By Richard M. Reinsch II
Sunday, March 01, 2026
Conservatives in America find themselves at a crossroads
in 2026. For a half century, there was a pretty firm consensus on a few
cardinal precepts. Conservatives advocated for economic growth as the primary
means of generational advancement and American success, argued for limits to
government power, supported the buildup of American military forces to be
wisely deployed rather than unthinkingly restrained, and spoke out on behalf of
the embodied person and the dignity of the unborn. All of these core beliefs
have found themselves under challenge from inside the movement and the
Republican Party. And yet, despite the impression given by both the mainstream
media and the podcast wing of the GOP that the forces challenging these core
beliefs have taken over the right, a recent authoritative survey
of the same electorate in 2024 showed that conservatives of traditional stock
retain the lion’s share of the electorate on the right.
That means the current conventional wisdom that the GOP’s
future will be economically populist, isolationist, and anti-Israel is simply
unsupported by data. But clearly conservatism is in crisis, even if that crisis
is the result of a false belief that people and politicians who don’t reflect
the true opinions of Americans on the right are the vanguard. So where do we go
from here?
To determine the answer, a historical perspective is
needed. We should turn to a previous hinge moment in American history, one that
aligns with this one, and see how the arguments and policies to which
conservatives gravitated created a bold new future on the right very different
from the ideas and nostrums that preceded it.
Start with the conservatism that emerged and coalesced
post-Nixon and -Ford: a conservatism of economic opportunity and
self-government. This era is instructive because it began with Richard
Nixon’s triumph over left-liberalism in the elections of 1968 and 1972 even as
his presidency followed a much less conservative path—creating new activist
agencies, imposing government controls on wages and prices, working toward
détente with the Soviet Union, and, in general, evading the battleground issues
of abortion and cultural relativism that impassioned voters. In his history of
conservatism, The
Right, Matthew Continetti focuses on the political evolution of the
“new right” in the 1970s. This group included supply-side economists, an
emboldened National Rifle Association, the newly established Heritage
Foundation, the anti-feminist activism of Phyllis Schlafly, the rise of
first-wave neoconservative foreign policy, and the growing importance of
evangelical Christians represented by the rise of the Moral Majority.
What the “new right” brought to the forefront after the
Nixon and Ford presidencies was the belief that core principles had to be front
and center if the right was to achieve its aims. This was necessary not only to
speak honestly to voters; it also allowed politicians and the movement to offer
new answers and solutions to problems in American life and governance—both of
which seemed to have gone off the rails.
***
In the early 1970s, in the face of double-digit inflation
and rising unemployment—what became known as stagflation—both the Ford and
Carter administrations acknowledged that their policy solutions couldn’t
resolve this ongoing crisis. But that didn’t mean there were no solutions; what
arose, in the words of economic historian Brian Domitrovic, was “the most
consequential revolution in economic policy since the New Deal.” It was made
possible by a collection of thirty-something economists, journalists, and congressional
staffers “removed from or hostile to the economic establishments in academia,
Washington journalism, and business.”
The economic ideas that would transform the Republican
Party largely sprang from the arguments of two—and only two—academic
economists, Robert Mundell and Arthur Laffer, whose prescriptions, in
retrospect, seem obvious and even simple. Their suggested tax cuts and changes
in monetary policy changed the way Americans thought about the economy. Laffer
and Mundell sought to restore and enhance the productivity and remunerative
strengths of American economic activity. This approach resonated with owners,
workers, and investors who were tired of punitive taxes and a mismanaged
currency that were eroding their gains. The victory of the supply-side school,
and the subsequent economic boom it brought about, revived support for free
markets, the value of work, abundant energy, and national independence. More
important, it renewed a general belief in the centrality of the individual—that
a person’s freedom, choices, and efforts are meaningful and deserve
recognition. These remain in force. The best results of President Trump’s
economic policy in his first and second terms derive from tax cuts for personal
and corporate income, and from capital expensing for businesses—alongside
pro-growth energy policies and deregulation.
Another revolution in conservative policy thinking came
about in the realm of social policy. It was guided by the introduction of the
term “mediating structures” by Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus in
their 1977 work, To Empower People. Berger and Neuhaus argued that
American domestic policy, almost across the board, was failing because it
ignored or disregarded the institutions that are necessary for human beings to
thrive. They stressed that political and economic legitimacy emerged through
family, neighborhood, associations, and religion. These “mediating structures”
both enriched the lives of the individual and provided a buffer against the
iron hand of activist government. One idea they promoted was “school vouchers,”
which would allow citizens to use their tax dollars to choose the schools their
children attended—thus potentially strengthening families, neighborhoods, and
traditions, rather than forcing everyone into one-size-fits-all,
one-directional government schools. Wildly controversial at the time, vouchers
are today a mainstream idea.
One area in which the “mediating structures” analysis
continues to shape discussion is in family-policy debates. Some on the right
are now advocating large transfer payments to American families to increase
fertility, which currently stands at 1.6 births per woman in the U.S. Kevin
Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, argues in his 2024 book Dawn’s
Early Light that the federal government should emulate Hungary’s family
policies and provide mortgage and loan subsidies to families based on the
number of children they bear. In the same vein, Oren Cass, president of
American Compass, supports a monthly cash benefit paid to mothers or families
for each child. The idea of using government subsidies to direct the behavior
of a self-governing people is violative of conservatism—and Roberts and Cass
are fully and proudly aware of this; they both want to supplant laissez-faire
ideas in favor of direct government intervention into the lives of the
citizenry.
These ideas, however, fly in the face of some
uncomfortable realities. The fact is that America has higher fertility
levels than Hungary, whose own programs have barely moved its fertility needle
despite their massive expense. The hunger to intervene displayed by Cass and
Roberts (and Vice President JD Vance, who is also attracted to this approach)
ignores or downplays what most families in this country want: more economic and
career opportunities, and better housing, educational, and health-care
prospects. Also, while families seek lower prices for the unavoidable costs of
raising a family, they intuitively yearn for a faith- and family-friendly
culture.
That is one of the reasons economic mobility matters to
Americans and their families. As University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox
recently observed, “American families have been migrating from blue states like
California, New York, and Minnesota by the hundreds of thousands to red states
like Idaho, Tennessee, and Texas.” It’s not just that the red states are more
socially welcoming to families and people of faith. Wilcox further explains
that these states allow families to support themselves financially “more
readily than in blue states” because red states have lower taxes, stronger job
growth, and more affordable single-family homes.” A successful conservative
alternative for American families would seem to be the revival of a supply-side
economic and cultural agenda for families, not Hungarian traditionalism.
***
Before entering the White House, Ronald Reagan had
absorbed the soulful anti-Communist prose of Whittaker Chambers and William F.
Buckley Jr., Chambers’s great supporter. Buckley’s conservative movement had
shaped Reagan. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale identified the intellectual
and spiritual corruption of the postwar American elite, which mocked God and
man, promoting ideas that inevitably lead to human degradation by claiming that
man’s freedom and spirit were arbitrary inventions of a fading patrimony.
Reagan worked to reverse that trend. One surprising fruit of that success was
the successful campaign for “originalism” in constitutional law.
A new book, The Meese Revolution, recounts the
successful effort to adopt “originalism.” Its authors, Gary Lawson and Steven
Calabresi, show how Edwin Meese, Reagan’s attorney general, brought together in
his Department of Justice a formidable mix of lawyers and legal scholars who
were developing the case for interpreting the Constitution through an
understanding of what the Founders intended even as conventional thinking was
dominated by the idea that the Constitution was malleable and should
accommodate contemporary fashionable ideas. In three speeches in 1985 at the
American Bar Association, the Federalist Society, and Tulane University, Meese
set forth the terms of what he called a jurisprudence of original intention.
They remain a remarkable achievement of statesmanship by an attorney general
who was constructing a legal framework for future generations of
constitutionalists.
Originalism doesn’t mean there aren’t profound and
important arguments to be had over the meaning of the words in the
Constitution; it only disputes and discredits the idea that the plain meaning
of the text can be ignored at will. Originalism and textual restraint have
flourished in the past decade across race, abortion, transgenderism, separation
of powers, and administrative law, highlighting some of the most consequential
victories secured by Trump’s presidency. Originalism’s triumph also indicates that
a rule-of-law conservatism remains superior to the strange insistence on the
part of some thinkers on the right that conservatism pre-Trump was simply a
form of liberal window dressing.
Numerous authors have voiced versions of this argument
over the past decade, including Adrian Vermuele, in his Common Good
Constitutionalism (2022); Michael Anton, in his The Stakes: America at
the Point of No Return (2020); and Patrick Deneen, in his Regime Change
(2023). A recent symposium at the Claremont Institute’s American Mind featured
arguments that, despite originalism’s successes, the interpretive philosophy is
incapable of achieving a conservative constitutional morality rooted in family,
faith, and civilization. An originalist conservative court just couldn’t be
counted on to vindicate any conservative principles when it mattered.
It is true that the Supreme Court under Barack Obama
approved gay marriage and other socially liberal desiderata. But the idea that
originalism itself was somehow to blame for that—that it was too weak a
philosophy to support the need for a judicial body that would uphold
traditional values—has lost much of its force after a series of more recent
victories in the last three years. The Court overturned Roe v. Wade, has
prohibited racial preferences in higher education, and has handed the
conservative movement victories in administrative-law cases and on transgender
issues. Originalism’s triumphs and contributions to restoring constitutionalism
are manifestly evident. The war against liberal change remains a slog, true,
but an adult understands that much of life is a slog.
***
There is another unsavory feature of American life that
has emerged in the past few decades, one that has inexorably redefined the
quality and moral fiber of what it means to be an American, and with that, our
collective understanding of American exceptionalism: the unabated explosion in
the growth of means-tested entitlements. While conservative thinkers and some
policymakers deserve credit for trying to keep the public’s focus on this
ruinous fact, in general the right has avoided engaging with the subject. That
is very dangerous.
As the political demographer Nicholas Eberstadt explains,
“Between 1983 and 2012, by Census Bureau estimates, the percentage of Americans
participating in entitlement programs jumped by nearly 20 percentage points.”
Only one-fifth of this 20 percent increase can be attributed to Social Security
and Medicare. Eberstadt notes, “By late 2012, more than 109 million Americans
lived in households that obtained one or more such [means-tested] benefits—over
twice as many as received Social Security or Medicare. The population of what
we might call ‘means-tested America’ was more than two-and-a-half times as
large in 2012 as it had been in 1983.” Consider also that from 1983 to 2012,
“the total U.S. population grew by almost 83 million,” but “the number of
people accepting means-tested benefits rose by 67 million.” It has only gotten
worse in the last decade. Means-tested benefits can no longer be considered an
exception; they are woven into the fabric of American life.
Christopher Caldwell suggests in his bookThe Age of Entitlement that this was
the result of an original conservative sin—that Reagan cut a deal with the
country to achieve power by implicitly refusing to question the legitimacy of
most Great Society programs and the enforcement apparatus set up by the civil
rights legislation of the mid-1960s. Those receiving welfare-state benefits
would continue to receive them, and the productive and investing members of the
American economy would receive tax cuts, much of which was funded by debt.
Successive Republican governments never questioned that general approach.
President Obama’s signature health-care achievement made things worse, as did
the spending blowouts of both Trump and Biden during the Covid fiasco.
In view of this, we should not be surprised that the new
“new right” Vice President JD Vance hopes to lead and usher into office in 2029
wants not to end or reform this spoils system but to turn it to the advantage
of his followers. Like Democrats of old and of today, who always have a victim
group that requires more federal programs and more federal spending because of
what the country has unjustifiably done to it, Vance is a grievance-based
politician. The small-town white male is no longer the salt of the earth; no,
he’s a victim. International trade took his job, he fought in the War on Terror
for no purpose, and he fell victim to the opioid crisis that corporations
imposed on him. Accordingly, the “new right” government must step forward with
tariffs, industrial policy, a harsh anti-immigration posture beyond removing
illegal aliens, pro–labor union policies, and progressive antitrust measures to
provide for these new aggrieved Americans.
The hidden premise of the Vance right is that we are now
living in a post–American Dream era. Reaganites have failed, leaving the vast
majority of adults who once aspired to stand on their own, living free and
independent lives, unable to survive. According to a new caste of American
right-wing leadership, taking its cues from European conservative statists,
American citizens should lead lives scripted for them, and leaders should
abandon policies rooted in growth, work, and citizenship grounded in freedom and
virtue.
Vance has been consistently clear, both before and after
entering public life, that drastic government action is warranted on behalf of
the American people. He has expressed admiration for Lina Khan—President
Biden’s director of the Federal Trade Commission, known for her aggressive and
progressive antitrust posture—and has supported the Affordable Care Act, and he
can be expected to adopt an accommodating stance toward the means-tested
entitlement state. His rhetoric of emergency and of a country in extremis
reveals an agenda to increase the size of government “for our own purposes,” as
he noted in a 2021 interview on the Jack Murphy Live podcast.
At a 2023 Intercollegiate Studies Institute event
featuring a panel on Patrick Deneen’s book Regime Change, Vance stated
that “changing the regime” of the “uniparty” is imperative. Other conservatives
have made similar noises. But it’s what Vance doesn’t say next that matters.
Vance reflected that he had observed “no meaningful distinction between the
public sector and private sector in the American regime” in Washington, and
that this public-private regime had conspired “against the people in the state
of Ohio” (whom he represented at the time). Vance did not follow these
observations with a commitment to rebuilding freedom and opportunity for his
fellow Ohioans. Instead, he wants to throw them federal morsels.
Vance is one of the most successful Americans of our
time, a creature who emerged all of a sudden at the beginning of the Trump era
and rose stratospherically during the past decade of American disorder. He has
embraced exactly the policies that would have crippled him as he sought to
transcend his own origins: the politics of grievance. His mantra: Many are owed
something from a few who have victimized them. Right-wing grievance policies
will not succeed in pulling anyone out of misery, economically or otherwise.
The only path forward for an America that wishes to remain the world leader
through the 21st century is to restore the conservatism of self-government and
opportunity.
