THE ANGLO/CONSERVATIVES VS THE FRENCH/RIGHT:

[I]nstead of concentrating its fire solely on left-wing elites, as Reaganite, conservative populism had done, the Trumpist brand of populism did something more: It simultaneously assailed right-wing elites, including the Buckley-Reagan, fusionist conservative movement described earlier. In particular, nationalist and protectionist Trumpism broke dramatically with the Reaganite internationalism of the Cold War era and with the pro-free trade, supply-side economics ideology that Reagan embraced and that had dominated Republican Party policymaking since 1980. It thus posed not just a political challenge to the liberal establishment, and a factional challenge to the Republican establishment, but also an ideological challenge to the separate and distinct conservative establishment, long headquartered at Buckley's National Review. The distinctiveness of Trumpism in 2016 was that it assailed three establishments simultaneously.

In short, as a body of populist sentiments, Trumpism boldly objected to the fundamental tenets of nearly every component of mainstream conservative thought described in this essay. At the heart of Ronald Reagan's political philosophy was a single value: freedom, especially individual freedom--the "right," in Reagan's words, of "each individual ... to control his own destiny" and "work out" his own happiness without subjection to "the whims of the state." "America is freedom," he declared in his Farewell Address. At the heart of Trumpist populism, however, is a rather different yearning: for solidarity and security, especially for those who feel forgotten, disrespected, or left behind. If Reaganite conservatism, at least in theory, has been skeptical of the power of government to manage the economy and create prosperity, at the core of Trumpist populism is a willingness to use governmental power to improve the lot of people whose plight has been overlooked by arrogant elites.

It would be difficult to overstate the shattering impact of the Trumpist upheaval on conservative activists and networks during the past six years. The once ascendant conservative community in America--a community built on ideas--has increasingly become a house divided over ideas, with contentious factions engaged in an often rancorous tug of war. At such hubs of dissident conservative discourse as The American Conservative magazine, the Claremont Review of Books, and the website American Greatness, demands for a fundamental reconfiguration of the right are frequent: a right in which two of its former pillars--free-market libertarians and neoconservatives--would be marginalized if not entirely absent. The once dominant and implicitly ecumenical philosophy of fusionism has been denounced by a chorus of right-wing critics as a "dead consensus," afflicted with "Zombie Reaganism" and what they bluntly deride as "free market fundamentalism." In some right-wing circles, free-market capitalism has even been portrayed as an enemy of the "common good."

Meanwhile, the institutional custodians of fusionism--particularly those inside the Beltway--have been openly mocked by some on the right as "Conservatism, Inc.," as if the conservative establishment were just another business trying to make money. Fusionism, some critics assert, was perhaps a necessary contrivance during the Cold War but is now irrelevant.    

And so a determined quest for yet another formulation of conservatism has begun: for what one might call "Trumpism without Trump." Not so long ago, leading conservative thinkers of the Reagan era and its afterglow routinely associated their philosophy with the principles of limited government, low taxation, free trade, and entrepreneurialenterprise. In 2022, however, growing numbers of populist/nationalist insurgents on the right are criticizing these principles as outdated and even unconservative dogmas. Ditching the anti-statist rhetoric of Reaganite populism, they are calling instead for the unabashed and energetic wielding of government power in pursuit of their agenda. In their hostility to globalism and transnational progressive elites, and their dismay about economic and social disintegration at home, some of them are looking to Old World nationalists and social conservatives for inspiration and intellectual support.

Indeed, one of the most striking intellectual currents in America in the past decade has been the growing Europeanization--more precisely, continental Europeanization--of American conservatism. Interest in Europe, of course, is nothing new on the American intellectual right. One thinks at once of Russell Kirk's magisterial volumes The Conservative Mind (1953) and The Roots of American Order (1974) and his extolling of Edmund Burke as the father of Anglo-American conservatism. One thinks also of the contributions of Friedrich Hayek, Wilhelm Röpke, and Ludwig von Mises to the classical liberal and libertarian strands of the conservative alliance that evolved after 1945. In the realm of political philosophy, the émigré scholars Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin and their students have done much to remind conservatives of their European heritage all the way back to Plato and Aristotle.         

Until recently, the American right has tended to identify most with what Kirk in one of his last books called "America's British culture," and with such British luminaries as Burke, Adam Smith, and (in our time) Margaret Thatcher.It has steadfastly preferred the American Revolution to the French Revolution, and the relatively moderate Scottish Enlightenment to the more radical and anti-Christian manifestations of the Enlightenment across the English Channel.While often critical of classical liberal purism, it has tended over the years to align itself with the liberty-oriented conservatism of the Anglosphere instead of the more statist brands of the right found in the past two centuries on much of the European continent.

It is all the more striking, then, that in the past half dozen years since the Trumpist explosion, a number of conservative intellectuals and celebrity figures in the United States have sought out right-wing political leaders and anti-liberal thinkers on the continent like Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary for guidance in fashioning an alternative political path. This fascination for non-American models is a measure not only of the seekers' intellectual curiosity but of their estrangement from what some of them perceive as an enfeebled American right--and American regime--riddled with "Lockean liberal" error and its allegedly inevitable, soul-corrupting consequences.

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