Daniel McCarthy

Pat Buchanan recently ended his syndicated column, essentially completing his retirement from public life. Yet it’s hard to think of any writer in his or her prime today whose ideas enjoy the currency that Buchanan’s now do. From trade and foreign policy to immigration and the “culture war” — a term that Buchanan introduced into popular politics — views that once set Buchanan apart from his fellow conservatives are now redefining the right. Buchanan was not the only conservative skeptic of free trade or foreign interventionism in the 1990s, but he was the only one that most newspaper-reading or cable news-watching voters knew about. At the zenith of American power and economic globalization, Buchanan defined the opposition to the spirit of the age.

Cassandra was a Trojan princess with the gift of prophecy — or the curse. For while she could foresee the downfall of her city, she could not make anyone believe her. She wound up enslaved to the conquering Greek Agamemnon, but he too disregarded her warnings and met his own grisly fate when he returned home to find his queen and her lover prepared to kill him. America’s Cassandra was a Frenchman. His fate has been less cruel but more ironic. Alexis de Tocqueville and his family survived the French Revolution, for aristocrats like them an event nearly as calamitous as the sack of Troy. Like Cassandra, Tocqueville could see into the future, in his case through acute reason rather than supernatural gift.

For the last thirty years, the Republican Party has been a battleground between two competing ideologies. One of these is fundamentally liberal, although it is packaged and sold under a variety of brand names: “compassionate conservatism,” neoconservatism, classical liberalism, and — most misleadingly — Reagan conservatism. The other ideology is a rejection of modern liberalism and the post-Cold War elite consensus in American politics. It is skeptical of free trade, large-scale immigration and US involvement in foreign conflicts. Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump are the primary representatives of this view, which is often called populist or nationalist. The two sides are not evenly matched.

A famous passage in the preface to Lionel Trilling’s book The Liberal Imagination is widely quoted and just as widely misunderstood. Trilling, a Columbia University professor and literary critic, wrote that at the time — this was 1950 — that there was no articulate conservative or reactionary thought in America, only conservative or reactionary “impulses” expressed “in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Trilling’s point was not to criticize conservatism but to set up an argument for his work as a literary critic. Liberals, Trilling argued, needed to be challenged; they had grown complacent in the absence of a vigorous conservatism to spotlight liberalism’s deficiencies.

What’s left of the Bush-Cheney wing of the Republican Party doesn’t like Ron DeSantis. But it’s eager to see him run for president anyway. For if DeSantis challenges Trump for the 2024 GOP nomination, the old establishment stands to gain no matter who ultimately gets the nod. The Florida governor certainly seems to be ideologically closer to Trump-style populism than to the neoconservatism that prevailed among elite Republicans from the end of the Reagan era to the defeat of Mitt Romney in 2012. Why, then, would those who pine for the likes of Bush and Romney want to see a choice between Trump and DeSantis, both right-wing populists, two years from now?

Liberalism is dying, and the American right is ascendant. That’s the lesson of the last six or eight years of national politics. Barack Obama should have been the beginning of a generational renewal for the Democratic Party. Instead the Democrats have been prisoners of their past. They looked backward in 2016 and nominated Hillary Clinton. After she failed, they reached even further back to nominate Joe Biden, a man born during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. Biden is not simply old; he’s nostalgia personified. He’s a throwback to a time when Democrats were less radical, when the party of FDR and JFK, and even of Bill Clinton, could lay claim to being an everyman’s party.

Sometime this century, or early in the next, women will no longer have to give birth. Already conception can take place within a test tube, and incubators have pushed back the earliest time when prematurely born infants can survive outside of the womb. We can edit genes and modify animal organs for successful implantation into human beings. We can grow meat from cell cultures, and we can clone vertebrates. For all the talk one hears about a dearth of innovation, the pace of biotechnological innovation has only accelerated since the end of the twentieth century. It will not soon stop. Artificial wombs are a feature of science fiction dating back to Huxley’s Brave New World and no doubt sometime earlier.

The future of conservatism will look like Friedrich Nietzsche meets Beavis and Butt-Head if things continue the way they have been going. As bad as this might sound for the right, it portends much worse for the left. Liberal pieties will not stand a chance against that threat. And liberals have only themselves to blame for what the right is becoming. Conservatism draws its strength from four forces — Christianity; heartland patriotism; the philosophy of Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and the Founding Fathers; and revulsion against the left. Each of these provides a popular or intellectual base, or both, for the right.

Conservatives suffer from a short attention span, and it largely explains their defeats in the culture war. They fight every battle as if it’s the only one they will ever have to fight. And so, win or lose, they are unprepared for what happens next. If they lose, they forget how all-important the last battle was, learning no lessons from defeat, nor about what’s vital and what isn’t. Twenty-five years ago, conservatives were adamantly opposed to putting women in combat or admitting them to institutions like the Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel. In recent years, conservative Republicans have celebrated the aspirations to office of female fighter pilots like Arizona’s Martha McSally and female graduates from Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel.

This time next year, Republicans expect to be back in control of Congress. They are already celebrating, as 2022 sees Glenn Youngkin newly sworn in as governor of Virginia. For a wide swath of GOP activists and consultants (and not a few voters, too), Youngkin is the face of a Republican Party that can win — with or without Donald Trump. Youngkin had Trump’s endorsement last November. Youngkin was as eager to promote this as his Democratic opponent was, but the endorsement helped rather than hurt him. Trump voters’ residual skepticism toward a nominee who had recently been head of the Carlyle Group — a private equity firm long synonymous with insiderdom and globalism — was overcome by the rise of Critical Race Theory as a pivotal campaign issue.