The explanation for conservatism's current crisis cannot be found in wonky analysis of worldly factors

I've been thinking about a piece I read at NRO yesterday morning for the past twenty-four hours. It is by George Nash, who in 1976 wrote The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945.

This piece brings his overview up to the present. First, he reviews developments through the publication of his book: the evolving strains of thought that became the three pillars, roughly represented by Hayek on economics, Russell Kirk on traditional values, and the neoconservatives on a foreign policy predicated on freedom's primacy.

He talks about how, while there is a discernible three-pillared conservatism, there has never been a monolithic adherence to it. Factions that emphasize one or two of the pillars at the expense of others have tussled for decades.

But he concludes by noting the rise of something unprecedented:

What I did not foresee before last summer was the volcanic eruption in 2015 of a new and even angrier brand of populism, a hybrid that I will call Trumpism.

Politically, Trumpism’s antecedents may be found in the presidential campaigns of Ross Perot and Patrick Buchanan in the 1990s. Intellectually, Trumpism bears a striking resemblance to the anti-interventionist, anti-globalist, immigration-restrictionist, America First worldview propounded by various paleoconservatives during the 1990s and ever since. It is no accident that Buchanan, for example, is overjoyed by Donald Trump’s candidacy. Instead of venting anger exclusively at left-wing elites, as conservative populism in its Reaganite and tea-party variants has done, the Trumpist brand of populism is simultaneously assailing conservative elites, including the Buckley-Reagan conservative intellectual movement that I described earlier. In particular, Trumpism is deliberately breaking with the conservative internationalism of the Cold War era and with the pro-free-trade, supply-side-economics orthodoxy that has dominated Republican policymaking since 1980.

So what manner of “rough beast” is this, “its hour come round at last”? Speaking analytically, I believe we are witnessing in an inchoate form the birth of a political phenomenon never before seen in this country: an ideologically muddled, “nationalist-populist” major party combining both left-wing and right-wing elements. In its fundamental outlook and public-policy concerns, it is somewhat akin to the National Front in France, the United Kingdom Independence Party in Great Britain, the Alternative for Germany party, and similar protest movements in Europe. Most of these insurgent parties are conventionally labeled right-wing, but some of them are noticeably statist and welfare-statist in their economics — as is Trumpism in certain respects. Nearly all of them are responding to persistent economic stagnation, massively disruptive global migration patterns, and terrorist fanatics with global designs and lethal capabilities. In Europe as well as America, the natives are restless — and for much the same reasons.

Trumpism and its European analogues are also being driven by something else: a deepening conviction that the governing elites have neither the competence nor the will to make things better. When Donald Trump burst onto the political scene last summer, many observers noticed that one source of his instant appeal was his brash transgression of the boundaries of acceptable political discourse. The more he transgressed them, the more his popularity seemed to grow, particularly among those who lack a college education.

What was happening here? The rise of Trumpism in the past year has laid bare a potentially dangerous chasm in our politics: not so much between the traditional Left and Right but rather (as someone has put it) between those above and those below on the socio-economic scale. In Donald Trump, many of those “below” have found a voice for their outrage at what they consider to be the cluelessness and condescension of their “betters.”

In the last year, these tensions have flared into an ideological civil war on the right. As the debate has unfolded, many conservative intellectuals have attempted to accommodate what they see as the legitimate grievances expressed by Trump’s supporters. But conservatives diverge profoundly in their appraisal of the phenomenon itself and of the man who has become its champion. To conservatives in the “Never Trump” movement, who have vowed never to vote for him under any circumstances, Trump is an ignoramus and carnival barker at best, and a bullying proto-Fascist at worst. To many on the other side of the Great Divide, it is not Trump but an allegedly decadent and intransigent conservative “establishment” that is the threat, and they are attacking it savagely. Joining the effort to radically reconfigure conservatism on nationalist-populist lines is an array of aggressive dissenters called the “alternative right” or “alt-right,” many of whom openly espouse white nationalism and white-identity politics.

It is a remarkable development, one that has now led to what can only be described as a struggle for the mind and soul of American conservatism. In these stormy circumstances, it would be foolish to prophesy the outcome. Suffice it to say that in all my years as a historian of conservatism, I have never observed as much dissension on the Right as there is at present. 

A question has lingered since I read this: Why? Why does disgust at "decadence and intransigence" within our ranks have to translate into giving raw populism a look?

Conservatism is about immutable principles. That's what distinguishes us. If something was good and right and true in the 1980s, or in the 300s B.C., it is no less so in the present moment.

I understand that Nash is in the position of an objective analyst, desiring as he does to comprehensively present all the factors involved. But I am just about fed up with objective analysis from those who are on the right. It's infected the talk-radio world and the work of more than a few print pundits.

The basic explanation for why the principled three-pillar conservative in this presidential race can't surmount the poll numbers, primary victories and delegate count of a charlatan, an embarrassment, a buffoon with no principles beyond self-aggrandizement is spiritual.

It's quite clear that we have become a stiff-necked people, that this nation no longer enjoys the blessing of almighty God.

As the Old Testament demonstrates, that need not be a permanent condition. Our Lord is slow to anger, and takes note of real repentance.

But we have an active role to play in the matter. We must demonstrate the contrition and the yearning to be blessed once again for us to experience anything but the grim darkness that at this point looks like our fate.

We must purge the Trumpness from our hearts and ask forgiveness.