DO WE WANT TO GOVERN OR JUST HATE THE OTHERS?:

There is, in fact, a historic opportunity for American conservatives to reclaim their core principles and build a winning political coalition. In the process, they can rebuild, rearticulate, and revive the American consensus about what our nation is, what it stands for, and where it can go.

What one is against can serve as the basis of what one is for. Indeed, as a conservative speaker pointed out to one of us in 2016, in the short to medium term, one can unite a squabbling party by pointing at something all of its factions find intolerable and reminding them that they oppose it. This, it was argued, was what Reagan had done in the 1980s and what Trump attempted to do and mostly failed.

It's quite debatable whether this was really the secret of past conservative coalitions' success, and whether the lesson is applicable now. The real key to Reagan's success may well have been the simple fecklessness of his, and his successor George H.W. Bush's, opposition, and the relative absence of partisanship that allowed for super coalitions to be built. But even if it is true, the limitations of this logic have become apparent.

Clearly, conservatives are going to need to articulate a real vision for the United States, and not just "stand athwart history yelling, 'Stop!'" They are, moreover, going to have to look past Reagan and abandon Trump. They need a new vision, and a chance to articulate it.

The good news, though, is that the excesses of the left and the vacuousness of Trump offer an opportunity to rebuild. Cancel culture, with its internet mobs, digitized harassment and slurs, nihilistic reverse racism, and attempt to shift the climate of intolerance it has created from the college campus to the boardroom is not a viable way forward for America. Indeed, given its origins in postmodernist deconstructionism and its characterization of the United States as irredeemably oppressive, it does not seek to be. The reaction against this over-reach by the postmodern left has come from all corners--from the campus free speech movement, to online contrarians, to left-libertarians, to liberals and former Hillary Clintonsupporters, to NeverTrumpconservatives, to moderate free-marketers--in addition to Trump supporters themselves.

A movement that can unite this many people across the political spectrum potentially signals the basis for a principled opposition. For conservatives who have historically styled themselves classical liberals, conserving the original liberal principles of America's founding, this is an opportunity. The challenge for conservatives is not simply to oppose, but to lead.

It must be emphasized: this will not save conservatives or Republicans this election cycle--not in net terms anyway. The Republican Party and the conservative movement are too tainted by Trump and too disorganized to do much more than tread water-if they are lucky. There is no winning this time, and, in fairness, there probably should not be. The question is how to lay the groundwork for a reboot, and what the conservative vision for America would look like in that case.

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