The terms “Old Right” and “New Right” are commonly used today, but it’s useful to know that they have a long pedigree. 

The Old Right of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, led by Robert Taft politically and people like Frank Chodorov intellectually, generally favored free markets at home and free trade abroad and placed a high value on individual liberty. In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of figures emerged, calling themselves members of the New Right. Their goal was to push the Republican Party in a more nationalist, protectionist, and socially conservative direction. Many of today’s national conservatives, or NatCons, have happily assumed the moniker New Right to distinguish themselves from those conservatives who continue to support aspects of the Old Right credo and favor important parts of their predecessors’ project. Though these two New Rights are not identical, they share many beliefs, especially the use of government power to advance their agenda, which threatens economic freedom and individual liberty. 

Libertarian Roy A. Childs, Jr., warned about those ideas in his essay, “The New Authoritarians,” published in Inquiry magazine in 1982. That article, a review of three books on the New Right, is included in the 2026 edition of Liberty against Power, a collection of Childs’ essays published by Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org, a project of the Cato Institute.

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Today the Cato Institute released the “Freedom in the 50 States” report for 2026. 

This revamped index consists of 97 policy measures over 10 categories sorted into either economic freedom or personal freedom. It assigns scores and letter grades to US states based on this general combined level of freedom. And, for the first time in the report’s history, this edition also scores and grades governors on how well or poorly they have advanced both economic and personal liberty in their states.

You can see the results here. And you can take a deep dive into the scores using the Data Dashboard and interactive maps. There’s plenty to see and analyze for yourself.

The project was over a year in the making. And when you spend that much time on a project, you usually accumulate plenty of insights. So you’ll be seeing more analysis from me based on the data in the index for Cato’s blog, in future policy reports, and elsewhere.

Since September 2025, the US military has been targeting small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, claiming they carry drugs. Branded by the Pentagon as “Operation Southern Spear,” 79 strikes have been carried out and 238 people have died, as of October 2026.

Officially, the Trump administration has designated the cartels and groups transporting drugs as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, justifying the use of military spending and artillery. Further, President Trump has claimed twice that seaborne drug flow has decreased 97 percent.

Recently, however, Wall Street Journal South American Bureau Chief Juan Forero reported that in response to the US airstrikes, smugglers are learning how to evade the military. As a result, new routes have led to record high supply, decreasing prices, and rising purity in both the US and Europe.

We have learned from the new and old assaults on our liberties that good politics depends not so much on good institutions as on the good moral sentiments that support them. “Add institutions and stir” is not a recipe for success. Officers of the state enforcing regulations do good work when they ensure that the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory does not block the fire escapes or that military helicopters do not intrude on the civilian approaches to National Airport. But a regulation is unwise, as often, when its declared purpose is not even approximately attainable, or when its secret purpose is corrupt, or when officers with unwise beliefs or bad moral sentiments staff the institutions enforcing it. The institutions, such as the courts and the police, that enforce the “rule of law” are splendid—unless the laws are unwise or enforced by thugs. And even if it is kept wise and pure in its black letters, the outcome of the rule of law depends radically on who interprets it.

That is to say, if evil or unwise people take over a nation by coup or by vote, no structure of institutions or codes of laws, such as the American Constitution or the Federal Register, can reliably save us—or not as reliably as we commonly suppose. Throwing the bums out in the next election doesn’t help if new bums take over or if the bums have meanwhile corrupted the election. 

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Voters will go to the polls soon in states and municipalities to decide ballot issues of significance for individual liberty, limited government, and sound public administration. Some highlights (via Ballotpedia and Bolts): 

Front and center for tax-watchers is the proposed California Proposition 40 wealth tax, criticized here in numerous pieces, including this policy analysis. Unusually steep by international standards at 5 percent, the measure would also defy widespread notions of legal regularity by reaching back retroactively to tax assets as of January 1, 2026, of persons who’d already moved out of state before the law’s enactment. Bad stuff.

Colorado’s Amendment 87 would replace the state’s flat 4.4 percent income tax with a graduated tax; it faces a counter-proposition that would freeze the existing flat rate. Iowa, Missouri, North Carolina, and Washington will all consider measures to freeze, roll back, or discourage increases in income tax rates. Adam Michel lately discussed the success of state flat taxes. 

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Cato Surveillance Week 2026 featured a panel that included my colleague and Cato Research Fellow Nicholas Anthony. As is always the case with such expert panels, there are inevitably more questions than we have time to address in an hour. Moreover, because the reach of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) is so vast, I wanted to follow up with Nick on some of the issues we covered and some we didn’t have a chance to get into depth on. What follows is the transcript of my chat with Nick, edited for clarity. 

Q. Folks may not be as familiar with the Bank Secrecy Act as other laws. Can you give them a brief crash course?

The Bank Secrecy Act was enacted in 1970 to require banks and other financial institutions to monitor customers and report certain transactions to the government. It started as an attempt to go after tax evaders, but it has since been expanded to go after drug dealers, terrorists, and immigrants (and everything in between). 

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