The Modern Conservative Tradition and the Origins of Trumpism

Today’s Trumpist radicals are not (small-c) conservatives – but they stand in the continuity of Modern Conservatism’s defining political project

credit - Left (William F. Buckley): Truman Moore/The Life Picture Collection; right (Donald Trump): Andalou Agency – both: Getty Images

For almost a decade, Donald Trump has dominated the Republican Party and acted as the de facto standard bearer of American political conservatism, defining the identity of today’s Right. How did it come to that?

Two diametrically opposed tales quickly emerged in response to Trump’s rise: There is the story of Trumpism-as-aberration, according to which the venerable tradition of principled American conservatism has been hijacked by an utterly unprincipled demagogue; Trumpism, in this interpretation, is fundamentally not conservatism at all, its triumph an accident, the recent trajectory of the Right a departure from what came before. Conservatives were seduced, or they were cowards in the face of an insurrection, a hostile takeover of the true conservative tradition.

The counter-interpretation holds that Trump’s rise was really no big surprise at all: This is what American conservatism, at its core, had always been – a movement fueled and defined by racial and cultural grievance, held together by anti-liberal sentiment. Everything else was just a front, a veneer of intellectual depth and respectability; there had been no venerable tradition to begin with, rather a fairly straight line from William F. Buckley (or perhaps even much earlier than that) to Ronald Reagan to Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich to Sarah Palin to, finally, Donald Trump.

There is inevitably a political dimension to these narratives, as they have very different political valences. Never Trump conservatives tend to prefer the aberration tale, which allows them to distance themselves and their pre-2016 politics – in many cases that also means their careers – from Trumpism. Creating a clear separation between the Conservative Movement and the Republican Party before 2016 and everything that has transpired since allows for a conveniently apologetic story that doesn’t necessitate a lot of soul-searching among political and societal elites who may have had a hand in influencing the GOP’s path.

Conversely, many on the Left tend to prefer a narrative of Trump-as-continuity as it offers an indictment of both conservatism (always and inherently evil!) but also of the American political order more generally. There is nothing specific about Trumpism and today’s Right, the argument goes, so there is no reason to unite behind the liberal establishment’s calls for a broad anti-MAGA coalition. In fact, the real enemy has always been and remains that very same neoliberal elite, while the idea that Trumpism represents a distinctly new and acute threat is just a distraction.

As a first approximation, if we want to move beyond the politics of this question and get the diagnosis right, the most plausible interpretation lies somewhere in-between these tales of either total aberration or complete continuity (though that does not mean exactly in the middle). The challenge is to grapple seriously with long-standing traditions and continuities while also acknowledging and investigating the more recent radicalization.

A story of radicalization

This radicalization has different dimensions, depending on what part of the Right we are focusing on. For instance, if it is the trajectory of the Republican Party we are examining, the story goes something like this (please bear with me as I will be painting with a broad brush): Before the mid- to late 1960s, the GOP was not a conservative party in any meaningful sense. Neither party had a clear ideological profile, as both sought to unite broad, heterogeneous coalitions. The most ardent racists had their home in the Democratic Party, which existed as a weird coalition of Southern segregationist Dixiecrats and more liberal Northerners, a constellation that arose for contingent historical reasons as the GOP, the party of Lincoln, was widely seen as a hostile force by Southern whites after the Civil War. The 1960s civil rights legislation acted as a catalyst for a process of partisan realignment and ideological sorting – ultimately uniting the forces opposing multiracial pluralism in a Republican Party that increasingly focused on the interests and sensibilities of white conservatives. And as the GOP became an ever more racially, socially, and culturally conservative party, Movement Conservatives became more influential ideologically and institutionally. What emerged as the Modern Conservative political project in the middle decades of the twentieth century was in many ways defined by an alliance between two distinct factions. One the one hand, there were reactionaries and traditionalists. On the other, the market-fundamentalists and libertarians, opposed to the New Deal state. Ronald Reagan was the first Republican president who identified as part of the Modern Conservative Movement. However, while the GOP became the parliamentary arm of the Right, it was still made up of different camps competing for influence and power: By the early 1990s, the formerly liberal and, by today’s standards, socially and culturally moderate “neoconservatives” fought with hard-right “paleoconservatives” (more on them later) for supremacy. Self-identifying “small-government” libertarians and the Religious Right continued to regard each other with suspicion. And the Republican establishment, mostly in line with the interests of the rich donor elite, hoped to mobilize the energies of the base by indulging a more “populist” style. Instead of controlling the base and harnessing its energies, however, the far-right energies took over, and every incoming class of Republican lawmakers has been more radical than the last, from the “Gingrich revolution” in the mid-90s to the Tea Party to today’s almost fully Trumpified outfit.

I am sure people will quibble with some of these points – but the broader outlines of this story are fairly uncontroversial. My sense is that most Never Trump conservatives would generally agree, as this could be told as a story of first liberal Republicans and then moderate and mainstream conservatives being marginalized and ostracized by more extreme factions.

What about the Right more broadly, beyond the Republican Party? Recent scholarship has plausibly described the Right as a coalition that ranged ideologically from moderate Republicanism to far-right extremism; it comprises the GOP, the rightwing intellectual sphere, the Religious Right, the media machine, activist and lobbying groups, the universe of (semi-) organized militant groups, the conservative base. This coalition is not synonymous with Modern Conservatism, but since the 1950s, the Modern Conservative Movement has certainly had a significant – and at times dominant – impact on its trajectory. However, the status of Modern Conservatism’s leaders like William F. Buckley and the intellectual circles around National Review, just like that of the Republican establishment in Washington, was never uncontested. In fact, a pervasive frustration with a conservative elite that is supposedly too soft has been a constant feature of the Right. Occasionally, those who demanded a more radical politics have united behind individual figures in an attempt to take over: They put their hope in George Wallace’s third-party run in 1968; in Pat Buchanan’s challenge in the Republican primary in 1992; finally, in Donald Trump’s ascension as the Right’s new tribune. The question, then, is why these calls for a more radical politics were more successful at certain moments, in some situations and constellations, but not in others? And the fact that Trump succeeded where previous rightwing “populists” and demagogues had not indicates how much the center of gravity on the Right had, by 2016, shifted towards radicalism – a process that Trump himself has since exacerbated.

But what if, finally, we don’t focus on the trajectory of the Republican Party or the story of the American Right in a broad sense, but instead on Modern Conservatism itself?

Whereas I don’t think an interpretation that emphasizes the rise of ever more radical factions both within the GOP and on the Right generally necessarily engenders much pushback, what happens if we ask: How much of this radicalization was inherent to Modern Conservatism from the start? How radical has the Modern Conservative project been? Was Modern Conservatism itself ever actually “conservative”? And, inevitably: How “conservative” is today’s Trumpist Right – and to what extent does it stand in continuity with Modern Conservatism rather than representing a departure?

How “conservative” has Modern Conservatism ever been?

An obvious starting point for this investigation is the question: What do we mean when we invoke the term “conservatism”? In colloquial parlance, political “conservatism” is associated with the notions of conserving and preserving. Such an understanding has perhaps its closest intellectual equivalent in the definition the English political theorist and philosopher Michael Oakeshott presented. Oakeshott was a professor of political science at Cambridge, Oxford, and the London School of Economics. He was a significant figure for the American post-war Right, as it sought the gravitas and academic legitimacy Oakeshott provided. In an essay titled “On being conservative,” published in 1956, Oakeshott declared:

“To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”

If we apply this definition to the Trumpist Right, the result seems clear: They are not conservatives – such conservatism of limits is at odds with the Trumpist desire to uproot, dismantle, and punish; such preserving sensibility is nowhere to be found among those who are in charge on the Right.

This interpretation is widely shared in both academic and political circles. It is precisely the argument historian Jessica Riskin made in an essay titled “I’m not a conservative, but please stop calling Trumpism ‘Conservative,’” published in the Los Angeles Review of Books in December 2020. Riskin wrote this piece as Trump’s multi-level scheme to nullify the results of a democratic election was already in full swing, although the violent escalation of January 6 was yet to come. Riskin is a historian of early modern science. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, her understanding of conservatism is centered around the ideas of Edmund Burke in the late eighteenth century. “Each time a commentator refers to Trumpism as ‘conservative’,” Riskin says, Burke “surely rolls over in his discreetly marked grave in Buckinghamshire.” Edmund Burke was staunchly opposed to the French Revolution, focused on preserving “traditional institutions” and convinced, in Riskin’s words, that “any reform must be undertaken gradually.” Riskin is certain that the intellectual founders of Modern Conservatism in the United States were Burkeans in that sense:

“When, in the 1950s, the founders of modern American conservatism such as Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley, Jr., identified Burke as the originator of their philosophy, they embraced this same principle: the necessity of preserving longstanding traditions and a distaste for rapid or wholesale change.”

Riskin’s overall verdict on the Trumpist Right: “It’s not conservatism, but right-wing radicalism.”

And isn’t that also very much in line with what the key thinkers on the Trumpist Right say themselves? I got into this in my previous piece on Russell Vought and his idea of “radical constitutionalism,” but it bears repeating here: The American Right today is dominated by forces and factions that are convinced our moment requires not restraint and preservation, but radicalism and “counter-revolution.” They do not present themselves and their goals in the idiom of conservatism. As Claremont-affiliated far-right thinker Glen Ellmers put it in an infamous essay in the spring of 2021: “Conservatism is no longer enough.”

The general sentiment that traditional conservatism needs to be replaced by a much more radical form of politics is being echoed across the Right – among pundits, activists, politicians, intellectuals. People at the center of rightwing politics are now rejecting the label “conservatism” outright. In October 2022, for instance, The Federalist published an instructive piece titled: “We need to stop calling ourselves conservatives.” It pleaded with people on the Right to accept the “need to forge a new political identity that reflects our revolutionary moment.” No more restraint, no more “small government”: “The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life – and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.” John Daniel Davidson, the author of the piece and senior editor at The Federalist, was fully aware of the implications of what he demanded: “If all that sounds radical, fine. It need not, at this late hour, dissuade conservatives in the least. Radicalism is precisely the approach needed now because the necessary task is nothing less than radical and revolutionary.”

Case closed – nothing further to discuss? Isn’t all this talk about “revolutionary” measures antithetical to what political conservatism is supposed to be all about?

Jesica Riskin’s piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books can serve as a reminder of why it is not quite so simple. When she lists concrete examples for why Trumpism, in her interpretation, is “not conservatism, but right-wing radicalism,” she brings up the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” That, however, has been the stated goal of not only the conservative legal movement, but of influential voices in the Republican Party for many decades. Ronald Reagan certainly was demonizing and targeting the administrative state. We could, of course, move to no longer identify Reagan as part of the Modern Conservative tradition. But as long as the goal is still to get the diagnosis right and understand the past and present of the Right, this isn’t very helpful at all. Reagan was undoubtedly the political leader of Modern Conservatism at the time.

The actual issue is that abstract notions of “conservatism” inspired by Edmund Burke aren’t very helpful in assessing the concrete political project of Modern Conservatism as it crystallized in the United States in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Assuming the latter must surely, because it employs the same term, be (small-c) conservative in a recognizably Burkean (or Oakeshottean, perhaps) way is a category error. One that, in Riskin’s piece, leads to some rather speculative claims: Burke “would no doubt have been content with such disciples” as Kirk and Buckley, Riskin declares, whereas Trump “would be as detestable to Burke as the Jacobins.” I am not going to counter that with my own speculations about whether or not, if he were still alive today, Bill Buckley would support Donald Trump (although it should, perhaps, be noted that National Review, the magazine he founded and that to this day claims to be representing the venerable tradition of conservative thought, has clearly settled on a pretty aggressive anti-anti-Trumpism.) More importantly, as historian Joshua Tait has emphasized, Buckley and many of the leading intellectuals of Modern Conservatism in the 1950s and 60s were highly critical of the kind of conservatism of limits that Russell Kirk and Michael Oakeshott (at least rhetorically) envisioned. In the Burke-inspired colloquial sense, “conservatism” suggests a fundamentally moderate political project, invoking the moderate Republicanism of the 1950s, perhaps, with Dwight Eisenhower as an iconic figure – accepting of the existing New Deal order and therefore decidedly part of the political mainstream. But the leading figures of the ascendant Conservative Movement never liked Eisenhower, they rejected the cultural and societal trajectory of the postwar consensus, and one thing that unified all the different strands of Modern Conservatism was the desire to roll back the New Deal.

A plausible diagnosis of the exact relationship between the Modern Conservative tradition and today’s Trumpist Right will have to distinguish between, on the one hand, colloquial, abstract, or philosophical notions of what it means to be (small-c) “conservative” and, on the other, the specific political project that referred to itself – and was widely referred to – as the (capital-C, capital-M) Conservative Movement in post-1950s America.

From Whittaker Chambers to Pat Buchanan to Donald Trump?

It is helpful to pay attention to how today’s self-identifying “counter-revolutionaries” on the Right conceive of their own role and relationship to the Modern Conservative tradition. Crucially, they do not think they represent a departure – in fact, they claim to be fighting in the name of the *real* essence that defined Modern Conservatism, which in their mind now requires radicalism.

Take the example of Russell Vought, who is one of the architects of Project 2025 and will return to the White House with Donald Trump in January to reclaim his position as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. I grappled with Vought’s trajectory in more detail in my previous piece, but it is important to restate the broad outlines of his view of the world here: Over the past two decades, Vought went from being widely regarded as a “fiscal hawk” and – at least rhetorically – claiming “small government” principles to an ever more explicit, aggressive desire to mobilize the coercive powers of the state against the “enemy within.” Vought believes the constitutional order, and with it the “natural” order itself, has been destroyed: The revolution has already happened, “the Left” won. Power now lies with a “permanent ruling class” of leftist elites who control all major institutions of American life and especially the “woke and weaponized” agencies of the state. In order to defeat them, conservatives must become “radical constitutionalists” and stage nothing less than a comprehensive “counter-revolution.”

What is remarkable about Vought, someone who has spent his entire adult life as a rightwing operator in and around the power centers of the Republican Party, is that he disdains the conservative establishment, which he believes categorically errs in trying to preserve what is no more. The Federalist Society, for instance, is getting it all wrong, according to Vought, in committing to fighting within the boundaries of “normal” politics. Vought, on the other hand, wants to purge the government and “traumatize” the “woke” bureaucrats; he wants to use the military to suppress protests; and he is devoted to Donald Trump who he literally views as a “gift of God.”

And yet, Vought is keen to present both himself and Donald Trump in the tradition of Modern Conservatism. Not coincidentally, Vought opened his 2022 essay titled : “Renewing American Purpose: Statesmanship in a Post-Constitutional Moment” in which he outlined his “radical constitutionalist” vision by invoking the legacy of Whittaker Chambers. Chambers is a towering figure in the intellectual history of the Conservative Movement. A former communist and Soviet spy in the 1930s, Chambers emerged after his defection as one of the most prominent anti-communist voices; he became famous when he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee against fellow former Soviet spy Alger Hiss in 1948; his autobiographical reflections, titled Witness, published in 1952, quickly became one of the core texts of the emerging Conservative Movement.

It turns out that Chambers plays a key role in Vought’s conception of how the Trumpist Right relates to the history of Conservatism. In mid-November, towards the end of a two-hour conversation on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, Vought elaborated on how he understands the genealogy of Trumpism. Asked by Carlson who people on the Right should read, whose vision they should emulate, Vought outlines what he calls “building blocks” for a “more coherent, convincing and satisfying public policy life”: “I think it’s like Whitaker Chambers married to Pat Buchanan, married to someone like a Donald Trump.”

It is worth grappling with this genealogy: Chambers to Buchanan to Trump. What is it about Chambers and Buchanan that the self-declared “post-constitutionalists” find endearing? What is about them the explicitly radical, “counter-revolutionary” Right wants to invoke?

Whittaker Chambers was an imposing presence in the intellectual circles of Modern Conservatism until his death in 1961. Because of his personal history as a former communist spy, the Right saw him as a powerful witness to the acute leftist threat. For coming forward to testify against Alger Hiss, he was seen as a brave leader who spoke his conscience, even when confronted with a hostile liberal orthodoxy. Chambers, who converted to Christianity in the 1940s, also represented a distinctly religious interpretation of the threat America was supposedly facing – a crisis of faith as much as a political challenge. And finally, Chambers was convinced that communism and liberalism were deeply intertwined: Liberalism was basically a less overtly violent, but equally dangerous form of communism; communism merely the most radical expression of liberalism. For people like Chambers, as George Nash put it in the 1970s in his field-defining study of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, “liberalism meant treason.”

More than thirty years after Chambers’ death, Pat Buchanan led an – ultimately unsuccessful, at least in the moment – rightwing revolt against the Republican establishment in the 1992 GOP primaries. Buchanan was not an outsider. He had worked for both Nixon and Reagan in the White House. But he also channeled the frustrations of “paleo-conservatives” who thought the Republican Party was in the hands of elites who did not do nearly enough to push back against the liberal onslaught of racial, cultural, and religious pluralism, who wanted to take a more explicit stance against egalitarian democracy, who demanded more radical measures in defense of an ethno-nationalist vision of “real America” as a white Christian homeland. Crucially, Buchanan was also instrumental in shifting the Right’s focus more explicitly to what came to be called the “culture wars.” In his infamous speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention, Buchanan raged against “unrestricted abortion on demand,” “radical feminism,” “the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women,” “discrimination against religious schools,” “women in combat,” “environmental extremists,” “the raw sewage of pornography that pollutes our popular culture.” America was indeed changing, Buchanan warned: “But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God’s country.” Buchanan pleaded with his fellow Republicans to understand that “this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”

“Real” America under siege; the leftist threat advancing; the establishment not willing to do whatever it takes, perhaps blinded by the idea that liberalism might be anything but an existential threat not just to the nation, but to Christian civilization itself; time for men of conscience to stand up, fight back and accept the struggle that goes far beyond the realm of politics… Russell Vought is not wrong to locate a tradition of such sentiment and sensibility and highlight the legacy of Chambers and Buchanan.

Where is the line?

If the “natural order” and “Christian civilization” are under threat, what must a movement pledged to their preservation do? Does “conservatism” imply inherent constraints that must be respected – or does a commitment to conserve the divinely ordained order require radical measures when crisis hits? Where is the line? Who gets to define it? Is there a limiting principle – or just a principled commitment that demands you do whatever it takes?

Modern Conservatism has a long tradition of debating these questions – and a long history of signaling that drastic, perhaps even violent measures may be justified, at least potentially.

In 1954, William F. Buckley and his best friend and brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell published McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning. Both men were in their late twenties. Their full-throated defense of McCarthyism and the anti-Communist crusade received a lot of attention and furthered their status as rising stars on the Right. One year later, Buckley founded National Review. I re-read McCarthy and His Enemies this fall in preparation for a graduate course on “Conservatism and the Far Right” I taught at Georgetown this past semester. And what stood out to me was the book’s final chapter, titled “The New Conformity” in which the authors left no doubt that all societies must indeed impose some conformity, defined as “its prevailing value preferences” – “or else they cease to exist. The members of a society must share certain values if that society is to cohere; and cohere it must if it is to survive.”

Imposing such an orthodoxy necessitated coercive measures, Buckley and Bozell were certain: “Coercion takes different forms. It may be exercised through education, through social pressure, or through laws.” Anything that threatens the fundamental truths and values had to be sanctioned by society and the state. In 1954, that meant communism, above all else – the goal, the authors declared, was “to make our society inhospitable to Communists, fellow-travelers, and security risks in the government.”

In this quest, Buckley and Bozell were certain to have the support of the “vast majority of the American people” who agreed there was no place for communism in America – McCarthyism was therefore only aiming “to harden the existing conformity.” What about the danger of censoring and sanctioning anyone and anything associated with “the Left”? Certainly, Buckley and Bozell agreed, “Whenever the anti-Communist conformity excludes well-meaning Liberals, we should … go to their rescue.” But they dismissed the idea that the anti-communist crusade might have produced such dangerous excesses – in fact, they claimed, McCarthy “fixes its goals with precision.”

That, however, is a very disingenuous depiction of Red Scare America and the pervasive anti-communist hysteria of the post-war period. And beyond the machinations of senator Joe McCarthy: It’s difficult to accept such reassurances that conservatives were targeting *just* communism when we remember that Modern Conservatism’s leading thinkers like Whittaker Chambers explicitly claimed that there was little difference between communism and liberalism, that both represented merely different guises of the same fundamental threat.

Let’s also remember that segregationists routinely derided the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s as communist – “Race Mixing is Communism” was a prominent slogan among those who protested the integration of schools and other desegregation efforts in the South from the late 1950s onwards. That suggestion was not universally shared in the halls of National Review, but it wasn’t a fringe position either. In October 1966, for instance, Frank Meyer wrote in National Review about what he called the “Negro Revolution.” Meyer was the key theoretician of “fusionism” – the idea that traditionalists and libertarians could actually come together under the banner of “conservatism” despite their differences, animated by their shared rejection of the liberal order. In the Martin Luther King-led civil rights movement, he saw a fundamentally illegitimate “program of confiscatory socialism, revolutionary in essence.” Meyer represented the libertarian strand of the fusionist bargain. But that didn’t keep him from demanding the authorities quash this “revolution.” In January 1968, Meyer wrote a piece in National Review titled “Showdown with Insurrection” in which he called on the state to mobilize against MLK’s movement that, as Meyer declared, relied “upon a terror inspired by mobs.”

There was no clear consensus in and around National Review about what measures were necessary and justified in response to the “upheaval” of the 1950s and 60s. The leading intellectuals of the young Modern Conservative Movement did not – certainly not openly – condone the wave of white supremacist violence against the civil rights protesters. It is questionable, however, how reliable the renunciation of violence was as a restraining principle: From the beginning, Conservative rhetoric, as evidenced by Meyer’s take on the civil rights movement, painted the “leftist” enemy as an acute, extremist threat. If Americans are being “terrorized” by a violent insurrection against all that is holy and good, if a ruthless “revolution” is already under way, must we not conclude that those who defend “order” are justified to respond in kind?

Interestingly, in their 1954 defense of McCarthy, Buckley and Bozell presented the imposition of an anti-communist orthodoxy as a defense of democracy, as they claimed to be acting in accordance with the majority. The idea that democratic ideals could therefore have served as a limiting principle is not very plausible, however. Modern Conservatives never left any doubt that there were certain eternal truths and values that must not be trifled with. If nothing else, Modern Conservatism was explicitly opposed to the progressivist project of adapting societal norms over time – something that they identified as a relativistic threat to the “natural” order. That is, fundamentally, what made all the “left”-coded political projects so dangerous: Their desire to engineer a new, “modern” society via state intervention. The “value preferences” Buckley and Bozell thought needed to be imposed on society were certainly not up to a vote – they may have, in the case of communism, aligned with majority opinion in the mid-1950s, but their legitimacy did not depend on majority support.

Modern Conservatism’s allegiance was never to democracy, but to a white, Christian “civilization,” as Bill Buckley explained in National Review in an infamous editorial titled “Why the South Must Prevail” in August 1957. The “White community in the South,” Buckley declared, indeed had the right to exclude Black people from political participation, deny them their right to vote, because it was “for the time being … the advanced race.” The “White Community” was therefore “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas which it does not dominate numerically” – after all, “the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.” In fact, imposing “superior mores” was the duty of the “White Community”: “If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.”

This, again, was not the universal consensus among Modern Conservative thought leaders. Buckley’s brother-in-law Brent Bozell, for instance, disagreed. But the defining question that inevitably emerges from what Buckley and Bozell outlined so clearly in their McCarthy book in 1954 and also from the fundamental Conservative conviction to be representing and defending the “natural” and/or divinely ordained order remains: What happens if society, for whatever reason, moves away from those “value preferences,” if the majority comes to reject those “superior mores”? Must Conservatives accept this trajectory – or is the “conformity” still to be imposed to safeguard that which is good and noble? If it is the latter, what measures are justified in imposing the orthodoxy against majority will? And who, other than the state, via a mobilization of its coercive powers, even has the ability to impose it?

“The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life,” The Federalist stated in 2022, “and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.”

Counter-revolutionaries from the start

Modern Conservatism – the specific political project that emerged in the United States in the middle decades of the twentieth century – was substantively never just, or even predominantly, (small-c) conservative. A conservatism of limits, of preserving and conserving, was certainly part of the mix. But at the same time, the notion that “conservatism is no longer enough” was a defining sensibility from the start. And the question which of these tendencies, these sentiments towards a changing world, would win out, and where the line was between them, has shaped the Modern Conservative project at all times.

If we take Modern Conservatism seriously, we should not be all that surprised by the radicalizing dynamic that has ultimately led to the Trumpist Right’s triumph. That outcome was never determined and depended instead on a lot of contingent factors, the structures of the political system, and individual decisions by influential rightwing leaders. It does not, however, constitute a departure from or a betrayal of the “true” Modern Conservative tradition. The political project that coalesced in the 1950s was always exceedingly clear about its goals and priorities. From the start, it was centered around its commitment to a specific societal order – and by its hostility towards the “left”-coded forces working to change, undermine, or subvert it. It always defined the stakes of the conflict as existential because it set out to defend a “natural order” that was not up for political deliberation or subject to democratic control.

On that basis, what would we expect from such a political movement as demographic and cultural changes continued to profoundly alter the society in which it operated – as the liberal/socialist/communist “Left” seemed to be gaining the upper hand in determining the nature and image of America? With so much of its identity wrapped up in rejecting “the Left,” Modern Conservatism always had a reactionary quality. As the commitment to ultimate values was never balanced by an equally strong commitment to limiting principles that could have moderated political action, where was the restraint against further escalation and radicalization supposed to come from?

The overriding goal of Modern Conservatism has been to uphold what its leading intellectuals in the 1950s explicitly defined as the “natural” or divinely ordained order. If “traditional” conservatism – of the preserving kind, or the Burkean/Oakshottean variety, if you will – was no longer commensurate with that challenge, more radical measures would have to be taken.

The leaders of today’s Trumpist Right aren’t conservatives. But they continue, in a profound sense, the tradition of Modern Conservatism.