The NextRight

The NextRight is a website, created by Soren Dayton, Jon Henke and Patrick Ruffini, "for wired activists to build a new Republican Party and conservative movement." It considers the current U.S. Republican Party and many American conservative groups dysfunctional, and wants to create a viable political alternative.


 * Dayton: "My sense is that our politics, the conservative movement, and the Republican Party is at a transitional point. Mike Huckabee’s campaign was basically correct that the Reagan coalition was over. Patrick had noticed that Bush had run in 2000 on a somewhat different agenda than Reagan’s, so this is not that surprising a statement … unless you are operating in the intellectually atrophied confines of the Beltway. Conservative interest groups have become profoundly transactional and trivial in scope. In any case, the Republican Party needs to change. Some of these demands are generational. Some of it is the catastrophe of the old business model. Some of it is demographic, although Barack Obama and his version of liberalism seem determined to give us an assist in the fall."
 * Henke: "In many ways, the Right has lost its logic. When tax rates were up to 70%, and the unintended consequences of the New Deal, Great Society programs and other social engineering policies were wreaking havoc across the economy, there was plenty of motivating energy for the Right to create and mobilize a Movement. But when, during a period of full employment and general growth, you're debating, say, whether tax rates should be 39.6% or 35.6%...well, you've got a less compelling raison d'etre for your Movement.

Meanwhile, Republicans have pursued the Iron Law of Oligarchy: it is the tendency of organization to devolve power to smaller groups of people, due to the "technical indispensability of leadership, the tendency of the leaders to organize themselves and to consolidate their interests". It's pretty basic public choice theory. Much of the DC-based infrastructure on the Right - Republican politicians, the advocacy organizations and non-profits, the massive, campaign-oriented fundraising machines that spring up in each cycle - has become the entrenched bureaucracy seeking its own promulgation."


 * Ruffini:Put simply, the party, and in many cases, the movement, has lost its moorings. Earmarks exploded ten-fold, and it wasn’t under a Democratic Congress. In this winter’s primary, we saw the once mighty fiscal-social-national conservative coalition turned in on itself, with economic conservatives pitted against social conservatives. And too many of the “experts” in the Presidential campaigns this cycle failed to modernize the way the party does business, clinging to the old top-down rostrums of direct mail and fundraising-by-cocktail-party in an increasingly networked and crowdsourced world.

Other former core Republicans, such as David Frum, also are trying to create an alternative.