ABSTRACT
Very little about the New Right’s economic strategy is new. It restates the enduring catechism of one traditional wing of the Right, which holds that all economic progress depends ultimately on the freedom of private enterprises to seek maximum profitability. The Great Depression also teaches important lessons about the economic thinking of another faction of the Right—referred to as the state capitalist Right—with a view that has been important in the twentieth century. Republican President Richard Nixon had to declare his conversion to Keynesian economics. The dominant discourse in the United States and across the world dismissed the policy implications of Milton Friedman’s neoclassical economics—dismantling state interventions in the economy—as dangerously impractical and misguided. The fall and rise of the Liberal Right as a set of economic theories and policy prescriptions closely matched the fall and rise of the private form of capitalism.
