The election of Johnson as House speaker crystallizes the danger facing conservatism since 2015

 It's expressed as succinctly as I've seen in these paragraphs from this CNN opinion piece:

On almost every issue, Johnson is hard right. He has been a staunch opponent of same-sex marriage. He has been at the forefront of opposing reproductive rights. He opposed funding for Ukraine. He wants to deregulate the economy, cut taxes and deny the very real problems facing our climate. He supported “expunging” former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment and has questioned the Justice Department for how it has handled investigations into Hunter Biden.

Most importantly, Johnson was at the center of the effort to overturn the 2020 election, something that in other times would have been immediately disqualifying for holding office let alone being speaker. Within the House itself, he was one of the point persons working with the Trump administration to subvert the decision of American voters by standing against certifying the 2020 results and helping create the legal strategy that was the basis for Trump’s attempted overthrow. In particular, he helped to round up support for a legal brief behind a lawsuit in Texas that would have thrown out the election results in four battle ground states where Biden was victorious.

The author, Julian Zeliker, a Princeton history professor, focuses on American political unfolding over the past 60 years. He's written books on Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and Newt Gingrich's role in transforming the Republican Party. 

So he's done some serious looking into the forces that have brought us to where we are. But it doesn't take a surfeit of astuteness to see that he has done so with a conviction that the good guys of the story have been located left of center. 

Johnson's assumption of the speakership makes easy pickins for the likes of Zeliker. 

Since so many on the right have willingly let their core set of principles be muddied in the name of "the times" calling for the core's situational tweaking, we've seen such developments as "national conservatism," which is basically gussied up protectionism, and, more recently, a clouded understanding of the stakes involved in Ukraine. 

The Zelikers of the world will happily conflate these positions - and, more importantly, the election denialism that has poisoned the stances of all Republican Speaker aspirants in the past several months, to one degree or another - with solidly conservative positions that Never Trump conservatives get behind: unnborn Americans' right to life, the understanding of what marriage is common to all cultures throughout all human history until five minutes ago, the understanding that cheap, dense and readily available energy sources has made for the quantum boost in human advancement over the last two centuries, and the principle that government ought to have to puke all over itself to take the first red cent of any citizen's money.

But since the Very Stable Genius came down the elevator, these get tangled together in ways that make reversing the tangle increasingly difficult. 

There might be some kind of reader who would here be inclined to respond, "Don't you think this presents you with an opportunity to reassess this whole conservative enterprise you've been so solidly behind most of your adult life?"

And I can't deny that it does raise interesting questions. I've been fascinated, in a horrified kind of way, at the wholesale signing on to Trumpism by towering intellectual figures I'd once greatly respected: Victor Davis Hanson, Roger Kimball, Bill Bennett, to name a few. I do ask myself, is there something flawed about the basic vision that would lead to their kind of excitement about an obvious charlatan?

What makes me doubt the validity of such doubt about conservatism is that there are still so many voices, found at journals such as National Review and The Dispatch (and LITD and Precipice) that did not swallow the Kool-Aid and are still capable of extracting Trumpist sludge from immutable verities.

But impressionable ordinary Americans, particularly the younger ones coming out of an "educational" system that has left them woefully ungrounded in a comprehension of the West's unique blessings for humankind, are vulnerable to a low-taxes-and-traditional-marriage-equals-election-denialism formulation as they prepare for the coming election cycle.

And postmodern Republicans will dig in their heels, flaunting a damn-right-it's-all-part-of-the-same-worldview / we-must-get-down-in-the-mud-for-this-fight attitude that makes any kind of healing or yearning after that which actually makes sense and is noble even more remote than it has been for eight years.