This impulse, according to some conservatives, represents an existential crisis in contemporary American political life—a systematic silencing of any dissent against what they see as the prevailing progressive views on identity. “I’m kind of scheduled for ejection from society,” Rusty Reno, the editor of the conservative journal First Things, told me in a recent conversation at the magazine’s office in New York. Much of elite conservative culture, especially in the world of essays and journalism, is focused on critiquing, mocking, and warning about identity-focused left-wing views. But Reno has lately been reflecting on the political project he would like to build, beyond what he feels bound to oppose. “We play so much defense that we don’t often discipline ourselves to say, ‘What are we for? What kind of society do we want?’” he told me. “It’s easy to know what you’re against, but harder to know what you’re for.”

First Things is the intellectual home for bookish religious conservatives in search of a counterargument to the consensus of progressive culture. The magazine’s readership is moderately sized, with roughly 30,000 subscribers, but its work has resonated in high-profile spaces: Tucker Carlson routinely invites First Things writers onto his show on Fox News and echoes their arguments in his monologues. A recent First Things piece, “Against David Frenchism,” inveighing against the supposed overattention to civility in certain neighborhoods of conservative politics, generated op-eds and conservative reactions for weeks. It won a personal note of appreciation from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who sent a message to the author, Sohrab Ahmari, congratulating him on the article.

First Things is slowly, tentatively laying out one path the conservative movement could follow after the chaos President Donald Trump has visited on the Republican Party. Reno, along with his team of editors and motley band of conservative friends and writers, believe that the tenuous coalition between free-market business types and socially conservative religious types is effectively over. He argues that the massive corporate influence on American politics and culture is pernicious, and wishes to reorganize the economy to promote the well-being of families. He maintains that a society without any belief in a higher power inevitably becomes cynical and consumerist, and he aims to build a collective sense of what he calls a transcendent horizon. Above all, he believes that Americans yearn for civic unity, and that nationalism should be viewed as a fact and an asset, rather than a swear word.

As a whole, the First Things project is an argument against cultural retreat: Religious conservatives should offer an alternative vision of the rightly ordered life, its writers argue, rather than publicly complying with progressive norms while privately seething with rage. In fighting for this vision, however, the magazine sometimes suffers from the moral hazards of opposition politics: writing with derision about its perceived enemies; using conspiratorial terms like “LGBT agenda”; and defending sweeping principles, like limiting immigration for the sake of national unity, while ignoring the particulars of how they have played out under Trump.