How the Left Changed the Right

 

From Reagan-Era Liberalism to Modern Progressive Politics

To understand what happened to conservatism, we also have to understand what happened to the left.

The right did not change in isolation. Political movements are not closed systems. They react to each other. They define themselves against each other. They borrow from each other. They harden in response to each other.

That is especially true in a two-party system.

So when we ask why the American right has become more populist, more suspicious, more combative, and less philosophically conservative, part of the answer is internal. The Republican Party lost its own intellectual center. It drifted from Reagan conservatism into neoconservatism, then into populist anti-progressivism.

But that is only part of the story.

The other part is that the American left changed as well.

The liberalism of Reagan’s time is not the same thing as the progressivism of today. They are related, of course. Modern progressivism did not spring from nowhere. But the tone, priorities, assumptions, institutional power, and moral vocabulary of the left have changed dramatically. It has been a long transition - starting with FDR's New Deal, and through LBJ's expansion. Even the definition changed. Historically, liberalism was equated with the ideals coming out of the scientific revolution, arising from John Locke and Adam Smith (See CATO's essay), and shifting more to a collectivist mindset (you could say it shifted to a different definition of liberal to being generous).

That change is one of the major causes of the current reaction on the right.

Reagan Faced Liberalism, Not Today’s Progressivism

When Ronald Reagan rose to national power, he was opposing a left that was still recognizably liberal in the older American sense.

It believed in a larger role for government. It supported labor unions, social welfare programs, civil rights enforcement, progressive taxation, and federal protection for vulnerable groups. It was more secular than the right, more suspicious of markets, and more comfortable with regulation.

That was a real ideological difference.

Conservatives opposed much of it because they believed it weakened individual liberty, expanded federal power, undermined family independence, and transferred too much responsibility from citizens and communities to government agencies.

But Reagan-era liberalism was still connected to many older American assumptions. 

It was patriotic. It had strong working-class roots. It included many religious voters, especially Catholics and mainline Protestants. It had anti-communist elements. It generally accepted the legitimacy of the American founding, even while arguing that America needed to live up to its promises.

That matters.

The old liberal might say, “America has failed to fully honor its ideals.”

The modern progressive is more likely to say, “America’s ideals were themselves corrupt from the beginning.”

Those are very different claims.

One invites reform.

The other invites demolition.

The Older Liberal Project

The older liberal project was built around redistribution, social protection, and civil rights.

It was concerned with economic inequality, racial discrimination, worker protections, poverty, education access, health care, and the power imbalance between corporations and individuals.

Conservatives disagreed with many liberal solutions. They argued that the welfare state could weaken families, that high taxation could punish productivity, that bureaucracy could crowd out local responsibility, and that federal power could become a threat to liberty.

Those arguments still matter.

But the older liberal project was at least operating within a recognizable American framework. It still spoke the language of constitutional rights, citizenship, equal protection, public duty, and national improvement.

It wanted to use government to protect people from what it saw as the harshness of markets, prejudice, and unequal opportunity.

Conservatives could argue with that. They could say it went too far. They could say it misunderstood human nature. They could say it created dependency. They could say it confused compassion with bureaucracy.

But there was still a shared civic vocabulary.

That shared vocabulary has been badly damaged.

The Clinton Moment: Triangulation and Overlap

The 1990s are important because they show how different the political world used to be.

Bill Clinton was a Democrat, but he governed in a way that recognized the political strength of conservatism. He spoke about welfare reform, crime, balanced budgets, illegal immigration, personal responsibility, and the importance of work.

That does not mean Clinton was a conservative. He was not.

But the fact that a Democratic president felt the need to speak that language tells us something important about the political environment of the time.

There was still overlap.

There were still Democrats who wanted to be seen as tough on crime. There were still Democrats who were willing to restrict welfare dependency. There were still Democrats who wanted to appeal to working-class voters who were patriotic, religious, and culturally moderate.

That overlap made American politics less cleanly ideological than it is now.

It also created a different kind of Republican Party. Republicans could still argue mainly about taxes, regulation, judges, crime, welfare, defense, and the size of government. The culture war existed, but it had not yet swallowed nearly everything.

Universities and the Long March Through Institutions

At the same time, another development was happening beneath the surface.

Universities were changing.

Ideas that had once been limited to radical academic circles began moving into teacher training, law schools, corporate HR departments, journalism, entertainment, nonprofit institutions, and eventually government agencies.

This included postmodernism, critical theory, radical feminism, race-based legal theory, queer theory, anti-colonial theory, and other intellectual traditions that framed society primarily through power, oppression, identity, and systemic domination.

Not all of those theories are identical. They should not be lazily lumped together. But they shared a common tendency: they moved the focus away from individual character, individual rights, and common citizenship, and toward group identity, structural oppression, and institutional guilt.

That changed the moral vocabulary of the left.

The older liberal asked, “How do we make sure every individual has a fair chance?”

The newer progressive increasingly asks, “How do we dismantle systems of oppression?”

Again, those are not the same question.

The first still assumes the individual as the basic unit of moral concern.

The second often treats the individual as a representative of a group category.

That is one of the most important changes in modern politics.

Obama and the Rise of Identity Politics

Barack Obama did not create identity politics, but his presidency marked an important transition point.

Obama himself often spoke in measured, liberal, constitutional language. In many ways, he was personally more restrained than the movement that later grew in his wake.

But his presidency coincided with major changes in media, activism, universities, racial politics, social media, and progressive organizing. During and after the Obama years, identity politics became far more central to Democratic coalition-building and progressive moral language.

Race, gender, sexuality, immigration status, religion, and national identity became increasingly politicized. Activist frameworks that had been growing for decades became mainstream faster than many people expected.

Social media accelerated this. Ideas that once moved through academic journals and activist organizations could suddenly spread instantly through hashtags, viral videos, online outrage cycles, and institutional pressure campaigns.

The left became more emotionally intense, more identity-centered, and more willing to punish dissent inside its own coalition.

That had consequences.

Many ordinary Americans who had considered themselves moderate liberals began to feel politically homeless. Some stayed quiet. Some moved right. Some became anti-woke liberals. Some simply stopped trusting institutions.

That is why figures like Bill Maher are significant. He is not a conservative. He is still a liberal in many obvious ways. But he regularly criticizes the modern left because he sees that something has changed. He recognizes that the left has become more censorious, more ideological, and more detached from ordinary common sense.

That matters because it shows that criticism of modern progressivism is not only coming from conservatives.

The Great Awokening

The period, sometimes called the “Great Awokening,” intensified the shift.

This was the period when elite institutions — universities, media organizations, corporations, nonprofits, professional associations, and parts of government — rapidly adopted the language of diversity, equity, inclusion, systemic racism, privilege, gender identity, anti-racism, and decolonization.

Some of this was framed as compassion. Some of it was framed as justice. Some of it was a sincere attempt to correct real wrongs.

But much of it became ideological enforcement.

Speech norms changed. Hiring norms changed. School curricula changed. Corporate training changed. Public rituals changed. Language rules changed. People were not merely asked to treat others fairly. They were asked to accept an entire ideological framework about identity and power.

That is where many people began to rebel.

They did not object to treating people with dignity. They objected to being told that disagreement was bigotry, that biology was hate speech, that equal treatment was insufficient, that America was essentially oppressive, and that every institution had to be rebuilt around progressive categories.

This is one of the key reasons the modern right became more reactive.

People felt that progressive ideology had moved from persuasion to coercion.

And once people believe they are being coerced, they stop behaving like ordinary political opponents. They begin behaving like insurgents.

COVID and Institutional Distrust

COVID deepened the rupture.

The pandemic was a public-health crisis, but it also became a crisis of institutional trust. Government agencies, public-health authorities, schools, media outlets, technology companies, and political leaders all became part of the conflict.

Some public-health measures were defensible. Some were poorly explained. Some were inconsistent. Some were heavy-handed. Some continued long after public trust had already been damaged.

The bigger issue was not only the policies. It was the way institutions communicated.

People were told to trust the experts, but the experts often changed guidance without enough humility. People were told misinformation was dangerous, but then watched institutions suppress or mock claims that later became more plausible. People were told restrictions were morally necessary, then watched politically favored protests treated differently than religious gatherings, schools, small businesses, or funerals.

This created a profound sense of unfairness.

For the right, COVID confirmed a growing suspicion: that modern progressivism was not merely an ideology of compassion, but an ideology of control.

That perception may not always be fair in every case. But politically, it was powerful.

It fed the rise of anti-institutional populism, MAHA-style health politics, distrust of pharmaceutical companies and public-health agencies, and the belief that expert systems had become politically captured.

Gender, Speech, and the Breaking Point

Few issues accelerated the cultural conflict more than gender ideology.

For many Americans, the rapid shift on gender was disorienting. The public moved in a short period from tolerance and anti-bullying language to demands that schools, sports, medicine, corporations, and government agencies adopt contested claims about gender identity as official truth.

This was not experienced by many people as simple kindness toward individuals. It was experienced as forced participation in an ideological claim.

That distinction matters.

Most people are willing to be kind to a struggling person. Far fewer are willing to be compelled to say something they believe is false, or to accept policies affecting children, parents, women’s spaces, athletics, medicine, and education without debate.

The left often treated resistance as hatred.

The right often treated the issue as proof that the left had lost contact with reality.

The result was escalation.

And again, this pushed the right further away from ordinary conservatism and toward a more aggressive anti-progressive posture.

The Left’s View of America Changed

Perhaps the deepest shift is the left’s changing view of America itself.

The older liberal critique was reformist. It said America had not lived up to its ideals. That critique could be severe, but it still appealed to the founding promise.

The newer progressive critique often goes further. It argues that the founding ideals themselves were compromised, hypocritical, exclusionary, or merely a cover for domination.

This is a major philosophical turn.

If America is basically good but flawed, then reform makes sense.

If America is fundamentally corrupt, then transformation or dismantling becomes the logical goal.

That difference explains much of the emotional divide in the country.

Conservatives hear modern progressive rhetoric and conclude that the left does not want to improve America. They conclude the left wants to replace it.

Progressives hear conservative resistance and conclude the right wants to preserve oppression.

Once both sides reach those conclusions, ordinary compromise becomes nearly impossible.

How the Left Changed the Right

The transformation of the left changed the right in several ways.

First, it made cultural issues central. The right became less focused on taxes and regulation and more focused on schools, speech, gender, immigration, national identity, and institutional capture.

Second, it weakened trust in expertise. When universities, media, medicine, public health, and corporations appeared to adopt the same progressive moral language, many on the right concluded that institutions had become politically unified against them.

Third, it made populism more attractive. If institutions are captured, then institutional candidates seem useless. Voters begin looking for wrecking balls.

Fourth, it reduced interest in procedural restraint. When people believe the other side is using institutions to dominate them, they become less concerned with norms and more concerned with winning.

Fifth, it turned anti-leftism into the main Republican glue. That is politically powerful, but philosophically thin.

This is the key point: the right’s reaction to the left is understandable, but it is not sufficient.

A movement can be right about the danger of progressivism and still be wrong about what should replace it.

The Timeline

The shift did not happen all at once. It unfolded over decades.

1960s–1970s: The New Left and Cultural Upheaval

Civil rights, Vietnam, feminism, sexual revolution, student radicalism, and anti-establishment politics reshaped the Democratic coalition. Some of this addressed real injustice. Some of it also introduced a more adversarial view of American institutions.

The right responded with law and order, anti-communism, religious revival, and renewed emphasis on family and national stability.

1980s: Reagan Versus Old Liberalism

Reagan opposed big government, high taxes, Soviet communism, secular liberal elites, and welfare-state dependency. But the liberalism he faced still had strong patriotic, blue-collar, and culturally moderate elements.

The right remained optimistic and philosophical.

1990s: Clinton Moment

Clinton recognized the strength of conservatism and adopted language around welfare reform, crime, balanced budgets, and personal responsibility.

This period still had ideological overlap. The parties disagreed sharply, but the cultural distance was not yet what it is today.

2000s: Post-9/11 Politics and Institutional Drift

The right became consumed by national security, terrorism, and foreign policy. Meanwhile, universities and cultural institutions continued moving leftward.

The groundwork was being laid for a larger cultural collision.

2010s: Obama, Social Media, and Identity Politics

Identity-based activism became more mainstream. Social media rewarded outrage. Campus politics moved into journalism, entertainment, corporations, and government language.

The reaction to Obama’s policy gave rise to the Tea Party, which is the beginning of the Right’s populist movement.

Late 2010s–2020s: The Progressive Institutional Moment

DEI, gender ideology, anti-racism, censorship debates, COVID mandates, public-health distrust, and anti-national narratives brought the conflict into schools, workplaces, churches, medicine, sports, and family life.

The right increasingly saw itself not as a conservative movement within normal politics, but as a resistance movement against institutional capture.

That is where we are now.

The Bill Maher Indicator

Bill Maher is useful as a cultural marker because he shows that the critique of the modern left is not limited to conservatives.

Maher remains liberal on many issues. He is not part of the religious right. He is not a MAGA populist. He is not a Reagan conservative.

And yet he has become one of the more visible critics of the modern left’s excesses. He regularly criticizes woke language policing, progressive intolerance, identity politics, and anti-American tendencies.

That matters.

When conservatives criticize the left, many progressives dismiss it as partisan. But when liberals criticize the left, it reveals an internal fracture.

The existence of anti-woke liberals tells us something important: the left has moved far enough that some of its own older liberals no longer recognize it.

That is not a small thing.

Conservatism Without a Compass

What Happened to the American Right?
Part one of a multipart series

One thing the current political environment demonstrates is that the word conservatism has almost lost its meaning.

In ordinary public conversation, it has become little more than a euphemism for “the right.” That creates a lot of confusion, because there is a difference between the dictionary meaning of conservatism, the historical meaning of American conservatism, and the way the word is currently used in party politics.

Those are not the same thing.

And because most people arguing about this do not know the history — or do know it and choose to ignore it for political advantage — we end up talking past each other. We use the same words, but we do not mean the same things.

That is a serious problem.

A political philosophy should be more than a reaction. It is supposed to explain what we are trying to preserve, why it matters, what we are willing to reform, and what limits we will not cross. But right now, much of what gets called conservatism is not really a philosophy. It is a coalition of people who oppose the modern left.

That may be enough to win some elections. It is not enough to govern a country.

Reagan Conservatism as a Reference Point

A useful place to begin is Reagan conservatism, not because Ronald Reagan was perfect, and not because the 1980s can simply be recreated, but because Reagan conservatism had a reasonably clear center.

In 11 Principles of a Reagan Conservative, Paul Kengor and Edwin Meese III identify those principles as:

• freedom
• faith
• family
• sanctity and dignity of human life
• American exceptionalism
• the Founders’ wisdom and vision
• lower taxes
• limited government
• peace through strength
• anti-communism
• belief in the individual

That list matters because it shows that conservatism wasn’t just “whatever the Republican Party happens to be doing this year.” It was a set of moral, constitutional, economic, and foreign-policy assumptions.

There was a worldview behind it.

Reagan conservatism was optimistic. It believed America had flaws, but that America itself was not the problem. It believed in individual liberty, but also personal responsibility. It believed in faith and family as essential institutions. It believed government had a role, but that government should be limited, restrained, and subordinate to the people.

Most importantly, it believed that the individual mattered.

That older conservatism philosophical roots. You could agree or disagree with it, but at least it was something definite enough to discuss.

That is much harder to say today.

The Left Changed Too — and That Matters

The right did not fracture in a vacuum.

One of the mistakes in many discussions of modern conservatism is that they treat the transformation of the right as though it happened by itself. It did not. The right changed partly because the left changed.

The liberalism Reagan faced was very different from the progressive movement conservatives face today.

The Democratic Party of Reagan’s era still had strong labor, Catholic, blue-collar, patriotic, anti-communist, and culturally moderate elements. Many Democrats favored redistribution, union power, civil rights enforcement, social programs, and federal protections for vulnerable citizens. That was still a serious disagreement with conservatism. It was not nothing. The older liberal tradition did contain a core suspicion of unfettered individual liberty, especially when liberty produced economic inequality or social instability.

But that older liberalism generally did not present America itself as an illegitimate project.

It did not generally argue that the founding was fundamentally corrupt, that speech should be filtered by identity categories, that biology is subordinate to ideology, that equal treatment is insufficient unless replaced by equity-based administration, or that institutions should be judged primarily by whether they reproduce oppression.

That is a major difference.

Modern progressivism is not simply old liberalism with more enthusiasm. It increasingly frames politics through identity, oppression, structural guilt, speech control, administrative enforcement, and the moral redefinition of basic social categories. That shift helps explain why many people on the right stopped thinking like conservatives and started thinking like resistance fighters.

This does not justify every reaction on the right. Some of those reactions are foolish, reckless, and self-defeating. But it does explain why anti-leftism became the emotional glue of the Republican coalition.

If the left had remained closer to Clinton-era liberalism — socially liberal, economically interventionist, but still broadly patriotic and institutionally restrained — the right likely would not look the way it does now. The rise of modern progressivism helped produce the rise of modern populist conservatism.

That is the context. It should be included. But it must not become an excuse.

Because reaction is not philosophy.

The Post-9/11 Shift

After 9/11, the Republican Party changed. The older Reagan coalition did not disappear, but the center of gravity moved. Foreign policy and national security took over the public identity of the GOP.

This is where neoconservatism became dominant.

Neoconservatism was not the same thing as Reagan conservatism. It overlapped with it in some areas, especially anti-communism and American strength, but it had a different emphasis. It was much more focused on American global dominance, interventionism, democracy promotion, and the use of military strength to reshape dangerous parts of the world.

A lot of the neoconservative project was tied to a post-Cold War belief that America had both the ability and the obligation to maintain a kind of global order. After 9/11, that worldview gained enormous power.

This is one of the major reasons the right fractured.

Many ordinary conservatives supported strong national defense. They supported fighting terrorism. They supported protecting the country. But that is not the same thing as supporting endless war, nation-building, surveillance, and the expansion of executive power.

Those things sit uneasily beside limited government.

And this is where the Republican establishment lost a lot of trust. For years, the party asked its voters to support wars and federal power in the name of national security, while still claiming to be the party of limited government and constitutional restraint.

That contradiction did damage.

Executive Power Became a Bipartisan Problem

This was not only a Republican problem.

After 9/11, executive power grew under both parties. Republicans expanded the security state. Democrats inherited much of it and, in some cases, normalized it.

The Obama administration’s use of drones, including the targeted killing of American citizens suspected of terrorism, is one of the clearest examples. Whatever one thinks of the national-security justification, it raised a serious constitutional question: can the executive branch identify, target, and kill an American citizen without ordinary due process?

That should trouble any serious conservative.

It should also trouble any serious liberal.

But by that point, much of American politics had already become so partisan that people judged executive power differently depending on which party controlled it. That is one of the signs of political decay. Once principle becomes subordinate to team loyalty, constitutional limits become negotiable.

And negotiable limits are eventually no limits at all.

Trump Did Not Create the Crack-Up

Donald Trump did not create the fracture in the Republican Party. He revealed it.

Trump was not a Reagan conservative. He was not especially philosophical. He was not primarily a limited-government constitutionalist, a religious conservative, a libertarian, or a traditional free-market Republican.

He was a populist fighter.

That is what many people missed. His voters were often not looking for a political philosopher. They were looking for someone who would fight back.

A lot of Republican voters had come to believe that the Democratic Party hated them, the media mocked them, the universities despised them, corporations used them, and Republican leaders ignored them. Trump stepped into that space and gave them a voice — crude, undisciplined, often self-destructive, and unmistakably combative.

For many voters, that was enough.

They did not ask, “Is this man a conservative in the Reagan sense?”

They asked, “Is he fighting the people who have been attacking us?”

That is the emotional core of MAGA.

And whether one likes Trump or not, that should be understood clearly. MAGA is not primarily an ideology. It is a populist reaction to institutional betrayal, cultural displacement, economic frustration, and political contempt.

Some of that reaction is justified. Some of it is dangerous. But it is not random.

The Current Right Is a Coalition, Not a Philosophy

The American right today is not one thing. There are several different factions operating under the same broad anti-left umbrella.

That is why the word “conservative” has become so slippery.

There are still traditional Reagan conservatives. They believe in limited government, faith, family, free enterprise, constitutionalism, American strength, and individual responsibility. But they no longer clearly control the Republican coalition.

There are neoconservatives and interventionists, who remain focused on American global leadership and military power. Their influence has faded with the grassroots, but they still exist in policy circles and among parts of the establishment.

There are MAGA populists, who are focused on immigration, trade, national identity, institutional corruption, anti-globalism, anti-progressivism, and loyalty to Trump as the central fighter. They are less interested in abstract philosophy than in visible confrontation.

There are Christian nationalists, though that term is often used too loosely. Some are simply Christians who believe America needs a moral foundation. Others really do want a more explicitly religious state. Those are not the same thing and should not be lazily lumped together.

There are accelerationists and black-pilled voices on the right who believe the system is too corrupt to save. They mirror the revolutionary left more than they realize. Both sides believe the existing order must be torn down. Both are tempted by authoritarianism. Both are ultimately nihilistic.

There is a governance or establishment wing, which values stability, business confidence, tax policy, deregulation, and institutional continuity. Its weakness is that it often surrenders cultural ground while trying to preserve office and access.

There is the tech right, represented by Silicon Valley defectors, AI advocates, techno-libertarians, and people focused on innovation, deregulation, government inefficiency, and high-skilled immigration. They tend to oppose progressive control systems, but they are often thin on traditional culture, family, religion, and local community.

There is the MAHA faction, focused on health, food, pharmaceutical power, chronic disease, institutional distrust, and the corruption of public-health systems.

There are also the hard-line fiscal conservatives and Freedom Caucus types, who are probably closest to old small-government conservatism in terms of spending, federal power, and individual liberty.

All of these groups are currently somewhere on “the right.”

But they are not all conservative in the same way.

Some are conservative philosophically. Some are reactionary. Some are populist. Some are libertarian. Some are nationalist. Some are anti-progressive. Some are simply anti-Democrat.

That distinction matters.

Anti-Left Is Not Enough

The biggest problem on the right today is that anti-leftism has become a substitute for philosophy.

That is understandable, but it is not sufficient.

The modern progressive movement has become increasingly radical in its view of America, identity, institutions, gender, speech, education, and power. Many people on the right see that plainly and are right to oppose it.

But opposition alone does not answer the deeper questions.

What is the purpose of government?

What is the role of the family?

What does liberty require?

What do we owe to the Constitution?

What is the proper relationship between religion and public life?

What are America’s obligations abroad?

What should be handled federally, and what should be handled locally?

What kind of citizens are we trying to form?

A serious conservatism has to answer those questions.

If it does not, the movement becomes nothing more than a temporary alliance of people who dislike the same enemies. That can create electoral energy, but it cannot create durable order.

Anger can gather a crowd. It cannot build a civilization.

The Failure of Historical Education

A major reason this discussion is so malformed is that our public education and university systems have done a poor job teaching history, political philosophy, constitutional structure, and basic civic reasoning.

Many Americans know political labels, but they do not know where those labels came from. They know slogans, but not the philosophical assumptions underneath them. They have opinions about fascism, socialism, liberalism, nationalism, conservatism, democracy, republicanism, and authoritarianism, but often cannot define those terms in a historically serious way.

That makes the public easy to manipulate.

If people do not understand history, they can be convinced that every current crisis is unprecedented. If they do not understand political philosophy, they can be convinced that every policy preference is a moral absolute. If they do not understand constitutional government, they can be convinced that power is good as long as their side controls it.

That is how republics decay.

Not all at once. Not usually through one dramatic event. More often, they decay through confusion, laziness, faction, resentment, and the slow loss of shared principles.

Christian Nationalism, Liberation Theology, and Political Religion

One of the more complicated camps on the right is what gets called Christian nationalism.

The term is often used carelessly, but there is a real issue underneath it. Some Christians see the collapse of moral order and conclude that the only solution is to use political power to restore Christian society. That impulse is understandable, but it is also dangerous if it confuses discipleship with state control.

There is a left-wing version of this problem too. On the left, liberation theology often presents Christ primarily as the liberator from social oppressors. Sin becomes externalized into systems, classes, races, or institutions. Salvation becomes political restructuring.

On the right, a mirror-image version can appear. Christ becomes the liberator from secularists, atheists, anti-Christians, and cultural enemies. Sin is again externalized. The problem becomes “those people” who must be defeated, reformed, or removed so that a righteous society can emerge.

Both versions miss something central.

Christ came to redeem the soul, not simply rearrange political power. He came to liberate mankind from sin, not simply to transfer coercive authority from one faction to another.

That does not mean religion has no place in public life. Of course it does. A free society depends on moral people. Law cannot do all the work. But when religion becomes primarily a political weapon, it loses its spiritual center.

That is a danger on both the left and the right.

Accelerationism Is Despair Wearing Armor

Another dangerous camp is the accelerationist impulse.

This exists on both sides.

On the left, accelerationists believe America is inherently oppressive and must be dismantled so something new can be built.

On the right, black-pilled accelerationists believe the system is so corrupt, so captured, and so hostile to traditional America that it cannot be repaired. Therefore, they conclude it must collapse before anything better can emerge.

Both positions are forms of despair.

They look bold, but they are actually a surrender of responsibility. They are the politics of people who have lost faith in persuasion, reform, constitutional process, and civic duty.

That does not mean all of their criticisms are wrong. Some of their criticisms are real. Institutional corruption is real. The two-tiered application of law is real. The collapse of trust is real. The manipulation of public opinion is real.

But if the answer is to burn everything down, then the cure is worse than the disease.

A conservative cannot be an accelerationist in any serious sense. Conservatism is stewardship. It repairs. It preserves. It reforms. It does not celebrate collapse.

The Post-Trump Problem

The Republican Party also has a looming problem: what happens after Trump?

Trump has a unique talent to galvanize people, both for him and against him. That has been his great political strength and his great political weakness.

He created a movement that many Republican leaders did not understand. But he also made that movement deeply dependent on his own personality. That creates a succession problem.

Who carries the coalition after him?

Can anyone speak to the MAGA base without merely imitating Trump?

Can anyone unite populists, traditional conservatives, Christians, libertarians, the tech right, health reformers, and establishment voters under something more stable than opposition to Democrats?

That is not obvious.

The danger is that the post-Trump right becomes a civil war of factions, each trying to inherit the emotional energy of MAGA without rebuilding a serious philosophical foundation.

And if that happens, the left will not need to be especially competent. It will only need to exploit the division.

What a Serious Conservatism Would Require

If conservatism is going to mean something again, it has to recover its first principles.

That does not mean simply returning to 1984. The world has changed. Technology has changed. China is not the Soviet Union. The border crisis is different. The administrative state is larger. The universities are more ideological. Corporations are different. The media environment is almost unrecognizable.

So this cannot be nostalgia.

But it can be recovery.

A serious conservatism should defend ordered liberty.

It should believe in the individual, but not the isolated individual. The individual belongs inside a network of family, faith, duty, work, neighborhood, and citizenship.

It should defend the family as the central institution of civilization.

It should understand that limited government only works when other institutions are strong.

It should support free enterprise without pretending that every corporate interest is automatically conservative.

It should support peace through strength without confusing strength with permanent intervention.

It should defend religious liberty without turning the state into a church.

It should oppose Marxist and post-Marxist identity politics without becoming merely tribal in response.

It should honor America without pretending America has never sinned.

It should reform broken institutions without teaching people to hate the inheritance they received.

That is the difference between conservatism and reaction.

Reaction only knows what it hates.

Conservatism knows what it is trying to preserve.

The Real Question

The question is not whether the Republican Party can win another election. It probably can.

The real question is whether the American right can recover a coherent understanding of what it is for.

Right now, the right has plenty of energy. It has grievances. It has factions. It has media personalities. It has fighters. It has donors. It has voters. It has slogans.

What it lacks is a clear center.

That is why the word conservatism feels so unstable. It is being stretched across too many groups that do not share the same assumptions.

Some want limited government.

Some want national power.

Some want Christian restoration.

Some want economic protection.

Some want technological acceleration.

Some want institutional revenge.

Some want reform.

Some want collapse.

Those are not minor differences. Those are different visions of the country.

The way forward is not to pretend the divisions do not exist. The way forward is to define them honestly, recover the principles worth conserving, and build a coalition around something deeper than fear of the left.

Because fear can win a season.

But only principle can shape a future.

 
What I'm working on next:
In Part 2, I'm going to discuss the shift in Liberalism
In Part 3, How the shift in Liberalism may have pushed the shift in the Right

Judgement and Love

We just had the April 2025 General Conference I've been reflecting after hearing Neil L. Anderson’s talk from General Conference last weekend. It resonated deeply with some things I've been pondering about judgment and love, specifically how I perceive others and how that perception influences my interactions.

Over the past several years, I've come to visualize our journey of eternal progression as climbing ladders—each person with their own ladder, uniquely designed. Some ladders have more rungs, others fewer. Sometimes the steps are close together, making progress easier; other times they’re spaced far apart, requiring us to stretch and reach, often beyond what seems possible. Occasionally, we might slip a step or two and have to climb again to regain our former footing.

Reflecting on Christ’s teachings, particularly in Matthew 7:1-2, where He admonishes, "Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged," I’m reminded that our judgment must be grounded in empathy and mercy rather than harsh criticism.

Christ’s commandment to "love one another; as I have loved you" (John 13:34) emphasizes that love and compassion should always guide our interactions. However, when we encounter the mistakes or sins of others, our instinctive reaction can often be critical judgment or emotional withdrawal. Deep down, I think this comes from a misguided desire to control situations or influence others to align with our expectations. But this reaction directly conflicts with the Savior’s teachings about love and personal agency.

This approach—seeking to control through harsh judgment—is troublingly reminiscent of Satan’s original plan, described in Moses 4:1-3, where he intended to force obedience and negate individual agency. If we become overly critical or condemning, we risk becoming obstacles that hinder others' spiritual journeys instead of helping them return to Christ. Rather than encouraging repentance, our judgmental attitudes might inadvertently push others further away, limiting their experience of Christ’s transformative love.

Doctrine and Covenants 64:9-10 offers guidance here, reminding us that judgment and ultimate justice are solely God’s domain: "I, the Lord, will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men." Thus, our default response to the sins or shortcomings of others should be forgiveness and compassionate support. Harsh judgment and emotional penalties, on the other hand, lead us into our own sins of pride and self-righteousness—perhaps more dangerous spiritually than those we initially sought to correct.

Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf wisely counseled, "Don’t judge me because I sin differently than you do." Everyone’s journey toward Christ is unique, and our responsibility lies not in hindering but in aiding each person’s path.

Returning to my ladder analogy, I’ve been exploring how to apply these principles practically in my daily life—how I can tangibly guide my thoughts and actions towards greater love and less judgment. Realistically, we cannot climb someone else's ladder for them, but we can lend a steadying hand when we're securely positioned ourselves. Perhaps we can offer the support that prevents them from slipping, or even just encourage and cheer them on. Sometimes, all we can provide is our heartfelt prayers and genuine love. At the very least, we must commit to never being a stumbling block but instead offer kindness, even when it’s neither reciprocated nor accepted.

In my experience, striving to increase my capacity to love others is bringing me deep joy. Sure, there have been moments of sadness and loneliness, especially when love isn't reciprocated. But there is profound comfort and fulfillment in the making the effort to see others as God might see them.

This approach has also deepened my awareness of my own weaknesses and sins—my own ladder and struggles. It brings to mind Christ’s parable in Matthew 18 about the unforgiving servant who, having been forgiven a great debt, failed to extend similar mercy. Like that debtor, I recognize how deeply I depend on Christ’s mercy and forgiveness, which humbles me and reminds me of my need for personal repentance. At the same time, it fills me with hope, knowing Christ extends to me the compassion He expects me to offer others. Recognizing my own frailties dissolves my desire to judge others harshly. I can definitely see the gaps with where I am versus where I need to be. But it's definitaely something I can work on.

We are taught that our greatest joy come with our alignment with Christ - and we come closer by extending supportive love rather than critical judgment. By choosing compassion and kindness, we facilitate spiritual growth—both ours and others’—drawing us all closer to eternal life.