The Gut Punch
On the Never Trump conservative's incomplete reckoning, the ideology it still won't indict, and the view from outside the myth.
Author’s Note: This is a compilation of my thoughts, notes, and reading as I have debated that conservatism in the American context was inevitably going to produce Trumpism, even when a significant portion of the pro-democracy coalition seems to argue against that notion, despite the historical throughlines.
I. The Fever and the Infection
Trumpism has been such an intoxicatingly powerful political force in American life. For better, in how it revealed our worst instincts with the lights on, and for worse, in how it made it genuinely difficult for a large swath of the nation to believe in America’s better angels. Does that make it now nearly impossible to argue for a credible conservatism even from the best conservative intellectuals? Not because those arguments lack rigor, and not because the people making them lack courage. But because the tradition they’re defending was always, at some foundational level, haunted?
I think about this constantly as I reflect on the series Evan Stern and I are doing: “Reality Checking the Bulwark.” The reactions have been instructive in their split. The positive responses tell us that our audience sees The Bulwark differently after our discussions. We engage seriously with the flaws of conservatism and the blind spots that make even brilliant people defend a noble-sounding ideology, thus revealing something their admiration had been obscuring. The negative responses accuse us of unfairness, specifically that we haven’t contended with the 2017–2023 era of mea culpas that became something of a literary genre for the Never Trump conservative writer.
That accusation can be misleading. Evan and I have engaged seriously with that body of work. We offer genuine credit where it’s due for honest observations, for moments of real intellectual courage, and for the considerable professional cost of speaking out against Trump from inside a conservative media ecosystem. What we are also willing to do, without apology, is name the elitism and selective blindness that sometimes sits right alongside those moments of courage.
Honesty requires both moves.
But throughout all of this, and for many years before the Bulwark series gave it a public form, I have been thinking about whether Trumpism has left such an odor and stain on the legacy of conservatism that even the best-faith, most intellectually sophisticated arguments can no longer hold up. And increasingly I think the answer is yes. Not because Trump created the problem, but because Trump revealed that the problem was always there. He is not the infection. He is the fever that finally made the infection visible.
II. From Dead Language to Domination Fetish: The JVL Arc
Jonathan V. Last, who spent his formative years at the Weekly Standard, the neoconservative movement’s house organ, eventually arrived at a verdict that would have horrified the intellectual he was training himself to become. In a 2021 piece that reads now as a kind of autopsy, he declared that conservatism, as a living political tradition, is dead. It was not hijacked and not corrupted from without.
He compared the pre-2016 conservative tradition to Old English, a language that still technically exists, and that a handful of academics can still speak (as well as some of my fraternity brothers), but no longer functions as the living medium of a living community. The ideas of human flourishing, prudence, gratitude, and caution that animated the tradition at its best still exist, he concedes, but mostly on think tank websites and op-ed pages “where people don’t want to face reality.” But what calls itself conservatism in the world as it is has no use for those ideas. What replaced them is simpler and, in its way, more honest: the raw pursuit of power, for its own ends.
By 2025, JVL had moved further still. In a piece that is perhaps the most unsparing thing he has written, he stopped calling it a dead tradition and started calling it a domination fetish. The object of modern conservatism, he argues, is not change in the sense of transforming the world toward some different arrangement. It isn’t even preservation in the Burkean sense of defending what has been handed down (despite the flaws of defending hierarchy in that). It is domination or the will to set the laws, force others to live by conservative preferences, extract wealth from whatever corner of the system is accessible, and celebrate corruption as the purest expression of will to power. He demonstrates this with evidence that is not theoretical, like the wholesale defense of January 6th insurrectionists, the lionization of Derek Chauvin and Kyle Rittenhouse, and Trump’s explicit declaration that he “couldn’t care less” about right-wing political violence. This is not peripheral to modern conservatism. It is the beating heart of it.
This four-year arc from “dead language” to “domination fetish” is itself a measure of the rot’s velocity. In 2021, JVL was writing an obituary. By 2025, he was writing a pathology report on the new organism that had emerged from the corpse.
III. What the Mea Culpa Doesn’t Confess
What makes the Never Trump conservative mea culpa genre so interesting, and so instructive for what Evan and I are doing, is not what it admits but what it carefully avoids admitting. A reader's email that JVL published and implicitly endorsed captures the evasion with almost unbearable precision. The writer reflects on how conservative elites talked about Western Civilization and Great Books, assuming in good faith that their base was actually listening. They weren’t. “We said ‘personal responsibility,’” the reader confesses, “and they heard that African Americans were poor because they deserved it.” He diagnoses this as a failure of character judgment rather than an intellectual error. The conservative intellectual class simply didn’t realize how many people were faking their engagement with ideas.
This is a strikingly self-flattering form of self-criticism. It exonerates the ideology while indicting the voters. The implicit argument is that the ideas were fine, and we were simply deceived about the character of those receiving them. But this account cannot survive contact with history. The racial semiotics of “personal responsibility” were not an accidental misreading by an unsophisticated electorate. They were deliberately constructed as a post-civil rights messaging architecture, one that allowed plausible deniability on race while communicating hierarchy loudly to those tuned to the frequency. Kevin Phillips, the architect of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, explained it with remarkable candor to the New York Times in 1970. The base was not misinterpreting the signal. They were the intended recipients. The problem was never that the conservative intellectual class was a poor judge of character.
The problem is that the ideology they were developing was providing intellectual cover for something they preferred not to name.
This is, I think, the central transaction of the mea culpa genre, which the conservative intellectual trades a small amount of institutional credibility by acknowledging that Trump was bad, that the base had bad instincts, and that things went wrong in exchange for preserving the foundational premise that the project itself was noble and the corruption was accidental. Jan-Werner Müller of Princeton names this dynamic with a cool precision that deserves to be more widely cited. He observes that there is a narcissism embedded in the very humility of these liberal and conservative confessions, a flattering assumption that only the confessor has agency, that if the intellectual class had simply spoken differently or more carefully, all would have been well. The right, in this framing, merely reacts. Everything is always backlash, never a self-generated political project. This is why it takes so long for even the sharpest observers in this tradition to name what Stephen Miller’s ethnic cleansing project actually is: not a reaction to legitimate immigration grievances, but a thing that was always wanted.
IV. A Stack of Structural Failures
The deeper problem, though, is not what individual conservative intellectuals did or failed to do. It is structural, or rather, it is a stack of structural failures that were always latent in the American conservative project and have now become visible simultaneously.
The political scientist James Kurth, writing from Swarthmore, provides the most rigorous framework for understanding this stack. He argues that American conservatism has always been paradoxically committed to conserving liberalism, and the classical liberal tradition of individual rights, free markets, and limited government. European conservatism had something genuinely hierarchical and organic to defend: feudal land relations, established churches, and aristocratic culture. American conservatism had none of that. The American founding was the revolution and the most successful liberal project in history. So what Americans called “conservatism” was always, in structural terms, the project of defending the founding liberal settlement against further transformation. American conservatives were, inescapably, liberalism’s most devoted defenders, which meant they were defending the very forces that were systematically dissolving the communities, traditions, and moral orders they also claimed to cherish.
Business conservatism championed the market dynamism that hollowed out small towns, fractured religious congregations, eliminated apprenticeship cultures, and replaced civic life with consumption. The military-security conservatives needed a massive federal bureaucracy and defense establishment that made a mockery of small-government theology. The social conservatives needed legislative intervention and moral regulation that contradicted the liberty absolutism of the libertarian wing. These three factions were held together not by a coherent philosophy but by a coalition of convenience, and a set of shared enemies, most of whom happened to be seeking inclusion in the liberal promise rather than its overthrow.
Jon Askonas, writing from the post-liberal right in Compact, adds a dimension that Kurth leaves implicit. He argues that conservatism failed not because the left won the culture war but because technological capitalism dissolved the social substrate in which traditions survive. “A technological society can have no traditions,” he writes, borrowing the insight from Marx before claiming it for the reactionary project. The conservative movement’s alliance with capital meant it was always partnering with the primary engine of cultural dissolution. The fusionist coalition didn’t just contain a contradiction. It was essentially funding its own demolition in real time, subsidizing the forces that would eventually destroy the soil in which its values might have grown.
And then there is what the Nationhood Lab, drawing on Colin Woodard’s American Nations framework, adds as the deepest layer of the problem. There was never a unified American tradition to conserve in the first place. There were always eleven distinct political cultures, including Yankeedom with its communal utopianism, Tidewater with its semi-feudal hierarchy and the labor of enslaved people at its foundation, Greater Appalachia with its warrior ethic and radical personal sovereignty, and the Deep South built explicitly around racial dominance. These nations shared a federal structure but never a common vision.
The “tradition” that conservatism claimed to be preserving was always one nation’s vision imposed on, or more accurately, extracted from, the others. When the Deep South’s founding culture became hegemonic in the Republican Party through the Southern Strategy and its long aftermath, the resulting conservatism wasn’t a deformation of some prior golden age. It was the authentic expression of one of America’s founding cultures, the one most deliberately organized around hierarchy, racial control, and resistance to federal interference with its internal arrangements.
Historian Allan Lichtman’s data, cited in my piece Debating Conservatism While the House Burned, simply confirms what this structural analysis predicts: 90 percent of conservatives backed Trump in 2024, exceeding even Reagan’s numbers. The GOP did not abandon its values and follow Trump toward corruption. It followed its values to their natural endpoint and found Trump already there. Trumpism isn’t a rupture. It is a culmination.
V. The Sunrise Ending as Load-Bearing Wall
I have been fortunate enough to be exposed to exceedingly smart conservatives and brilliant progressives. I have sat with the best arguments across the American political spectrum, read the most careful formulations, and engaged with the most rigorous defenders. But the more deeply I have studied Cold War political messaging, the rise of the New Right, and the way coalitions structure America’s political duopoly, the more I have come to believe that the conservative intellectual tradition is not simply wrong on particular questions. It is structurally cursed, condemned by its own internal contradictions to produce, with depressing regularity, the thing it claims to oppose.
The policy record is the least interesting part of this. David Todd McCarty has documented it: trickle-down economics never trickled. Tax cuts didn’t pay for themselves. Deregulation didn’t produce competition. It produced cross-sector monopolies. Anti-labor policy didn’t restore American manufacturing. It shipped it to the cheapest available labor market and left working-class communities to manage the wreckage on their own. These aren’t surprising outcomes. They are what you get when you construct an ideology whose stated values are a cultural performance and whose actual function is the preservation of existing hierarchies.
The more interesting failure is philosophical. Claes Ryn, a traditionalist conservative critic writing in Law & Liberty, argues that the conservative movement was captured from the beginning by a strain of American pragmatism that treated ideas as instruments for winning elections rather than as a living cultural practice to be developed and transmitted. Buckley’s National Review was paradigmatic of an intellectual magazine that, without its editors fully realizing it, turned philosophy into campaign strategy. The “great books” programs were marketing. The constitutional originalism was jurisprudential theater. When Trump stripped all of it away and ran on pure appetite, the intellectuals had no philosophical deep well to draw from. They had never actually dug one. What they had was a set of rhetorical positions that sounded like civilization but functioned as cover.
The need to end every American epic with a tinge of over-optimistic splendor — to insist, against all evidence, that the arc bends toward justice, that the system has self-correcting mechanisms, that the next election will restore normalcy — is not unique to conservatives. But it has a specific and recurring function in conservative intellectual life. It is the move that makes the whole performance sustainable. Admit that the founding was not just flawed but designed to produce inequality, and the project collapses. Admit that the racial codes were features rather than bugs, and the nostalgia becomes indefensible. Admit that the “tradition” being conserved was, in many instances, a tradition of domination, and there is nowhere comfortable left to stand. The sunrise ending is not naïveté. It is a load-bearing wall. I am not a psychologist, and I won’t speculate about the interior life that makes it necessary. But I can observe its function.
VI. The View from Double Consciousness
And then there is the matter of where I am standing when I observe all of this.
I have spent more than a decade studying American Cold War political messaging, the architecture of the New Right coalition, the way ideology travels through media ecosystems, and enters the bloodstream of ordinary political life. It started with a middle school obsession with the dynamism of the twentieth century and multiplied into what I can only describe as a haunted love of America’s story. America is the progeny of the industrial revolution, as one chapter in the larger and more complicated story of global modernity, as the place where the most ambitious liberal experiment ever attempted collided with the most brutal racial hierarchy the modern world produced.
I am also a Black American.
I could never see the nation through a Disney lens, not because I lacked advantages, but because I had many, and because being deemed Black in the American zeitgeist brings a specific kind of epistemological burden, rich or poor, prepared or unprepared. Du Bois named it: double consciousness.
The sense of always looking at yourself through the eyes of a world that has already rendered a verdict about you. The peculiar twoness of being both American and the object of American history’s most persistent project of exclusion.
What I have come to understand is that double consciousness is not only a psychological condition. It is an epistemological one. To see America from inside its mythology and outside its promise at the same time is to be immune to a particular species of wishful thinking that has consumed otherwise brilliant minds for a generation. The conservative intellectual class discovered in 2016 what Black Americans, Brown Americans, queer Americans, and working-class Americans had long already known: that the ideology’s promises were not universal, that the tradition being conserved had always been someone else’s tradition, and that the polite intellectual scaffolding around it was a vehicle for interests it preferred not to name directly.
They could not have seen this sooner from where they were standing. The view requires a specific position, one that does not permit the luxury of discovering the betrayal late, because it was never a betrayal in the first place. It was the design.
This is not bitterness. It is a description. And it is, I would argue, the reason that the most honest reckoning with American conservatism will not come from the conservative intellectual tradition’s most courageous internal critics — though their courage is real and their contributions are genuine. It will come from those who never had the privilege of being surprised.
This essay is part of an ongoing series of reflections accompanying “Reality Checking the Bulwark,” a podcast series with Evan Stern.
“The problem is that the ideology they were developing was providing intellectual cover for something they preferred not to name.”
This👆🏽statement right here.
The adversary of true liberalism is not true conservatism, it is populism weaponized as a road to absolute power. Left or right, the result is the same. I am sorry, I do not get all this carping on classic American conservatives when the real adversary is carrying out its plans unchecked. Picking the right battles is half of the solution. Trump is following a populist playbook even if he craves elite approval, and is willing to make his cronies the elite. That is what populists do.