Michael Lind is a contributing editor to Politico and author of Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America.

There is an air of desperation out there on the GOP campaign trail. It’s impossible not to sense it in the kinds of things being said by teetering establishment Republican candidates like Jeb Bush and John Kasich, both of whom started off the last debate virtually pleading with base voters to come to their senses about Donald Trump, who is barely identifiable as a conservative by any standard measure of ideology. Not to mention Ben Carson, whose views sound like a grab bag of life philosophies. “I want you to know I’m fed up. I’ve about had it with these people,” a flustered Kasich told a rally in his home state of Ohio this week. “What happened to our party? What happened to the conservative movement?”

It’s an excellent question. And maybe it’s time we stopped blaming the lack of traction experienced by establishment conservatives like Bush, Kasich, and Chris Christie on things like personality and debating skill, and started talking again about that thing known as “the conservative movement.” Maybe the real problem is less Jeb’s awkwardness, or Kasich’s personality, or Christie’s New Jersey bravado, than an issue that runs much deeper. The establishment candidates in this year’s Republican primary nomination campaign are out there reciting all the formulas that worked for Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes—supply-side tax cuts and more military spending. Yet the old-time conservative religion doesn’t seem to fire up the congregation, many of whose members have become idol-worshippers of strange new gods like Trump and Carson.


Why isn’t the old-time conservative religion working to fire people up any more? Maybe the reason is that it’s really, really old. So old it’s decrepit. I can testify to this as a refugee from the collapse of movement conservatism a generation ago.

True, the Republican Party itself lives on. Republicans dominates two of the three branches of the federal government, Congress—both House and Senate—and the Supreme Court. Below the federal level, the GOP is enjoying its greatest successes in generations. Today, Republicans enjoy total control of 60 percent of state legislatures and partial control of 76 percent. Only at the presidential level have the Democrats enjoyed a majority in recent electoral cycles.

But no one is quite sure what the Republican Party’s vision is or should be any more—least of all those hapless “establishment” presidential candidates who are flailing away out on the trail. Today, the greatest obstacle to majority status for the Republican Party may not be demography. It may be a superannuated conservative ideology that is increasingly disconnected not only from the values of the larger society but from the values and interests of Republicans themselves.

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If the conservative movement were a person, it would soon qualify for Social Security. Today’s legacy right originated 60 years ago as “movement conservatism.” It was born with the founding of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review in 1955. In 1964, movement conservatives captured the Republican presidential nomination for Barry Goldwater. They lost the general election that year, but in 1980 and 1984 the White House was won by a leader of their movement, Ronald Reagan.

Yet by the 1980s, movement conservatism was running out of steam. Its young radicals had mellowed into moderate statesman. By the 1970s, Buckley and his fellow conservatives had abandoned the radical idea of “rollback” in the Cold War and made their peace with the more cautious Cold War liberal policy of containment. In the 1960s, Reagan denounced Social Security and Medicare as tyrannical, but as president he did not try to repeal and replace these popular programs. When he gave up the confrontational evil-empire rhetoric of his first term toward the Soviet Union and negotiated an end to the Cold War with Mikhail Gorbachev in his second term, many conservatives felt betrayed.

Then there was Goldwater, “Mr. Conservative.” Always first and foremost a libertarian, he lashed out in the 1980s at the religious right movement led by Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. In the 1990s, orthodox conservatives denounced him as a liberal for supporting environmental protections and gay rights.

Indeed, it’s fair to say that the three great projects of the post-1955 right—repealing the New Deal, ultrahawkishness (first anti-Soviet, then pro-Iraq invasion) and repealing the sexual/culture revolution—have completely failed. Not only that, they are losing support among GOP voters.

This is nothing less than a failure of conservatism itself. After Buckley, Reagan and Goldwater had jettisoned much of their earlier hard-edged conservatism, there should have be an intellectual reformation on the American right in the 1990s. And there were a number of candidates for a redesigned conservative ideology. Reagan brain truster James Pinkerton wrote of a “new paradigm” that would accept the need for government but make it more flexible. David Brooks and Bill Kristol called for “national greatness conservatism” in the tradition of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. A more populist alternative was offered by Pat Buchanan, a mix of nativism, protectionism and “culture war.”

But instead of fading from the scene and opening the way to new thinking, old-fashioned Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan movement conservatism came back, in an even more radical form in the 2000s, catching me (by then an ex-neoconservative) and others by surprise.

When George W. Bush was elected, like many others I expected him to combine the “kinder and gentler” domestic policy of his father with the realist foreign policy symbolized by his father, Jim Baker and Brent Scowcroft. Instead W. doubled down on all the elements of the old “conservative movement” policy and left utter wreckage in his wake. Reagan had wrecked the budget with his tax cuts for the rich, but later in his two terms he presided over numerous tax increases. George W. Bush pushed through budget-wrecking tax cuts for the rich again, invoking the same supply-side theory that had been discredited in the 1980s.

Reagan left Social Security alone. George W. Bush made the partial privatization of Social Security—long the holy grail of the libertarian right—a priority of his second term. That bombed with the public.



Reagan chose his battles carefully—withdrawing from Lebanon and invading tiny Grenada. Following 9/11, George W. Bush not only invaded Afghanistan but also invaded and occupied Iraq, which had nothing to do with the Al Qaeda attacks and posed no serious threat to the U.S. or its allies. The country is still paying for that mistake more than a decade later, and its reverberations have robbed neoconservatives of most of their credibility.

Reagan was careful to distance himself from the religious right while paying it lip service. George W. Bush and Karl Rove chose to capitalize on hostility to gay rights and gay marriage for partisan purposes.

As president, therefore, W. showed far greater fidelity to the objectives and values of movement conservatism than Reagan himself had done. The result? A voter backlash inspired by the bloody debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan that helped Democrats win back Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008. Meanwhile, Bush’s Social Security privatization plan was so unpopular among Republican voters that a GOP-controlled Congress did not even bring it to a vote.

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What caused this peculiar Indian summer of radicalized movement conservatism in the Bush years? I think that the replacement of a unified conservative movement by three parallel movements played a major role.

The original conservative movement of Buckley and his allies was called “fusionism” because it sought to fuse three strands: free-market economics, militant and militarized anticommunism, and social traditionalism. Once conservatives wove this into a comprehensive political vision. But as time went on that vision started to come apart, and in the hands of different right-wing groups each strand grew more and more radicalized and unrealistic. From the 1960s to the 1980s, each of these strands found a home in a distinct movement: libertarianism, neoconservatism and the religious right. Each of these had their own magazines, their own think tanks, their own activists.

From the libertarians, the right wing of the Republican Party took radical schemes for blowing up Social Security and Medicare and replacing them with Rube Goldberg systems of vouchers and tax credits and savings accounts. But establishment conservatives rejected libertarian isolationism in foreign policy and libertarian views on sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.

Many of the neoconservatives were former Cold War liberals, at ease with the post-New Deal welfare state and organized labor. But the conservative establishment took from them only their bellicose foreign policy ideas. From evangelical Protestant members of the religious right the establishment took opposition to abortion, gay rights and pornography, while ignoring the unease felt by many religious conservatives about unfettered commercialism.

To a large extent, the three right-wing movements allowed themselves to be co-opted by the conservative establishment of the GOP in this way. Instead of trying to work out comprehensive public policies, libertarians specialized in economic policy, neoconservatives specialized in foreign policy, and religious conservatives specialized in determining licit and illicit sex and contraception.

And this specialization led to radicalization. Adherents of a coherent public philosophy who aspire to govern have to weigh costs and benefits. But activists in a single-issue movement can gain attention and raise money by pushing extreme ideas with no regard for their effects on other areas of policy. This explains, I think, why the separate and specialized libertarian, neoconservative and religious right movements have often been far more extreme than the original members of Buckley’s fusionist conservative movement were.

It is this incoherent package of ideas—not the product of a single three-sided conservative movement, but rather a selection from three parallel single-issue movements on the right—that has formed the orthodoxy of the Republican Party, ever since the acolytes of Goldwater and Reagan succeeded in marginalizing the formerly dominant Rockefeller and Eisenhower and Nixon Republicans. And it is this incoherent package of ideas that is being recycled by Republican presidential candidates today, more than three decades after Reagan effectively abandoned it after winning the White House.

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Thus you have the spectacle of insiders like Jeb Bush, Kasich and Christie trying to sell policies that were unworkable even in the Reagan years and since have become far more radical and therefore less palatable. Once again, as in previous electoral cycles, candidates for the Republican presidential nomination unveil tax plans that will provide the biggest gains to the rich, invoking supply-side economics to support the claim that these tax cuts will make up for lost revenue with increased growth. Insiders like Bush, Kasich and Christie and outsiders like Carson promise to cut Social Security or phase out Medicare. While the libertarians are promised the realization of their tax and budget fantasies, the religious right is treated to denunciations of Planned Parenthood. And all Republican candidates except Rand Paul call for more defense spending and more military action abroad. That’s in the playbook, too.

All of which raises an interesting question: Does anyone in the Republican Party actually believe the whole package of libertarian economics, neoconservative militarism and religious right social reaction? Outside of the professional conservative establishment—Fox News journalists, right-wing radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh, career conservative think-tank apparatchiks—are there any voters or donors who are true believers in the right-wing catechism?

The evidence suggests otherwise. The Republican donor class tends to be libertarian and globalist. The Republican voter class tends to be populist, protectionist and nationalist. The legacy movement conservative machine finds it increasingly difficult to straddle these divides. The stale formulas of 50-year-old movement conservatism may not prevent a Republican from winning the White House. But even if Republicans control all three branches of government in 2017, they cannot govern on the basis of inherited conservative ideology.



Even if Republicans achieve a supermajority at all levels of U.S. government, the right-wing program will not be carried into operation. Social Security and Medicare will not be abolished and replaced by some elaborate system of savings accounts dreamed up at the Cato Institute. These middle-class programs are too popular, not least with Republican voters.

A Republican president could unleash disastrous new wars of choice, like George W. Bush’s war in Iraq and Barack Obama’s war in Libya. But the neoconservative dream of a benign Pax Americana, in which China, Russia and other powers tremble before the might of Uncle Sam, is dead, never to be revived.

A unified Republican government could refuse to add new protections for racial, sexual and gender minorities. But even a Republican-majority Supreme Court is not going to repeal Roe v. Wade or allow states to outlaw gay marriage.

If these are the goals of conservatism, then the conservative movement is effectively dead, even if people who call themselves conservative Republicans keep getting elected.

I point this out as an apostate and an outsider. But at some point, iconoclasts within the Republican Party are going to rebel against the legacy of the dead ideas of the age of Buckley, Goldwater and Reagan. They will not necessarily be progressives in any sense. They may call themselves conservatives. But their conservatism will take new forms, relevant to the early 21st century, not the mid-20th century.

Recently, a diverse group of conservative thinkers like Yuval Levin of National Affairs and Republican policymakers like Sen. Mike Lee of Utah have been dubbed “reformocons.” Is the long-expected conservative intellectual reformation here at last? So far, there is little evidence. Their policy proposals are mostly minor tweaks and tax credits. House Speaker Paul Ryan has been described as a Young Turk, but his plan to voucherize and privatize entitlements is half-century-old libertarian orthodoxy.

The reformocons are the Gorbachevs of the right. They want to reform the system without questioning its fundamental premises. What the Republican Party could use instead are a few Boris Yeltsins, willing to abandon the old orthodoxy altogether and start afresh.

It’s about time. Today, we are nearly twice as far from 1962, when Milton Friedman published Capitalism and Freedom, than Friedman was from the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. When he founded National Review in 1955, William F. Buckley, Jr. was closer in time to William McKinley than to Barack Obama. The particular synthesis of free market economics, hawkish foreign policy and social reaction that defined movement conservatism was the product of particular circumstances half a century ago.

What would a successor to today’s conservative orthodoxy look like? Many in the establishment media want the GOP to move toward what might be called “Bloombergism,” after Michael Bloomberg’s “No Labels” movement. But that kind of centrism—cuts in middle-class entitlements plus increases in immigration—has no appeal outside of the bipartisan donor class.

The next right might move in other directions. It could be more libertarian in foreign policy and lifestyle issues as well as economics. But the poor showing of Rand Paul in this year’s Republican presidential primary would argue against the success of a consistently libertarian GOP.

A more promising path to a new governing conservatism was sketched out by David Frum in Dead Right (1994) and by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam in Grand New Party (2008). Despite differences, the three authors agreed that, now that the white working class is the electoral base of the Republican Party, it makes no sense for Republicans to pursue libertarian policies like cutting Social Security or voucherizing Medicare that would immiserate their own voters. The recent report that ill health and premature death among high-school-educated white Americans has risen dramatically underlines their message. One response might be a kinder and gentler Trumpism—combining a defense of middle-class entitlements with some measure of protectionism in the lower end of the labor market.

Many of the issues that divide today’s left and right might continue to divide conservatives from progressives tomorrow. Any conservative movement whose major voting bloc is the white working class is likely to object to affirmative action at the expense of non-Hispanic whites and also to resent means-tested welfare programs, as distinct from universal earned benefits for which working-class Americans are eligible. The other major constituency of the Republican Party, the business community, will continue to object to progressive policies—in the area of environmental regulation, for example—that impose excessive costs on businesses.

But it is safe to say that if representatives of working-class Republicans and the Business Roundtable sat down to hammer out a Republican Party platform, it would differ substantially in other areas from the agenda of the legacy conservative movement. Most working-class Republicans of all races support and need Medicare and Social Security. And business-class Republicans for the most part have reason to support the Export-Import Bank, along with public investment in useful infrastructure and basic R&D. A Republican Party that reflected the actual interests and values of both its popular and elite constituencies would probably have nothing to do with quixotic libertarian crusades against the Ex-Im Bank and middle-class entitlements of the kinds promoted by the Koch brothers and the Club for Growth.

So maybe Donald Trump is on to something after all.