls Franco a great man of history. And there’s an incentive for escalation. When defeating the left becomes the measure of conservatism, even Franco becomes marketable — a guy who crushed the right enemies but ruled with an unchecked power our Founders wrote a Constitution to prevent. Audiences spent a decade rewarding people for knowing who to fight without asking what they intended to conserve. The French Revolution had enemies on the right too. But not all were friends of the American one.