RETURNING FROM NATIVISM TO NEOLIBERALISM:

By then dismissed by commentators as well into his anecdotage, the president defiantly told one of his stories: "A small story about a big ship, and a refugee and a sailor. It was back in the early Eighties, at the height of the boat people, and the sailor was hard at work on the carrier Midway, which was patrolling the South China Sea. The sailor, like most American servicemen, was young, smart and fiercely observant. The crew spied on the horizon a leaky little boat -- and crammed inside were refugees from Indochina hoping to get to America. The Midway sent a small launch to bring them to the ship, and safety. As the refugees made their way through the choppy seas, one spied the sailor on deck, and stood up and called out to him. He yelled, 'Hello, American sailor -- hello, Freedom Man.'" [...]

The party that purported to represent law and order, faith and family, prosperity and property suddenly saw life and liberty in jeopardy under a leader who, instead of lowering the temperature, exulted in stoking the flames. The realisation dawned on cooler heads that their Grand Old Party was now held hostage by diehard fanatics who owed allegiance, not to the republic, but to the narcissistic, paranoid, megalomaniac leader of a cult.

Having been confronted with the visceral truth at Trump's impeachment trial of how close senior statesmen like Mike Pence and Mitt Romney came to being lynched, some Republican senators, even those like their leader Mitch McConnell who saw the impeachment of an ex-president as unconstitutional, are rightly queasy about absolving Trump of responsibility: for his hysteria-inducing segue from "Make America Great Again" to "Save America"; for his "call to arms" to men who were indeed armed and ready to "fight like hell" to "stop the steal"; for goading the mob that had marched on Congress with tweets even as it rampaged through their chambers, corridors and offices. Trump may have his Götterdämmerung, but sober senators had no urge to perish with him.

It is easy to forget just how extraordinary the events of 6 January actually were. American society still has its trigger-happy cops and gangsters, but the institutions of freedom, democracy and the law are revered and have almost always been spared violence. Writing a preface to the twelfth edition of his Democracy in America in the revolutionary year 1848, Alexis de Tocqueville paid tribute to the rule of law across the Atlantic: "While all the nations of Europe were devastated by war or torn by civil discord, only the American people in the entire civilised world remained at peace. Almost the whole of Europe was turned upside down by revolutions; America did not have even a single riot . . ." Tocqueville did not foresee the impending Civil War; apart from that, his insight has held true for a century and a half. Only now, on 6 January, has a precedent been set for political violence of the most dangerous kind: a dagger aimed at the heart of the Republic, wielded by Republicans. 

There remain two powerful schools of thought on the centre-right: the neoconservatives and the classical liberals

There is, as conservatives are discovering no less than other Americans, life after Trump. They have been there before. In the aftermath of Bush, the liberal commentator Sam Tanenhaus published a crepuscular bestseller in 2008 entitled The Death of Conservatism. In 2012, perhaps hoping that Romney would defeat Obama, R. Emmett ("Bob") Tyrrell fired off a trenchant counterblast, The Death of Liberalism. As Trump's star neared its zenith in 2018, the Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony wowed American conservatives with The Virtue of Nationalism. Now the cycle may begin again and we may expect a spate of books writing the obituary of American conservatism.

They will all be wrong, because there remain two powerful schools of thought on the centre-right: the neoconservatives and the classical liberals. The former has a focus on the defence of democracy, the latter on the preservation of liberty. Trump was interested in neither, but both will be needed in the future if conservatives are to recover from the débacle he has visited upon their cause. Conservatives have been mugged by unreality and divided by a demagogue. What unites them is Reagan.

Republicans should embrace a new role: as champions of freedom against a Biden administration that may well prove to be as censorious as Trump's was incendiary. American conservatives have been confronted with the chilling consequences of conformism on their own wilder fringes. Perhaps this will better equip them to resist the conformism of "woke culture". Having seen how precarious democracy is even in its homeland, perhaps they will once again have the courage to defend it there -- and to the ends of the earth.

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