Don­ald Trump is no prin­ci­pled con­ser­v­a­tive. His shift­ing atti­tudes on abor­tion and same-sex mar­riage have a whiff of oppor­tunism. He called for dou­ble the $275 bil­lion in infra­struc­ture spend­ing that Hillary Clin­ton pro­posed. And he’s a free-trade skeptic.

Since the late 1800s, the wolf at the door has taken many different forms: Jews, African Americans, Catholics, Communists, humanists, institutions of higher education, sexual minorities and immigrants.

So how has he hijacked the GOP? Trump’s suc­cess at tap­ping into eco­nom­ic anx­i­eties is cer­tain­ly a fac­tor in his suc­cess among white work­ing-class con­ser­v­a­tives (though his sup­port­ers are more afflu­ent than is usu­al­ly acknowl­edged). But it wasn’t just eco­nom­ic pop­ulism that allowed Trump to be the last can­di­date stand­ing. He won because he told a sto­ry that con­ser­v­a­tives nev­er tire of hear­ing, and he told it bet­ter than any­one else.

The premise is this: Our nation is under dire threat. Threats to our free­dom loom beyond and lurk with­in the nation­al bor­ders. Chris­tian­i­ty and the foun­da­tions of Amer­i­can civ­i­liza­tion are at stake.

Since the late 1800s, the wolf at the door has tak­en many dif­fer­ent forms: Jews, African Amer­i­cans, Catholics, Com­mu­nists, human­ists, insti­tu­tions of high­er edu­ca­tion, sex­u­al minori­ties and immi­grants. The promi­nence of any par­tic­u­lar vil­lain depends on the sto­ry­teller, and it varies over time. But the basic claims remain strik­ing­ly similar.

The threat that the vil­lain sup­pos­ed­ly pos­es can be a tra­di­tion­al mil­i­tary one — bombs and armies — or it can take ide­o­log­i­cal forms: dan­ger­ous ideas or cul­tur­al shifts. It can come from the out­side or the inside. The sto­ry is most pow­er­ful when all of these lines are blurred, so that the threat has both mil­i­tary and ide­o­log­i­cal ele­ments, and the bat­tle­field is both inside and out­side the nation. The Sovi­et Union of the Cold War era is a clas­sic example.

Trump has shrewd­ly cashed in on this sto­ry. Yet the sto­ry has also become the source of the GOP’s great dilem­ma. In Trump’s telling, the raw racism and big­otry that cre­at­ed the story’s ear­li­est vil­lains have resur­faced. Though they served him well in the pri­ma­ry sea­son, they don’t bode well for Trump’s gen­er­al elec­tion fate, or for a par­ty that des­per­ate­ly needs to broad­en its elec­toral base beyond a shrink­ing pool of elder­ly white voters.

A brief his­to­ry of cry­ing wolf

The half cen­tu­ry after the Civ­il War pro­duced not only a vicious racist back­lash against African Amer­i­cans, but a peri­od of strong nativist fer­vor, sparked by rapid­ly ris­ing immigration.

About 20 mil­lion immi­grants arrived in the U.S. from 1880 to 1920, most­ly from East­ern, Cen­tral and South­ern Europe. In Our Coun­try: Its Pos­si­ble Future and Its Present Cri­sis (1885), Con­gre­ga­tion­al­ist min­is­ter Josi­ah Strong offered one of the most influ­en­tial respons­es to this wave, pre­dict­ing that the world would soon ​“enter upon a new stage of its his­to­ry — the final com­pe­ti­tion of races, for which the Anglo-Sax­on is being schooled.” Strong pro­posed a mas­sive Protes­tant mis­sion­ary cam­paign to Chris­tian­ize the nation’s cities and, ulti­mate­ly, the world. The book report­ed­ly sold 175,000 copies in the ear­ly years after its pub­li­ca­tion — a best­seller for the time.

Through the ear­ly decades of the 20th cen­tu­ry, influ­en­tial social reform­ers across the polit­i­cal spec­trum — includ­ing many white pro­gres­sives — fol­lowed Strong in defend­ing the nation against the threats from immi­grants, racial and reli­gious minori­ties, and the gen­er­al­ly ​“unfit,” a broad cat­e­go­ry that encom­passed the poor and the phys­i­cal­ly and men­tal­ly dis­ad­van­taged. The per­va­sive racism of the World War I era was expressed most pow­er­ful­ly in the Ku Klux Klan, which flour­ished in the first half of the 1920s and direct­ed its vio­lence not only against African Amer­i­cans and immi­grants but against reli­gious minori­ties — Jews and Catholics in particular.

Ama­teur anthro­pol­o­gist Madi­son Grant summed up the ener­gies that fed into the Klan’s rise in his The Pass­ing of the Great Race (1916), a sem­i­nal text of the emerg­ing eugen­ics move­ment. ​“Altru­is­tic ideals,” Grant wrote, ​“are sweep­ing the nation toward a racial abyss.” He meant that phil­an­thropic efforts aimed at help­ing ​“unfit” races threat­ened the dom­i­nance of the ​“supe­ri­or” race of white Nordic peo­ple. (Cer­tain white eth­nic groups, includ­ing Irish and Ital­ians, were often includ­ed in the ​“unfit” races.) The book was wide­ly read and endorsed by Amer­i­can politi­cians — Theodore Roo­sevelt applaud­ed its ​“fine fear­less­ness” — and it is still wide­ly read, cir­cu­lat­ed and cel­e­brat­ed with­in white nation­al­ist circles.

World War II marked a trans­for­ma­tive moment in the sto­ry of Amer­i­can con­ser­vatism, as com­mu­nism moved to the fore­ground as the most promi­nent civ­i­liza­tion­al threat.

In 1951, William F. Buck­ley pro­vid­ed the move­ment with its mod­ern foun­da­tion­al text in God and Man at Yale. Fresh­ly grad­u­at­ed, young Buck­ley looked back on his under­grad­u­ate days with con­ster­na­tion. ​“I had always been taught, and expe­ri­ence had for­ti­fied the teach­ings, that an active faith in God and a rigid adher­ence to Chris­t­ian prin­ci­ples are the most pow­er­ful influ­ences toward the good life,” he wrote in the fore­word. But at Yale, he found that he was ​“one of a small group of stu­dents who fought … against those who seek to sub­vert reli­gion and indi­vid­u­al­ism.” A devout Catholic, Buck­ley shift­ed the bat­tle away from explic­it inter­faith antag­o­nisms. The new ene­mies would be creep­ing com­mu­nism, god­less­ness, and cul­tur­al­ly crit­i­cal insti­tu­tions, like Yale, that betrayed the nation by pro­mot­ing ​“athe­is­tic socialism.”

Wis­con­sin Sen. Joe McCarthy plant­ed that flag dra­mat­i­cal­ly in the pub­lic square in the ear­ly 1950s, and though his wild accu­sa­tions even­tu­al­ly back­fired, anti-com­mu­nism remained a vital source of ener­gy and pas­sion for the post­war con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment. In 1964, for exam­ple, a Mis­souri-based Bap­tist preach­er, John Stormer, regur­gi­tat­ed McCarthy’s themes in None Dare Call It Trea­son. It report­ed­ly sold 7 mil­lion copies; a new edi­tion was pub­lished in 1990. ​“A cold analy­sis of the world sit­u­a­tion and of the degree of con­trol exer­cised by the col­lec­tivists can only pro­duce the real­iza­tion that the odds against our sur­vival are great,” Stormer wrote.

Even with anti-com­mu­nism ascen­dant, explic­it racism remained a dis­tinct ele­ment with­in main­stream con­ser­vatism through at least the mid-1960s. Buck­ley was an aggres­sive crit­ic of the civ­il rights move­ment, for exam­ple, explain­ing in 1957 that ​“claims of civ­i­liza­tion super­sede those of uni­ver­sal suf­frage.” He was address­ing the ques­tion of whether the white race is ​“enti­tled to take such mea­sures as are nec­es­sary to pre­vail, polit­i­cal­ly and cul­tur­al­ly, in areas” where it is a numer­i­cal minor­i­ty. He thought it was, since ​“for the time being, it is the advanced race.”

Through the late 1970s and 1980s, as the Chris­t­ian Right matured as an orga­nized polit­i­cal force and became the GOP’s base, con­ser­v­a­tive polemics focused less on explic­it­ly racist appeals or com­mu­nist sub­ver­sion and more on ​“sec­u­lar human­ism.” These jere­mi­ads had a famil­iar con­spir­a­to­r­i­al edge, but they broad­ened the cri­tique to posi­tion com­mu­nism as one vari­ety of human­ism, which they defined as a phi­los­o­phy that priv­i­leged human abil­i­ties and rea­son over faith in, and total sub­mis­sion to, God’s agency.

“Human­ism means that … man is the mea­sure of all things,” wrote Fran­cis Scha­ef­fer, an influ­en­tial Chris­t­ian apol­o­gist. Scha­ef­fer thought there could be no com­pro­mise between human­ism and Chris­tian­i­ty, and evan­gel­i­cals respond­ed to this mes­sage with a burst of insti­tu­tion build­ing, focused espe­cial­ly on ele­men­tary and sec­ondary schools. Sub­se­quent schol­ar­ship has shown that their cre­ation of edu­ca­tion­al enclaves in the 1970s was, in large part, dri­ven by racial fears and ani­mosi­ties about blacks. But the explic­it jus­ti­fi­ca­tion was the defense of Chris­tian­i­ty and civ­i­liza­tion against the onslaught of humanism.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, a vari­a­tion on this cri­tique found an audi­ence far beyond evan­gel­i­cal cir­cles through a flood of influ­en­tial books and arti­cles decry­ing the cor­rup­tion of Amer­i­can high­er edu­ca­tion, brought on by con­ser­v­a­tives’ despair over the increas­ing pres­ence of women and minori­ties on cam­pus and the cur­ric­u­lar reforms, such as the cre­ation of race and gen­der stud­ies depart­ments, that reflect­ed the new diver­si­ty of the insti­tu­tions. In 1987, Allan Bloom, a sec­u­lar Jew, gave this cri­tique its most pol­ished expres­sion in The Clos­ing of the Amer­i­can Mind—in which he explained ​“how high­er edu­ca­tion has failed democ­ra­cy and impov­er­ished the souls of today’s stu­dents.” It remained on the New York Times best­seller list for sev­er­al months.

There are still dis­tinct echoes of these eras with­in the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, but 9⁄ 11 ini­ti­at­ed a sharp tran­si­tion by refo­cus­ing con­ser­v­a­tive fears on per­ceived for­eign threats. The demo­nized immi­grants of a cen­tu­ry ago, large­ly of Euro­pean ori­gin, have been replaced with Lati­no immi­grants, espe­cial­ly Mex­i­cans; the reli­gious big­otry once aimed at Jews and Catholics has been trained on Mus­lims. In that sense, the sto­ry has come full circle.

Both groups, Mex­i­cans and Mus­lims, can be por­trayed as pow­er­ful vil­lains, because they pose per­ceived threats that exist with­in and beyond the nation’s bor­ders: ​“They’re tak­ing our jobs,” in the case of Mex­i­cans; and ​“they’re plot­ting war on us,” in the case of Mus­lims. And the lat­ter nar­ra­tive offers not only a mil­i­tary dimen­sion — the ​“war on ter­ror” — but also an ide­o­log­i­cal one. Since 2010, at least sev­en states, most­ly in the South and Mid­west, have passed laws to address the non-exis­tent threat that Sharia law pos­es to the Amer­i­can legal sys­tem. The Mus­lim threat — like the for­mer Sovi­et Union — is per­ceived as all-con­sum­ing and every­where at once.

A Trumpoca­lypse?

The racial and reli­gious hos­til­i­ty of Don­ald Trump’s cam­paign is jar­ring in part because, before 9⁄ 11 , the con­ser­v­a­tive end-of-civ­i­liza­tion sto­ry focused on threats that had lit­tle to do, explic­it­ly, with race or reli­gion. And while racial and reli­gious big­otry had been sim­mer­ing with­in the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment since the World Trade Cen­ter attacks, they’d been con­fined pri­mar­i­ly to the movement’s pun­dits and pub­li­ca­tions — as when Ann Coul­ter wrote last year, in Adiós Amer­i­ca, ​“The only thing that stands between Amer­i­ca and obliv­ion is a total immi­gra­tion mora­to­ri­um. … No mat­ter how clear­ly laws are writ­ten, gov­ern­ment bureau­crats con­nive to con­fer cit­i­zen­ship on peo­ple that a major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans would not let in as tourists, much less as our fel­low citizens.”

With the pos­si­ble excep­tion of Ted Cruz, no main­stream GOP politi­cian would have said any­thing near­ly as incen­di­ary. But Trump, with his dem­a­gog­ic instincts and total lack of par­ty loy­al­ty, was free to join Coul­ter in tak­ing the end-of-civ­i­liza­tion sto­ry back to its roots in racial and reli­gious ani­mus. It is an open ques­tion where the sto­ry will take him now — and how his par­ty, and the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment with it, will nav­i­gate his aftermath.