The Conservative Movement at a Crossroads

A shift from dissident to establishment has opportunities—and pitfalls.

There is a moment in the life of every political movement when aspirations become reality, when the dissidents become the establishment.

For the Right, that moment is now. After the death of George Floyd in 2020, the Right functioned mostly as a dissident movement. It rallied opposition to coronavirus lockdowns, the radicalization of our institutions, and corruption in the federal government. With Donald Trump’s victory last year, however, this opposition movement earned an opportunity to become the new establishment.

I watched the process unfold behind the scenes. During the transition period, the incoming Trump administration’s best thinkers finalized their plans and, in many cases, announced them on Inauguration Day. Many of the ideas formed during the Right’s dissident period—including some of my own—suddenly became policy: abolishing the DEI bureaucracy, rescinding Lyndon Johnson’s executive order on affirmative action, dismantling the Department of Education. In the early months of this year, the feeling was triumphant.

The administration continues to do good work, but I’ve noticed a growing concern—more discussed in private than in public—about elements of the Right that have failed to make the transition. Since Inauguration Day, we’ve seen a splintering, especially in the media and intellectual worlds. Some have assumed the responsibilities that come with victory, while others prefer to remain as dissidents and, unfortunately, have fallen into various ideological rabbit holes.

Sometimes it’s a question of temperament. There will always be gadflies and pot-stirrers who fixate on criticism and grant trust only sparingly. My concern, however, is with a larger section of the Right that has proved vulnerable to three ideological trends: racialism, anti-Semitism, and conspiracism.

These ideas have trickled into the discourse for some years. Initially they were relegated to the fringes, but they appear to be entering some corners of mainstream conservatism. The last time I was in Washington, I had dinner with some young staffers who said that racialism, anti-Semitism, and conspiracism have gained a foothold among their Gen Z colleagues in Washington.

There are obvious problems with these ideologies. They are predicated on false histories, they reduce politics to negation, and they provide a mechanism for avoiding responsibility. While these ideologies are optimized for online attention, and thus make a good business for influencers, they are a disaster in the realm of practical politics.

They do not provide a viable, moral governing philosophy for institutions, and they do not make individual lives better. In particular, they do not prepare young men for the challenges of public service, the formation of families, and the demands of the world. Instead, they sap energy and stir dark emotions that make any kind of accomplishment more difficult.

It might be tempting to blame the influencers who peddle these ideas or look down on the men who fall for them. That’s a mistake. If conservatives hope to become a generational political movement, we must make a more attractive pitch to the young people who will be entering institutions and eventually taking leadership roles.

Our task, in other words, is to make responsibility more attractive than conspiracy. We should celebrate the people in politics, including officials in the Trump administration, who are taking on the burden of governance and attempting to reform corrupted institutions. They are the boys who have become men.

I can understand the fascination with being a dissident. It produces feelings of excitement, romance, and a spirit of danger. Many of the rebels of the “woke” era assumed enormous risks to take principled stands. But politics is about adapting to real-world conditions, and those conditions now require us to change. If the Right hopes to become a durable governing force in America, it must instruct its members how to make the transition from dissident to establishment without losing the spirit of courage.