Conservatives Are Not a Party

By Yuval Levin

Thursday, October 23, 2025

 

Seventy years ago, when National Review launched to help conservatives make their case to the country, it did so with a distinctly factional ethos. In speaking for conservatives, the magazine understood itself to be speaking not for a dominant orthodoxy but for a dissenting sect seeking influence through winsome persuasion and prudent political action.

 

In his opening editorial, William F. Buckley Jr. noted that the magazine was unavoidably out of place:

 

It is out of place because, in its maturity, literate America rejected conservatism in favor of radical social experimentation. Instead of covetously consolidating its premises, the United States seems tormented by its tradition of fixed postulates having to do with the meaning of existence, with the relationship of the state to the individual, of the individual to his neighbor, so clearly enunciated in the enabling documents of our Republic.

 

For these reasons, Buckley continued, conservatives in America “are non-licensed nonconformists.” This was true even within the Republican Party. To advance their cause, they would need the skills to make themselves important members of a coalition.

 

Much has changed in the intervening decades, but those very skills are again urgently necessary. Today’s conservatives are sorely lacking in both the self-knowledge and the coalitional prowess required to advance our cause.

 

Conservatives forgot how to think as a faction in no small part because we succeeded as one, especially within the GOP. By the end of the 20th century, it was possible to believe that conservatives were not just one sect vying for influence within the Republican coalition but the party’s dominant mainstream, and indeed almost its entirety. To say that a politician was not a conservative was to say that he had no place in the Republican Party.

 

This was how Donald Trump’s populist insurgency was received at first. In the 2016 Republican primaries, for instance, Marco Rubio warned voters that “a con artist is about to take over the Republican Party and the conservative movement and we have to put a stop to it.” Rubio didn’t draw a distinction between the party and the movement — the primaries were about who would run both.

 

Trump did not share that view. “This is called the Republican Party, it’s not called the Conservative Party,” he told an interviewer in 2016. And he was right. A political party, particularly in our two-party system, is unavoidably a broad coalition that includes different elements. These elements build and sustain that coalition because none of them could have sufficient public support to win elections on their own. To succeed, they must understand both the benefits and the demands of coalition-building.

 

The benefits for each faction are not only the potential for electoral success but also the pressure to hone its case, clarify its priorities, and better grasp the character of our society through the work of negotiating its place in a larger party framework. This work demands patience and energy for internal debates, clarity of purpose to know when to bargain and when to insist on one’s priorities, and the prudence and self-confidence to back a party that isn’t ideologically pure so it can make deals with opponents for policy gains.

 

Such coalition-building is the essential political skill in America’s constitutional republic. Our system is built to restrain narrow majorities and force them to grow, so governing requires endless negotiation at every step. Our two-party system has long served the constitutional order by training politicians in the habits required for that before they ever rise to power.

 

But in our time, both parties have grown dangerously deficient in this basic competency and lost sight of their coalitional character. Over the past 15 years or so, the Democratic Party has come to be dominated by progressive activists, losing some key habits of coalition maintenance in the process. Not by coincidence, the party has become less persuasive and attractive to the public over this period.

 

But it happened to Republicans even earlier, precisely as the Republican Party and the conservative movement became synonymous in the minds of many on the right. The party came to expect its politicians to march in step on all key issues, while conservatives expected their leading voices and thinkers to toe the Republican line.

 

That mentality harmed both the GOP and conservatism, but it hurt the latter more. A party’s factions operate by exerting pressure on its politicians. If such criticism comes to be seen as a betrayal, then those factions can’t do their work, and the party becomes disconnected from its underlying framework of priorities and interests.

 

The resulting rigid, brittle, nominally conservative GOP turned out to be easy prey for a populist takeover. There had always been a populist faction in the Republican coalition, intertwined with conservative and libertarian factions. But in a party that had largely ceased to understand itself in coalitional terms, Trump’s primary victory in 2016 was implicitly understood as heralding a new unitary agenda for all to embrace as one. Social, fiscal, and foreign policy conservatives would not so much negotiate for leverage over the party platform as demonstrate their fealty to the new regime. And since Trump does not have clear ideological principles or a consistent policy vision, they would be expected to support Trump personally and shift their priorities as he shifted his.

 

In 2020, the GOP gave up on even producing a party platform for this reason. By 2024, the party’s factions, and even its single-issue groups (like those in the pro-life movement), were scurrying to demonstrate their relevance by showing that Trump mattered to them more than their own policy aims did. They felt the need to prove to their own grassroots activists and donors that they supported Trump, not that he listened to them. The logic of coalition-building had been entirely subsumed by the ethos of a one-voice party.

 

This is bad politics, not only for the substantive aims of the assorted ideological factions that compose the GOP but also for the party as a whole. The era of intra-partisan consolidation has been an era of electoral failure for both parties. Republicans and Democrats have effectively both been minority parties for a generation. When one of them wins, it wins narrowly and negatively — that is, by persuading just a hair more than half of the electorate that the other party would be even worse. Because our constitutional system restrains narrow majorities, winning by a hair means never really being able to govern effectively.

 

The parties have responded to this dynamic mostly by denying its existence. Winning 49 percent of the popular vote and then insisting that the election was an epic landslide might make the winning party feel a little better, but it doesn’t let it advance durable policy changes. That would require winning bigger. And that, in turn, would require a recovery of coalitional instincts. A party must find ways to reach voters who are not already in the tent, and this is exactly what a robust coalitional politics can accomplish.

 

Conservatives rose to dominate the GOP, and helped the party win big, precisely by mastering the skills of intraparty coalition-building. That is the art we must now learn anew. In true conservative fashion, we should look to the founders of our movement, and of this magazine, for models.

 

As Daniel DiSalvo of the University of North Carolina has brilliantly shown, effective intraparty factions have always been the constructive moving forces in American political development. They enable the parties, and with them the country, to respond to changing circumstances and to the dynamics of public opinion in ways that reinforce the strengths of our constitutional order. Factions do this by clearly delineating their distinct priorities and negotiating with other factions within their party. The result is a coalition that emphasizes to the public the most broadly appealing facets of each faction’s agenda and emphasizes in actual government those facets that each faction values most.

 

This requires intraparty factions to make demands of party leaders, not to march behind them in lockstep. And it requires some willingness to let different factions speak to different voters in different places at the same time.

 

But above all, a recovery of coalitional instincts requires a culture of persuasion and negotiation within the party, which requires factions with substantive ambitions beyond the defeat of the other party. You can’t negotiate if you have no demands. This is where conservatives, as a distinct and self-conscious faction of the GOP, have an essential role to play in any post-Trump Republican future.

 

At our best, conservatives can bring a vision of governing to bear in internal Republican debates — a set of ideas about the centrality of family, religion, and culture; the properly constrained but energetic role of government; the importance of the Constitution; the uses and limits of markets; and the nature of America’s geostrategic challenges. We can also advance concrete policy priorities and turn general ideas into an agenda for governing — in education, health care, welfare, family policy, and more.

 

Conservatives are in a position to do both in ways that are distinct from the approach of populists on the right. In this respect, we can bring some needed dispositional balance to the broader coalition. Traditional conservatives tend to approach politics with a sense of the importance of institutions, a desire for solidarity and stability, and sometimes even an emphasis on the importance of legitimate elites. The right badly lacks all of these dispositions, and the longer it lacks them the more of a problem that will be with voters.

 

Conservatives ought not (and could not in any case) render the right content with today’s elite institutions and the people who run them — they deserve harsh critique and transformation. But conservatives could render the right more inclined to save, revitalize, and deploy those institutions in new ways, while more-populist voices are inclined to obliterate them. Voters should not just be faced with a choice between smug progressivism and caustic populism. Republicans must offer an alternative leavened with a constructive conservatism.

 

The populist faction of the right, meanwhile, could balance the inclinations of conservatism with urgency and energy. It could also emphasize an appreciation for the concerns and priorities of many current and potential Republican voters who are moved more by suspicion of elite power than by confidence in the American political tradition.

 

Of course, such vague general priorities would need to be translated into concrete governing ideas — but that is just the work that intraparty coalition-building could advance. The absence of such coalition-building is a primary reason why Republicans have had so little to offer voters for so long, and therefore why they have not won a real majority in so long.

 

Republicans must grasp that they lack such a majority, and in any case that they lack a plausible political framework for the medium term. It is hard for Republicans to see past Donald Trump in this moment. But Trump is a 79-year-old, term-limited, lame-duck president. Unless they intend to indulge in unconstitutional fantasies about a third term, Republicans will soon have to consider what the future of the party should involve. For Republicans who are conservatives, this is an opportunity to think through how those two self-designations — Republican and conservative — are distinct, and how grasping the difference between them, after decades of obscuring it, could revive both conservatism and the GOP.

 

Imagining that future and thinking like an intraparty faction will require some non-licensed nonconformity. And it can’t start soon enough.