Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is has been full of ominous developments. Forty years ago, conservatism reflected Reagan's sunny optimism about America. Trump is taking conservatives to a dark place.
At Gettysburg, Lincoln said that this nation was "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." At the National Conservatism Conference, Senator Eric Schmitt repudiated Lincoln:
If America was a universal proposition, then everything we inherited from our specific Western heritage had to be abolished. So the statues come down. The names are changed. Yesterday’s heroes become today’s villains. The story of the nation has to be rewritten to align America with its true creed.
On the Right, the situation wasn’t all that different. The truth is, by the 1990s, too many on the Right had come to accept the same basic worldview as the liberal elites they claimed to oppose.
In foreign policy, trade, immigration and the domestic culture wars, too many conservatives defined the American identity as nothing more than an abstract and vaguely-defined proposition. Even if you didn’t want to immigrate here, you would be made to submit to that proposition anyway, via military crusades to bring Madisonian democracy to the furthest corners of the world.
For years, conservatives would talk as if the whole world were just Americans-in-waiting—“born American, but in the wrong place.” America was, as one neoconservative writer put it, “The First Universal Nation.”
That’s what set Donald Trump apart from the old conservatism and the old liberalism alike: He knows that America is not just an abstract “proposition,” but a nation and a people, with its own distinct history and heritage and interests.
At the National Conservatism Conference in Washington this week, perhaps the second biggest applause line came when Rep. Riley Moore (R-W.Va.) discussed his effort to award Buchanan the Presidential Medal of Freedom on the stage. The only bigger reaction came when Trump border czar Tom Homan espoused the hardline immigration rhetoric that once made Buchanan an outlier within the GOP.
For Moore, Buchanan deserved the highest civilian honor in the United States because “he was right about pretty much everything 20 years before most people realized it.” In contrast, he told POLITICO Nightly, George H.W. Bush was “wrong about almost everything.”
The conference wasn’t exactly a welcoming venue for those who adhere to the brand of Republican politics that had dominated at the end of the 20th century and the dawn of the 21st century. Even the speaker delegated to defend Trump’s airstrikes against Iranian nuclear sites, Max Abrahms, a professor at Northeastern University, took pains to insist he was not “a neo-con” — an even more deadly pejorative than “liberal” at the venue.
“Buchanan has been revered by the under-30 crowd basically the entire time that I’ve been working in professional politics,” explained Nick Solheim, the head of American Moment, an influential right wing nonprofit. “[P]eople have been posting vaporwave edits of Pat Buchanan since 2016.”...David Tell, a former aide to Bush on his 1992 campaign, agrees that Buchanan’s platform is eerily similar to the policies of Trump’s GOP. However, he added, there’s now a “Huey Long element not previously present in American conservatism.”
