As a war-damaged president faces midterms, a battle looms for the future of US conservatism that the hard right is well placed to win
US President Donald Trump’s shadow during a meeting of the National Governors Association
By Edmund Fawcett
Nobody could call it an anniversary mood. As Americans celebrate their country’s 250th birthday, more than half, in a recent poll of polls, think it is headed in the wrong direction, while Donald Trump’s approval ratings have been hitting all-time lows. There is little love for the Democrats either. But one thing is sure: Trump will soon be a lame-duck president.
Even his grip on the party is loosening. He can still punish dissent by running primary opponents against incumbent Republicans, as Senator John Cornyn of Texas learnt last month. Yet four Republican senators voted with Democrats this week to pass a war powers resolution intended to rein in the president’s authority to resume hostilities against Iran. If Tucker Carlson, a former loyalist, is to be believed, the war has cost Trump much Maga support.
Democrats may win the House and possibly the Senate in November. Even if they do not, attention will turn to Trump’s likely Republican successor and to what kind of Republicanism follows: the milder sort, now dim to memory, able to work with liberals and progressives? Or the illiberal, hard-right kind to which Trump has given loud, if erratic, voice?
The American hard right was there before Trump and will be there after he has gone. What remains uncertain is whether it continues to dominate American conservatism or retreats to the margins, where it sheltered from the 1930s to the 1980s. Over-rosy pictures of the US past foreground recent inclusiveness, openness and multilateralism. Victory in righteous war and success at righting social wrongs frame a hopeful American self-image. Yet the hard right’s exclusionary, dog-eat-dog nationalism is in no way un-American. It too is deep in the American grain. Trump’s manner may be unorthodox. The message, when he sticks to it, is unoriginal
Few peacetime presidents, it is true, have matched Trump’s pride in his norm-breaking methods or blatant enrichment of friends and family. His administration does daily damage to lawful due process, familiar habits of government, the health of public argument and US soft power in the world. Improvisational statecraft rewards rivals, affronts allies and baffles the nation. Outsized as he is, however, this is about more than Trump.
Among would-be successors the frontrunner is JD Vance, the vice-president, largely from lack of obvious rivals. Like Trump, he gets attention by insulting foreign leaders and picking fights with them — or trying to, as with the Pope. Before 2024, Vance had won only a US Senate seat (Ohio) with a billionaire’s help. Few policy successes bear Vance’s name. His new book, Communion, calling for religion in public life, is a risky campaign vehicle.
Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser, looked a runner earlier this year as war and foreign intervention put him in the news. It is no record to campaign on. A bare third of Americans approved of the Iran war. Many vice-presidents in the past 50 years have won their party’s nomination to run for president. Only two won the White House.
If Republicans keep the presidency in 2028, will they worsen the wreckage? If Democrats win, will Republicans help or obstruct the repair? Hopeful damage reports on the Trump years note that, unlike the autocratic corrosion of liberal democracy in, say, Russia, Turkey or Hungary, Trump’s administrations did not re-engineer institutions. Corrosion was mostly not encoded in law. A conservative Supreme Court can still say “no” as well as “yes” to the White House. A less hopeful view notes the destructive civic example Trump sets of proudly breaking rules that don’t suit him.
Another way to put the question is whether the Trumpian hard right is a new normal or a self-destructive decadence — a final, self-confirmatory chapter in the “government-is-the-problem” approach to government that took root in the late 1970s? Comforting as it might look, liberals, right or left, are unwise to count on that second, self-destructive outcome
Since thoughtful American conservatives may object that the label hard right is shrill, partisan and inept, some spelling out can help. The hard right is not unique to the US. It is neither new nor extreme (in the party-spectrum sense) but mainstream across much of the liberal democratic world. Its international links are strong.
The hard right is neither united by interests nor coherent in outlook. Local niceties aside, it is everywhere a volatile alliance of global-minded capitalists, nation-minded welfarists and ethico-cultural traditionalists. Globalists want a limited but indulgent state with undemocratic freedom for foreign capital and local jobs to come and go. Welfarists want a caring state that looks after the national people, ignores others and protects the country from poor immigrants. Globalists and welfarists disagree with each other on taxes, regulation, tariffs and immigration. They combine amiably enough with the traditionalists, whose sermons on moral corruption and civilisational decay they mimic or sit through out of tactical courtesy.
Two things, both negative, hold the hard right together. One is angry disappointment at liberal democracy’s failures to lessen the local inequities and insecurities caused by globalisation and technological change. The other is shared targeting of rhetorical villains to blame failures on.
The hard right calls on five seductive themes, in use on the European and American right for 150 years. First is national decline: economy, culture, moral fibre and international standing are in free fall. Second and third are capture of political and cultural power by the nation’s enemies — those within being liberals who promote greed, “individualism”, godlessness and national shame. Deliverance, fourth, awaits under an anti-liberal leader speaking for the people.
Tying that together, fifth, is victimhood: for the nation’s ills, neither the people nor its deliverer is to blame. The culprits are liberals, barely part of the nation. Hard-right globalists blame liberals for the post-1945 ballooning of the state; welfarists for post-1980s indifference to people and nation; traditionalists for post-1960s moral confusion, personal indiscipline and social decay.
The US hard right fits the pattern. Its active, vocal elements — backers, organisers, thinkers and publicists — include tech libertarians, old business lobbies, “paleoconservative” traditionalists, nation-first Buchananites, rightwing Evangelicals, conservative Catholics and social-media voices including frank racists (Nick Fuentes) and sub-Nietzschean know-it-alls (Curtis Yarvin). The hard right’s voters include enthusiasts who buy its message (more men than women; regionally, more Southern and Midwestern) as well as “hold-my-nose” Republicans fed up with old Democrat alternatives and doubtful of new ones.
Hard-right dominance of post-1945 Republicanism took time to build. The inner-party contest set globalist Dwight Eisenhower vs Americanist Robert Taft, liberal Nelson Rockefeller vs anti-liberal Barry Goldwater, status-quo Gerald Ford vs radical Ronald Reagan, and an indistinguishable mix of Republican governors and Washington insiders vs hard-to-place, self-assertive, “I speak for the people” Trump. After Eisenhower, each Republican nominee was more to the right than the losing contenders. All promised to deliver government from its hostile captors. The task seemed the more heroic and urgent as the list of conservative complaints against “big government” grew: high taxes, desegregation, civil rights, affirmative action, abortion, cultural disquiet, over-regulation, woke overkill.
In foreign policy, Trump has improvised too often and gone off script too much for the phrase “Trump Doctrine” to be heard without a hollow laugh. Yet he came to office for his second term with a distinctive and thoroughly American doctrine, drafted by foreign-policy intellectuals of the hard right and styled as a “deliverance” from misguided recent tradition.
Democrats and Republicans after 1945 aligned Americanism, westernism and universalism in an avowedly virtuous trinity. The hard right has reverted to a nation-firstism that takes the US as materially and intellectually defendable on its own. It, too, is an old American tradition, although from a world that long ceased to exist.
From the 1860s to 1930s, a mainly Republican-led US had sky-high tariffs (save for eight years under the Democrat Wilson) and barriers were repeatedly raised against immigrants. After the first world war, Senators Henry Cabot Lodge (Brahmin high-end) and William Borah (Western Populist) killed American membership of the League of Nations. The isolationist right opposed Americans joining the second world war. Afterwards, anti-Nato Taft, who led the Republican right against Eisenhower, tried to block US membership of an alliance it had created.
Without using the Americanist label, last December’s national security strategy returned to that vein. It scolded predecessors for vainly trying to “control the world”, dropped human-rights promotion and stifled foreign aid. Climate change and net zero got one mention as “disastrous ideologies”. Unilateralism replaced multilateralism: the US will stop working with international organisations that “erode” national sovereignty.
In Westphalian mode, the strategy acknowledged other dominant players (China and perhaps Russia) in a post-ideological “balance of power”. To the long-forgotten 1823 Monroe Doctrine (warning Europeans not to mess with the Americas), it added a “Trump Corollary”: with force if needed, the US will monitor Latin America to stop mass immigration and drug trafficking.
Strategic shifts of this kind take decades to prepare and to get “into” the Overton window. It was orthodox on the US right till the 1930s. It will not vanish with Trump’s passing.
So it is with recent hard-right reflection of a broader kind on the character of conservatism. That, too, took decades to develop. In scholarly voice, it evokes the hard right’s four themes of decline, capture, enemies and deliverance. The modern tradition began in obscurity with Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (1948), a cry of dismay against liberal modernity, which he followed with a call to arms, “Rhetorical Strategies of the Conservative Cause” (1959). That speech laid out a Gramscian programme of dialectical warfare against postwar liberalism: sharpen arguments, aim them at vulnerable targets, and mass-produce them in well-financed colleges and think-tanks.
Although long forgotten, Weaver identified two fighting modes: civilisational homily and a march through the institutions. In the first mode, gifted publisher-journalists (William F Buckley Jr), TV hosts-turned-senators (Jesse Helms), Nixon-Reagan speechwriters (notably Pat Buchanan, coiner of “silent majority”) and anti-liberal thinkers (Paul Gottfried) concentrated verbal fire on partisan universities, desegregation, women’s rights and sundry cultural discontents.
In institutional mode, the hard right planted its banner in Washington when the Heritage Foundation opened in 1973. It competed with the centre-right American Enterprise Institute and the neoconservative Hudson Institute before winning power’s ear for itself. Although Heritage has since fallen to internal quarrelling, it wrote the 900-page “playbook” for the second Trump administration, Project 2025. It smoothly combines both of Weaver’s modes: castigation of liberals and careful, well-defended proposals for bills and executive orders.
Weaver’s intellectual grandchildren teach at top universities. They include Patrick Deneen at the Catholic Notre Dame. In Regime Change (2023), he promised downtrodden fellow Americans deliverance by a virtuous, free-market elite from economic neglect and moral oppression. Deneen called that “aristopopulism”, although “clerico-Bolshevism” would do as well.
The Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule calls for an equally virtuous executive, untrammelled by undue oversight, and for regulation that works for the “common good”, an erudite mix of anti-liberal US constitutionalism and late 19th-century anti-socialist Catholic paternalism. In Against Democracy (2016) the Georgetown University scholar Jason Brennan argued, with a nod to John Stuart Mill in undemocratic mode, that most voters were too ignorant to merit an equal vote with the well-informed. Only they knew which policies would most promote the general welfare. Government, Brennan held, should favour a wise knowledge elite, a system for which he used the neologism “epistocracy”.
You can argue the toss about how wise, numerous or enduring the hard right’s backers were in 2024. Trump’s fans treat the election as a “realignment” — an enduring step-change like 1932, which united working-class Democrats and middle-class liberals, or 1968 and 1972, which consolidated Republicanism in the ex-Democratic white South.
Trump, in fact, won narrowly. He won a plurality, not a majority, of the popular vote. But for 460,000 votes in three key states, he would have lost. Had men, as women once, no vote, his Democrat opponent Kamala Harris would have romped home. As it was, she won 75mn votes, Trump 77mn and close to 90mn either did not or were not registered to vote.
That pattern suggests not electoral realignment but two polarised parties alongside a disaffected and presently unanchored group that senses neither big party has much clue. On what concerns them most, the economy, voters can agree in principle on the US’s underlying strengths — high employment, higher productivity, for example — while reasonably complaining that promised fruits lie ahead. Meantime, they suffer high prices, static wages, poor healthcare and bad public services.
What if Trump’s term ends in tamed inflation, manageable deficits, peace in the Middle East and Ukraine, a new balance among the powers? The Republican hard right can claim “performance legitimacy”: OK, we’re illiberal but we deliver what counts. And if those successes don’t come? The hard right will own the failure. It will be up to Democrats — and to liberal Republicans waking from the dead — to make the hard right pay at the polls.
Before that, conflict looms between centrist Democrats and progressives drawn to the young mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani. Everyone fed up with the hard right must hope that despite the left’s love of self-slaughter they unite against a common enemy. And if liberal Republicans join in, all the better.
For that to be more than a tactical alliance, however, a democratic liberalism needs new grounding. It needs more than a return to the New Deal, Fair Deal or Great Society. You can’t go back. It needs a liberal Richard Weaver pointing to a path for now. Is there one?
Liberals lack a mobilising picture of liberal democracy’s virtues to match the hard right’s picture of its vices. Like any guiding ideas in politics, those of liberalism are open to dogmatic abuse, academic rarefication, interest-group capture or disregard in practice. Liberal democracy makes a high bid, leaving the gap between promise and performance large, especially now. It doesn’t follow that there must be better ideas to hand or that the performance gap cannot be narrowed. Liberals distrust and demand protection from power, whether the power of the state, wealth or majority prejudice. That is why liberals insist on personal rights and liberties. Liberals expect conflict from society, believe human life can be improved, and ask respect for everyone whatever their status — the democratic seed in an otherwise undemocratic creed.
The hard right cleverly makes those four ideas in themselves sound selfish, unworldly, wet or hypocritical (without explaining how liberals can be all those at once). It is silent on its own counterpart vices: fondness for autocrats, exclusionary pictures of society, wrongful discrimination and groundless pessimism about human prospects. Intellectually and rhetorically, the hard right ought to be an easy target. Liberals give it too free a ride. The hard right’s ideas are thin but rhetorically powerful. In public argument, liberals need less seminar and more martial arts.
Nobody knows what will follow the illiberal Trump show. But a lot will depend on how liberals, both right and left, rethink, resell and defend themselves.
Edmund Fawcett is author of ‘Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition’ and ‘Liberalism: The Life of an Idea’
