In the state of Tennessee, a Politico magazine investigation monitors a new real estate project called “Highland Rim,” developed by the “Ridge Runner” company, in the state’s countryside.
At first glance, the project appears to be part of a familiar wave in post-pandemic America: families leaving cities, wealthy people working remotely looking for more space, and rural towns trying to restore life through investment and new housing.
Read also
list of 3 itemsend of list
But the investigation goes beyond the real estate facade. The project, as the magazine presents it, does not sell land alone, but rather presents a complete vision of life: neighborhoods with a conservative Christian character, churches, schools, common spaces, and residents who are supposed to be united by a similar cultural and political vision.
Here, “returning to the countryside” does not appear to be just a living choice, but rather an experience in building a society tailored to the new American right.
This local experience comes at a broader moment in which Christian nationalism within the American right is moving from a position of protest against liberalism to an attempt to build alternatives to it.
While the Politico investigation pursues its practical image in Tennessee, David French in the New York Times reads its intellectual and historical roots, within a broader American debate about a new right that is not content with waging the battle from Washington, but seeks to wage it in the features of daily life.
Old ideas in a new dress
French starts by criticizing the label “New Right” itself. What is new here, in his opinion, is not the ideas but the moment in which they returned to the center of the American debate.
French believes that the Christian nationalist wing within the MAGA movement reproduces old tendencies of hostility to liberalism, suspicion of individual rights, glorification of the hierarchical family and homogeneous group, and viewing pluralism as a sign of dissolution rather than a sign of political vitality.
In French’s reading, this right is based on the accusation that liberalism has morally weakened society, liberated the individual from the ties of family, church, and local community, and opened the door to feminism, immigration, secularization, and the disintegration of identity.
From this diagnosis is born the counterpromise: the restoration of the nation through the traditional family, moral discipline, social hierarchy, and religious identity.
This is why French brings up the experience of the Vichy regime in France during World War II. He does not present it as a ready-made correspondence to the American situation, but rather as an example of an intellectual structure that begins by declaring the failure of liberal democracy, and then presents salvation in the form of a return to the nation, the family, obedience, and “authentic communities.”
In that experience, as French reads through the writings of historian Julian Jackson, the family became the nucleus of the social system, women were placed within the home, and national affiliation turned into a tool for separating citizens between those who were considered an integral part of the nation and those who were pushed to its margins.
What matters to French is not only the French past, but rather the language that is repeated today in some circles of the American right. Immigration is depicted as an invasion, women’s rights are presented as a threat to the family, individualism is described as decadence, and democracy is condemned whenever it is unable to produce the conservative society that these people want.
Thus, the fear of collapse becomes indispensable political fuel. The more a country appears to be on the verge of disaster, the easier it is to justify curtailing freedoms in the name of salvation, and restoring patriarchal authority in the name of protecting society.
Experience in Tennessee
At the heart of the Tennessee experience stands Josh Abutoye, founder of Ridge Runner and one of the faces associated with the New Right network. Politico follows him as he inspects rural land that he sees as not only a real estate project, but a space capable of shaping an entire lifestyle: from home and school to church and the local market.
The magazine says that Ridge Runner, which is linked to the conservative investment fund New Funding, has bought or contracted to buy thousands of acres in the Appalachia region, and divided them into hundreds of plots allocated to families looking for a conservative rural life.
However, the project is not based on housing alone; Its design includes neighborhoods with a specific architectural character, shared farms, public spaces, churches and schools, in addition to businesses “in harmony” with the spirit of the place.
Here the political dimension of the experience becomes clear. The religious factor, as the investigation reports from Abutoi, is not an added element to the neighborhood but rather part of its design. The goal is not to withdraw from politics, but rather to engage in it from another path: building small communities that embody the conservative model in daily life, instead of waiting for the battle to be resolved in Washington alone.
An elite builds its own countryside
One of the paradoxes of the project is that it attacks the world of elites, but it moves with clearly elitist tools. Abutoye himself studied at Harvard and worked in major financial institutions.
The project left behind investment money, conservative networks, remote workers, and high-income earners who could move their lives from cities and suburbs to a less expensive, larger countryside with fewer regulatory restrictions.
The language of returning to the land and roots does not negate this fact. The project not only attracts poor local families looking for a home, but also attracts a class capable of buying land and building a new lifestyle. Here Politico’s most sensitive question arises: Will the project revitalize the town on its outskirts, or will it build a private community for the wealthy of the new right on top of its countryside?
Abutoye believes the project will bring construction, taxes and local spending, bringing life to areas that have suffered from industrial decline and a loss of population and opportunity.
However, some local residents are not reassured by this promise. Preserving the place, for them, does not mean that a new elite will come to redefine it. What appears to the project owners as a “conservative revival” may appear to others as a kind of soft class replacement, or rural modernization in right-wing garb.
Conservative criticism
The rejection does not come from liberals alone. In Gainsborough, as the Politico investigation shows, some local conservatives disagree with the spirit of the project, not because they are left-wing or secular, but because they belong to an old rural temperament that abhors patronage.
This disagreement reveals an important distance between the old Republican right and the new right. The old right, in its local form, used to raise doubts about authority as a basic slogan, even if it sometimes contradicted its practices.
As for the new right, it does not fear power itself, but rather fears that it will remain in the hands of its opponents. He wants a conservative authority capable of shaping public behavior through politics when it can, and through the market, real estate, school, and church when politics is not possible.
So the Tennessee experiment seems not just a conservative housing project, but an early test of the kind of power that the New Right imagines. If it succeeds, it will give him a practical argument that he can build an alternative society, not just complain about liberal hegemony.
What French’s text and Ward’s investigation have in common is that Christian nationalism is no longer merely an objectionable discourse. It turns into quiet social engineering, starting with choosing the land, then designing the houses, determining the shape of the school, the nature of the market, the location of the church, and the type of residents who will find themselves in harmony with all of that.
