Nicole Hemmer is assistant professor at the University of Virginia's Miller Center and co-host of the Past Present podcast.

Matt Schlapp, chairman of the Conservative Political Action Conference, had a clear message when he announced on Saturday that right-wing agitator Milo Yiannopoulos would be highlighting this year’s event. “We think free speech includes hearing Milo’s important perspective,” he tweeted. Yiannopoulos was an unexpected invitee. The central figure in a number of campus controversies, he traffics in shock then spins it as free-speech advocacy. Schlapp had clearly gobbled up the spin.

But not everyone was buying it. The announcement drew immediate protests from prominent conservatives. Peter Wehner, a conservative writer and senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, called the invite “more evidence of the moral decay of conservatism.” Jonah Goldberg of National Review, who greeted the news as “sad and disappointing,” added, “This new big tent is gonna have some wild parties, but leave me off the invite list."


It’s not hard to see why conservatives might object to Yiannopoulos. Emerging from the alt-right swamps of GamerGate and Breitbart (he calls himself a “fellow traveller” of the alt-right, a white nationalist, misogynist movement), Yiannopoulos’ reputation hangs on his willingness to make all sorts of anti-woman, anti-Semitic, anti-gay (even though he is gay himself), anti-Islam, anti-everyone comments. His profanity and explicit sexual talk makes him anathema to the Christian right, and he’s never had a word to say about the economic policies that make the supply-side right tick. And this was before folks began to pay attention to his comments criticizing sexual consent and promoting sex with underage teens—comments that ended up getting him disinvited from the conservative conference on Monday.

So, why was he even invited to CPAC in the first place?

The answer has to do with an organization and a movement that have lost their way. CPAC, once the place where American conservatism defined itself, is in disarray because conservatives are in disarray. Having just traded much of their belief system to win an election, they’re finding it hard to reset their ideological compasses. Yiannopoulos is just a symptom. And withdrawing his invitation is not the cure.

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There was a historical irony in CPAC’s decision to embrace an offensive, fringe figure like Yiannopoulos. Back in 1964 the American Conservative Union, the organization that runs CPAC, was founded to clean up conservatism’s image, to make it responsible and respectable.

The ACU emerged in the aftermath of Barry Goldwater’s disastrous 1964 presidential bid. Throughout the campaign, Democrats successfully tied Goldwater to the racists in the Ku Klux Klan and the conspiracists in the John Birch Society. For the conservative writers and activists who gathered in Washington, D.C., after the election, the extremism charge was an existential problem. If conservatism could be dismissed as a fringe collection of kooks and Klansmen, it could not be an effective force in American politics. So they erected the ACU as a guardian of “responsible conservatism.” The first prohibition: No one could join the board of directors who had ties to the Birch Society.

The ACU was part of a broader effort to police the lines of conservatism, to toss out any groups that might tarnish the right’s image. In the late 1950s,for instance, National Review purged writers with connections to the anti-Semitic rag American Mercury. As William F. Buckley Jr., National Review’s founder, later observed, “Conservatism must be wiped clean of the parasitic cant that defaces it, and repels so many of those who approach it inquiringly.” The ACU, and through it, the CPAC speaker roster, was a place where that parasitic cant could be regularly scrubbed away.

So long as the core of the conservative project held, CPAC operated as a standard annual meeting. Every year, conservatives flocked to D.C. to rub elbows with the politicians and activists who formulated, popularized and enacted the ideas and policies that defined the American right. But as conservatism began to fracture in the mid-2000s, CPAC became a more tumultuous event. The invite list became a battle not just over who spoke when, but how conservatism would be defined—what controversial figures and celebrities it would include, what values and identities it would embrace. Entertainment value began to matter in a way that it hadn’t before, which is how someone like Donald Trump, hardly a conservative leader, came to speak at the 2011 meeting. And there were some Yiannopoulos-esque exclusions: Anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller, who had been a CPAC regular since 2009, was barred in 2013 as conservative activists sought to moderate their image after the 2012 election. She hasn’t been allowed back since. And Chris Christie was left out in the cold in 2013 after hugging Barack Obama following Hurricane Sandy.

CPAC also reflected deeper splits in the conservative coalition. In the late 2000s, as the influence of the religious right waned and libertarians grew more powerful, there were open battles over whether to include gay conservatives and atheists, as these groups became lightning rods for a growing power struggle within the movement. When GOProud, a group of gay conservatives, was allowed to serve as a sponsor in 2010 and 2011, speakers at the event denounced the decision. That opposition led to GOProud’s exclusion in 2012, an exile that lasted until the organization was dissolved in mid-2014. The Log Cabin Republicans had a protracted fight with the organization over sponsorship, which they finally won in 2016. American Atheists likewise were disinvited in 2014, only to be welcomed the next year.

CPAC has spent much of the 2010s extending and revoking invitations, seemingly unsure who, exactly, counts as a conservative. Such was the fate of Yiannopoulos: His invitation was trumpeted as a coup for free speech; his disinvitation as a coup for conservative values. That was hardly the message CPAC had hoped to deliver—that one had to choose between free speech and conservatism—but the organization’s ham-fisted handling of the whole affair ultimately drove it to that choice.

Yet CPAC does not bear all the blame here. If organizers were confused about how someone like Yiannopoulos fits into the conservative movement, they are by no means alone. The rise of Trumpism has scuttled old conservative alliances and values. The right has largely abandoned free trade and open markets. In 2015, CPAC presented a united front against Vladimir Putin; his popularity among Republicans has since surged. Trump himself—profane, scandal-ridden and uninterested in conservative ideas—has become the leader of the Republican Party and a wildly popular figure in conservative circles. The conservative resistance to Trump is vocal but small. Most of the rest of the movement set aside their values to embrace Trump, smashing their ideological compasses in the process.

How were CPAC organizers supposed to know conservatives would be put off by Yiannopoulos? After all, it was largely a small anti-Trump conservative faction that opposed the invitation at first, before the remarks about pedophilia (remarks that Yiannopoulos responded to first with defiance, then contrition, stressing that he had not meant to suggest sexual contact with underage children and teens was acceptable). For Trump supporters—and the vast majority of conservatives support Trump—the distance between the president and Yiannopoulus was not significant. He has said deeply offensive things about women and Muslims. So has Trump. He writes for Breitbart, “the platform of the alt-right.” The site’s former chairman, Steve Bannon, is Trump’s senior counselor and chief strategist. He has criticized sexual consent and celebrates sex with underage teens. Trump starred in an Access Hollywood tape that made clear he wasn’t a huge fan of sexual consent himself, and that he had no qualms with forcing himself on women. Trump and Yiannopoulos are brothers-in-arms in the fight against “political correctness,” drawing heated criticism from liberals and select members of the conservative establishment. Even now it’s not clear that the majority of conservatives were put off by Yiannopoulos’ comments, just that the firestorm had gotten a little too uncomfortable. Looking at it this way, the shocking thing isn’t that Yiannopoulos was invited. It’s that CPAC felt pressured to drop him.

With Trump in the White House and Republicans in control of Congress, conservatives have more political power today than they have had in a decade. Still, conservatism as a political movement is disintegrating, held together not by a shared commitment to ideas like democratic governance, stability or a distinct moral vision, but rather a desire for power. That makes for a movement whose boundaries are blurred beyond recognition and whose standards are impossible to detect. And that is a problem that no disinvitation can fix.