Requiem for the Realignment

As Republicans rubbed their eyes on the morning of November 9, it became painfully clear that the much-predicted red wave had turned out to be a mirage. A slew of unremarkable Republican candidates lost their bids to unseat Democratic congressmen, and prominent “MAGA-style” Trump-backed candidates lost as well. Both groups within the GOP blamed the other, with MAGA Republicans saying that the establishment GOP was milquetoast, and mainstream Republicans criticizing the crass populism of many Trump candidates. In spite of rampant inflation and general economic anxiety, Republicans only nar­rowly reclaimed the House of Representatives and failed to take the U.S. Senate.

Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, many on the right have preached the advent of a “realignment.” Accounts of realignment have taken various forms, but generally involve some traditionally Democratic constituencies shifting to the Republican Party and the GOP itself beginning to reflect the populist priorities of its base. The authors of the 2019 declaration “Against the Dead Consensus” inveighed against the “failed” conservative intellectual infrastructure that had gone before. “Trump’s victory,” they wrote, “driven in part by his appeal to work­ing‑class voters, shows the potential of a political movement that heeds the cries of the working class as much as the demands of capital.”¹ Calls for realignment on the right are even more urgent now than they were five years ago. But they are currently on very precarious ground, and only an honest reckoning with that fact can keep the possibility of realignment alive.

In Search of a Campaign

In the days after the November 2022 misfire, conservative analysts settled on a typical narrative: Republicans had not pleaded their case to voters. Kevin Roberts, heralded by some on the right as bringing the Heritage Foundation from the Reagan era into the post-Trump policy world, complained in a Fox News op-ed that “the GOP’s supposedly wise and sophisticated tacticians urged their candidates to avoid poli­cy.”² What policy should GOP candidates have advanced? Roberts touted Senator Rick Scott’s libertarian “Rescue America” plan which, he said, “called for education freedom and parental empowerment, con­gressional term limits, . . . the protection of religious liberty, women’s sports, and unborn babies, [and s]uggesting all federal legislation sunset in five years.” Days later, Roberts was back in the Fox News op-ed pages, demanding that Republicans hold the line on the federal debt ceiling as a signature policy plank.³ Yet it is hard to think of a less plausible argument than that a more truly deficit-hawkish GOP could have triumphed on November 8.

Poll numbers do not bear out this typical conservative claim. Overall, according to the AP VoteCast survey, 47 percent of voters said that the economy and jobs were the most important issue facing the country, and 65 percent of those voters cast votes for Republicans.⁴ But in crucial swing states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona, independent voters overwhelmingly favored Democratic candidates (by 18, 28, and 30 points, respectively).⁵ Zooming out, about 27 percent of the country considers itself liberal, 39 percent conservative, and 34 percent moderate. So there is ample room for a conservative party to capture moderates—but 55 percent of moderates voted for the Democratic Party, and only 40 percent for the GOP. There is no reason to think that doubling down on standard “conservative” issues like tax cuts—or, even worse, gim­micks like sunsetting all federal legislation—would help the Republican Party get to 51 percent in the states where it needs to. In fact, polling consistently shows that Americans oppose federal budget austerity and prefer increases in federal spending.⁶

Yet neither did the election results support the public policy angle that many MAGA-oriented conservatives were pushing: that focusing on crime and immigration would drive voters to the polls. Only 9 and 8 percent of voters flagged immigration and crime, respectively, as their most important issue. The argument that intervention in Ukraine would infuriate American voters due to comparative neglect of the border at home also fell flat. With economic turmoil difficult for voters to pin down on any one source, foreign policy was not a motivating issue in the 2022 election at all. Finally, retrospective views on how the Covid-19 pandemic was handled played no role in the election; the electorate was divided 50-50 on concern about Covid-19, and it was not a motivat­ing issue. State-level investigations into vaccine effectiveness and similar topics will not translate onto the national stage in 2024.

In short, both the “mainstream” Republican as well as “MAGA” Republican arguments were poorly positioned to take advantage of an overall political situation that should have been favorable to Republicans. Neither conservatives at the Heritage Foundation nor “based MAGA” advocates online have articulated a positive governing agenda that would use the power of the state to bolster the national industrial economy and support the American family. Those arguments exist—in the pages of American Affairs, as well as in policy proposals from American Compass and other organizations. But with important excep­tions, they aren’t being translated for the electorate as a whole. After two years of economic malaise and ever more aggressive left-wing cultural propaganda, the election largely affirmed the status quo.

The Reconsolidation of the Right

It was not supposed to be this way. As the Trump administration wore on, many on the right began to realize that the typical conservative approach to governance had been an obstacle to “the realignment.” Many came to the view that only an electoral strategy aimed at harnessing vote shifts through policy change could be a source of long-term success for the Republican Party. With some proportion of culturally conservative blacks and Hispanics growing dissatisfied with the Demo­cratic Party, it was thought, Republicans should be able to attract them, seeking to build a multiracial, working-class party. To do so, the Repub­licans would have to shift from their rigid “fiscal conservative” (classical liberal) stance to allow for the government spending and economic intervention required in the present moment. If they did—say, around promoting pro-family spending or government investment in industrial development—they might be able to win voters to a “national” plat­form.

A small architecture of “aligned” think tanks and projects sprouted into existence, initially American Affairs and with many worthy projects following suit. American Compass was launched to provide cool-headed policy recommendations from within a framework broadly supportive of the realignment approach. Likewise, American Moment came into existence to redress the lack of “aligned” staffers that consistently plagued the Trump administration—a praiseworthy and important goal. In the ferment that the Trump disruption allowed, a more robust “post­liberal” viewpoint also emerged on the right (one that colors my own approach) to provide a theoretical context for the new policy emphases on the common good, family policy, and industrial development. In its early iterations, the National Conservatism conference also sought to foster debate on new approaches to political economy, before returning to more conventional themes of social conservatism.

These efforts on the “inside track” of the Republican Party have been extremely important. Indeed, they have already put a number of topics into circulation, particularly around reindustrialization and family poli­cy, that mark important shifts on the right. Yet however innovative specific policy proposals may be, unless they are packaged in a simple form and made part of a national brand, they can do little to motivate voters. And with voters not motivated by the top-line branding, the ability of realignment policy to mature into a governing approach is thwarted. On this score, much of the Republican Party has been plagued by well-intentioned half steps that are difficult to translate into a com­pelling national message. The Republican Study Committee is one such example. After several years of heightened discussion around the need for fiscally generous policies to support the American family, the RSC released its “Family Policy Agenda” in September of 2022. Any move­ments in the direction of robust family policy are praiseworthy. But as the political scientist Darel Paul has observed, the RSC’s agenda “is largely another collection of more savings accounts, more tax cuts, more privatization, more work incentives and less regulation.”⁷ With abortion now a motivating left-wing issue, the Republican Party knows on some level that it must become a pro-family party. Filtered through the GOP’s typical policy levers, though, the result is often halting and insufficient.

For the inside track of policy change to harness the outside track of voter interest, policies have to be translated into simple and compelling messages. At the overall level of voter messaging, however, the Republican Party has made few shifts. Seeking a message for addressing persis­tent inflation in the country, the GOP settled on blaming Biden and the Democrats’ “reckless spending”—a phrase it hammered in advertisements throughout 2022. Among voters concerned about inflation, 47 percent cited the cost of groceries as their chief concern. These voters tilted Republican by a twelve-point margin. Yet 25 percent of the electorate despaired above all of price increases in health care, prescription drugs, housing, childcare, and miscellaneous other purchases. These voters voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party—by twenty-four to forty-one points, depending on the issue. A message of decreased government spending makes working-class voters more rather than less afraid of the increasing costs of goods. Among voters overall, 53 percent hold the view that “government should do more to solve problems,” whereas only 46 percent judge that government does “too many things better left to businesses and individuals.” Here again, getting to 51 percent in states that count will require Republicans to modulate its messaging—not losing government-skeptical voters but governing in a tangibly conservative way. Yet two months before the election, the Heritage Foundation’s new president was once again out promoting the message, “Government is not the solution, but the obstacle, to our flourishing.”⁸

A clear contrast between the “based New Right” and a more populist policy angle occurred in late August, when the Biden administration announced the largest student-debt cancellation in American history. As if on cue, the supposedly now more populist Heritage Foundation released “Seven Reasons Why President Biden’s Student-Loan Debt Transfer Is Bad for America.” But as usual, conservatives could offer no arguments about how to help despondent, work-seeking, debt-laden young Americans other than standard bromides: Don’t take on debt you don’t intend to pay off! Work harder and pick up an extra job! Meanwhile, with entry-level housing prices at generational highs and the job market now weakening even for those with college degrees, it’s no surprise that young, college-educated Americans despair of voting for the Republican Party. Contrary to what many backers of conservative causes think, it’s not the spread of “socialism” or “woke ideology” on campus that is driving college students to the Left. Rather, they mani­festly have nothing to gain in material terms from voting for the Republican Party.

Contrast the typical American conservative approach to student debt with that of the conservative government in Hungary. The Hungarian government does offer a student debt cancellation program, but ties the program to conservative social goals—getting married and raising a family. For several years, Hungary has offered first-time mothers with student loans a three-year suspension of their loan payments after the birth of their first child. Having a second child results in halving the remaining student loan balance, and having a third child wipes the balance out entirely. From the beginning of 2023, the government announced, women with student debt who have a child before their thirtieth birthday and within two years of the completion of their studies (or during) will have the entirety of their student loan debt for­given.⁹ However different the American higher education system may be, with more private colleges and very expensive price tags, orienting public policy in a pro-family direction will require creative thinking like this—with direct, simple, tangible benefits. Millennial Americans are already less likely than their European counterparts to grow more con­servative as they age, so finding ways to reach young voters—and help them realize the goals that human beings by nature have—ought to have been a Republican priority.

To be sure, many of the policy priorities of the so-called New Right could be successful aspects of an overall policy. The issues that motivate voters to go to the polls can be different from those on which they judge the success of an administration. Crime and immigration are important things for a U.S. administration to tackle, and an improving public order situation contributes to overall feelings that one’s country is moving in the right direction. A successful Republican campaign would harness the basic motivations of the electorate while later delivering on substantive goods that reaffirm voters’ choices. As matters stand, Republicans ap­pear ideologically incapable of diverging from their Reaganite commitments to lower spending and rein in government, while the populist notes they sound are ones unable to command a national majority in elections.

The New Right: From Policy to Cultural Tropes

The morning after the November election, a slew of realignment-oriented conservatives threw their weight behind the potential presidential candidacy of Governor Ron DeSantis in 2024. Realignment con­servatives rightly want to present a more effective and shrewd version of the Republican Party that has learned lessons from Trump’s populism, while avoiding the excesses and inconsistencies to which he was prone. They put distance between themselves and the Washington GOP leader­ship, and argue that only a full-throated, smarter attempt to reshape Washington politics will forestall a collapse into a perma­nent Democratic majority. DeSantis has shown that robust conservative governance can be successful at the state level. As he moves to the national level, the task will be to harness the populist economic issues necessary to chart a path to the White House.

In his own victory speech after securing another term as Florida governor, DeSantis framed his governorship as primarily a battle against “woke” ideology. “We have embraced freedom. We have maintained law and order. We have protected the rights of parents,” said DeSantis. “We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”¹⁰ While DeSantis’s message is important and clearly resonates in fiscally prosperous Flor­ida, an “anti-woke” message, dissevered from direct improvements in voters’ economic circumstances, would likely be inadequate on the national stage. Typi­cally, the most egregious instances of “woke” ideol­ogy are said to be those in American primary schools. But only the slenderest majority of voters, 51 percent, say that local public primary schools spend too much time on gender identity issues. To be sure, conservative state-level governments are well within their rights to restore order in public education and higher education. DeSantis de­serves credit for his ap­proach—confronting corporations and effecting changes in the state education system—which embodies the new, more assertive mode of conservative leadership. But confronting entrenched corporate interests on economic rather than cultural grounds is a different matter. Direct combat with “woke” ideology, one of the pri­mary commitments of the New Right, will not win a national election unless it is made complementary to bread-and-butter concerns.

The New Right’s focus on “woke” ideology reflects a deeper trend in how the Republican Party absorbs new tendencies in its electorate: the GOP turns new constituencies into cultural tropes while avoiding sub­stantive policy change. To succeed in 2024, the Republican Party needs to avoid this trap. The archetype for this tendency was the GOP’s absorption of culturally conservative voters after Nixon’s Southern Strategy and the Moral Majority. Socially conservative voters became one leg of the “three-legged stool” of fusionism, whose votes could be relied upon while economic policy continued its shift toward laissez-faire. After 2016, discussion revolved around how Trump conjured the “white working class,” particularly from many of the forgotten parts of the Upper Midwest and in places where working-class voters had traditionally voted Democratic. Fast-forward to 2022, and most promi­nent “MAGA” voices and candidates had nothing specific to say to working-class voters, white or otherwise. Rather, pro-working-class politics had been transformed into messaging campaigns based, as it were, on caricatures of lower-class whites. Many of these simply repur­pose the caricatures drawn by establishment and left-wing commentators, in the immediate aftermath of 2016, to explain white working-class votes for Trump as ressentiment, or racist anger over white men’s having lost cultural ascendancy as well as their jobs. Unable to embrace policies that would help the (multiracial) working class, MAGA voices have instead emphasized continued litigation of the 2020 election and the Covid pandemic, while promoting “based” tropes centered on defiant but politically toothless gestures against cultural left-liberalism.

On the policy front, the “based” New Right has solidified around the idea that a second Trump presidency could finally begin the “real work” of dismantling the administrative state (although not, presumably, the agencies involved in securing the U.S. border). Next time Republicans have the White House, they argue, we will really drain the swamp—firing mid-level civil servants and defunding the vast bureaucracy on the Potomac.¹¹ At each point, the New Right picks up one insight from the post-2016 landscape while turning it toward a more functionally liber­tarian end. Classical liberal neutrality is wrong, they say—instead, we must be positively committed to limited government. Lacking a simple policy message is part of why Republicans lose, they admit—instead, Republicans should campaign on a simple anti-government message.

The “New Right” candidates put forward for senior party positions reflect this. Harmeet Dhillon, a conservative lawyer active in areas of election law, announced her campaign for Republican National Com­mittee chair by telling a Turning Point USA rally that the proper goal for the Republican Party is “about the government leaving us alone so we can live our lives in freedom.” During the agony over the selection of a new House speaker, the concerns of the insurgent Freedom Caucus were more akin to Tea Party goals of 2010. Aside from restoring a procedure to make it easier to oust the speaker, Kevin McCarthy’s main concession to the insurgent Right concerned tying any potential debt-ceiling increases to corresponding spending cuts. But that concession only flatters the libertarian donors who sponsor the intraparty resis­tance. Concerns about spending do not reflect the tendencies of poten­tial “realignment” coalitions that could sustain conservative government.

Given the reconsolidation of the populist moment back into standard Republican tactics, it is important to encourage a potential DeSantis administration to avoid these traps. Overall, DeSantis has come on the scene as a smarter, savvier, more levelheaded equal to the post-populist moment in American politics. The DeSantis administration prioritizes combat with “woke” ideology and the restoration of sanity in schools and universities, as well as resistance to the cultural agendas of large corporations. Such tasks make sense for a state governor. But a presidential campaign and national governing agenda have to address the political economy of the country as a whole as well as its foreign policy priorities. A DeSantis campaign with populist economic appeal could be successful, but will need to hit different notes on the national stage and avoid the New Right tendency to replace economic motivations with cultural tropes.

A Tale of Two Realisms

Perhaps nowhere has the reconsolidation of traditional conservative Republicanism been so clear as in the area of foreign policy. From the time of his attack on Jeb Bush during the 2016 GOP debate in South Carolina, Trump departed from modern neoconservative orthodoxy on the purpose and scope of American military intervention abroad. He criticized the never-ending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as wastes of American lives and treasure. Instead of the neoconservative democracy-promotion line, he struck a pose as an “America First” defender of American interests. Coincident with the birth of the National Conservatism movement in 2019 and the departure of some neoconservatives for the Democratic Party, many rump neoconservatives made their peace with Trump. On the basis of affirming national interests and national sovereignty rather than global democracy promotion, they wrapped themselves in the banner of realism and an interests-based, realistic approach to foreign policy. In the subsequent years, however, the same gradual reconsolidation has occurred. Unlike the past twenty years of wasteful military efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq—the argument goes—we now have to focus, resolutely and aggressively, on the primary military threat: China, and to a lesser extent Russia.

Since Russia and China are (unlike Afghanistan and Iraq) major military powers with global economic influence, the realistic argument has more to work with. China’s economic dominance and rising military power pose a unique challenge, particularly now that America’s mili­tary‑industrial production is bogged down in supporting Ukraine. But in a sleight of hand characteristic of the reconsolidated position, the new realism transforms Trump-era skepticism about foreign military in­volvement into full-scale planning for war with China—and at least tacit support for American military backing of Ukraine. The tension between the two approaches has been captured well by the rolling debates between David P. Goldman and Elbridge Colby. Colby’s new realism emphasizes that the United States must pick only one major conflict to prepare to fight for and that, given Taiwan’s importance as an obstacle to Chinese economic hegemony in East Asia, American strategy must be focused on denying Chinese ambitions in the Taiwan Strait. Goldman, by contrast, consistently describes himself as a hawk but from the stand­point of American national military development and a larger strategy of reindustrialization.

An immediate call for arming up the Taiwan Strait and preparing for military conflict is certainly an unusual denouement for the realism of the Trump era. A major shift since 2016 has been the realization, first advanced during the Trump campaign itself, that China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization marked the beginning of a drastic decline in American manufacturing. In the wake of the 2016 election, the “China Shock” study was frequently overlaid on maps of the 2016 elec­torate: the same regions that had suffered from manufacturing declines were shifting toward more populist economic demands. Fast-forward to 2022 and the Right has largely internalized these shifts by evoking the cultural views imputed to such voters (they are “based” and “anti-woke”) while transferring economic anxiety over Chinese manufacturing into tub-thumping for military conflict with China. At this year’s NatCon conference in Miami, Senator Rick Scott of Florida went so far as to call for a cessation of trade with China. But when it comes to proposing the economic agenda that would rebalance trade in an Ameri­can direction and encourage reshored manufacturing, Republican efforts have been halting. Indeed, it was the Biden administration that seized the opportunity to build on the Trump administration’s efforts. In February 2022, following an executive order from the year prior, the Biden administration released a multipart report addressing ways to pur­sue domestic manufacturing renewal across a range of industries. Corporations themselves, shaken by the supply chain disruptions of the last few years, have begun their own efforts toward reshoring and nearshoring. Without the coordinating power of the state, however, such efforts cannot coalesce into the nationwide effort that would be needed to build American economic sovereignty. Meanwhile, fresh on taking the House of Representatives and under the influence of their right flank, the GOP have busied themselves with a select committee to investigate “Communist influence.” Without efforts to transform such anxieties into a national economic policy, investigations like this simply launder serious concerns back into age-old Republican cultural tropes.

A reasonable “third way” for great power competition with China could center instead on a combination of reindustrialization and a revivified interest in the supremacy of the United States in the Americas—the classic Monroe Doctrine. America’s attempts to support Ukrainian self-defense militarily over the last year have revealed a number of shortfalls in America’s military-industrial capacity.¹² As the conflict winds toward an eventual conclusion, the United States will begin to take a close look at militarily significant supply chains and production issues. At the same time—while hastily and carelessly aban­doning “strategic ambiguity” on Taiwan would risk embroiling the United States in an even greater conflict—the United States has classic geopolitical reasons for wanting to slow further incursion of Chinese presence in Latin America. China is rumored to be planning a military base in Argentina—a clear red line that should be the beginning of rethinking the American approach to China. Instead of a select committee on “Communist influence,” the time is ripe for taking a reindustrialization-first approach to competition with China, and revitalizing posi­tive American influence close to home.

The Lepennization of the GOP

To understand the GOP’s situation, it is useful to consider both the national and historical scales. Ever since Trump’s arrival on the political scene, a new element has been present in the Republican Party. For the old GOP establishment, the question has been one of how to manage the problem. Two-thirds of Republican and Republican-leaning voters consider themselves to be supporters of the “MAGA” movement—an impressive amount, considering the controversy surrounding Trump in recent years. As with the Moral Majority of the 1980s, however, the transformation of the 2016 Trump electoral proposition into an artifact of cultural grievance has been successful in sowing loyalty among this self-identified portion of the voter base: 97 percent of MAGA voters cast their votes for the Republican Party. By the same token, this trans­formation of working-class politics into cultural grievance also long ago succeeded in bringing out Trump’s worst characteristics, which now predominate. Trump, in other words, was transformed from being a “genuine” threat to the system (however misguided that expectation was), to being an essential prop for the system.

In outline if not in details, this transformation resembles the role of Jean-Marie Le Pen in France. For the first ten years after its founding in 1972, Le Pen’s Front National was excluded from political life, with major media networks refusing to cover it. Not long after the victory of François Mitterrand as the Socialist candidate in the 1981 presidential election, however, Mitterrand sensed an opportunity to disrupt the uni­tary opposition on the right by giving voice to Le Pen. Media blackouts against Le Pen were dropped, and the Front National began to pick up small victories in local elections—culminating in the party’s obtaining thirty-five seats in the National Assembly in the elections of 1986. With that, the Front National became a national political force, and Le Pen himself would go on to contest the presidential election four more times, making it to the second round in 2002. Thanks to the cordon sanitaire—“anyone but Le Pen”—imposed by the mainstream parties, Le Pen be­came a reliable foil for the establishment parties and an obstacle to the union of the Right. While the media fret about the political trends that allowed Le Pen to rise, the reality is that his opening arose in part from decisions within the French establishment.

Although Trump’s course proceeded differently, the denouement appears likely to be the same. Trump won the 2016 election unexpectedly, to the chagrin not only of Democrats but of many Republicans, as well. Yet he is now an even more polarizing figure than in 2016: in the election of 2022, more Democratic than Republican voters cited Trump as a factor in how they cast their vote—even though he was not on the ballot. With a strong base of passionate supporters, Trump, like Le Pen, can always be a wild card in the right-wing presidential race. Some in his base will accept no substitute. But if he were to obtain the Republican nomination, he would face hardened opposition from Democrats and the media as well as neglect and even opposition from the Republican donor class.

Many on the “based New Right” seem more than happy to play the role set out for them. The overall result, however, is primarily beneficial for the existing governing consensus and political stasis. The “Freedom Caucus” insurgents can claim the mantle of post-Trump populism while offering policies identical to Tea Party proposals—or even the George W. Bush agenda—from more than a decade past. Combined with the Freedom Caucus’s tendency toward outlandish political stunts, it is all too easy for the Republican establishment, in contrast, to present itself as a junior coalition partner in the Democratic-run regime. The GOP has, in effect, become two parties—with an establishment wing govern­ing in coalition while insurgent MAGA forces are largely wasted on “based signaling.” The tragic result of this split is that the center-left retains its unified governing power, which some Republicans share, while the Right as a whole is fractured and weak. In effect, the United States has become a multiparty democracy governed by the Democrats and a centrist portion of the Republicans, while right-wing insurgents act as a foil.

A Path Forward

In Hill offices, conservative publications, and a handful of bootstrapped think tanks, young conservatives treat the conservative “heroes” of yesteryear with a mixture of scorn and disdain. For the up-and-coming generation, the political and economic future both look foreboding, and interest in new intellectual and policy approaches is intense. But institutional capacity around new conservative approaches—those em­phasizing political economy, family policy, critique of liberalism, and the recovery of different elements of the past “American system”—remains limited. Provided that institutional capacity catches up to this level of interest, the prospects of a national-interest-oriented Right could improve.

But what if things stay the same? Consider the following. . . . The year is 2092—the centenary of F. A. Hayek’s death. To celebrate, America’s seemingly immortal conservative think tanks, from AEI to the Heritage Foundation and everything in between, are holding sympo­sia across the land. College Republicans jockey for generous stipends to the different conferences, examining and applying Hayek’s influence across a range of political questions. . . . Now, conservatives have not held the presidency in the United States for more than twelve out of the last seventy years, but conservative foundations have never been strong­er. In the immaculate Art Deco conference room at the Liberty Fund in Indianapolis, for instance, a dozen college students undertake a Socratic reading of essays about Adam Smith’s impact on Ronald Reagan’s first term. Carefully selected great books, identical to the ones originally selected in 1960, dot the shelves. Students vie for recalling minute details of the policy priorities of the 1980s, while a Liberty Fund “recorder” types away, taking notes for a vault that will never be read. A ritual repeated every year, these Liberty Fund seminars remain a sacred memorial to what now seemed to be slipping even further away. . . .

Although this picture may seem absurd, it is only slightly amiss from the present situation of astroturfed intellectual programming that domi­nates the formation of young conservatives. Often the work of small-scale regional capital, such foundations and their related think tanks have met with wild success: they have frozen in amber the conservative intellectual world of circa 1955, dominated by global struggles between freedom and tyranny, wrapped firmly in an American flag they seem to imagine still an uncontested symbol. Ironically, the most promising path forward may be to peer more deeply into the network of conservative foundations that have dotted the landscape of the United States over the last fifty years.¹³ Otherwise, such institutions will continue to put a limit on how much “realignment” is allowed on the American right.

Outside these institutions, however, new ideas on everything from trade to family policy have emerged at a rapid pace, spreading like wildfire in spite of limited institutional support. The efforts of a small but influential cadre of realignment policy thinkers have begun to coa­lesce into specific proposals and areas of emphasis, particularly in indus­trial policy, family policy, and geostrategy. At its best, the realignment thinkers form a kind of shadow cabinet within the Right, ready to articulate the way to renewed political strength when the Republican Party is ready. Particularly on crosscutting issues like reindustrialization, where interest is now emerging among otherwise apolitical corpo­rate interests, the Right has no one else to offer. After all, the premise of legacy conservative think tanks has fundamentally been that policy is a misguided endeavor—that hewing to traditions through the “little platoons” is the only way to preserve the nation. Yet without fiscally engaged policy to promote these goods, the “little platoons” of families and neighborhoods won’t be forming at all.¹⁴ Since the old center-right has redefined its goal as blocking the realignment, policy “innovation” from legacy conservative think tanks will continue to dwindle. Ten years from now, the only people on the right with policy approaches available will likely be realignment thinkers. When attention turns toward sub­stantive policy issues in that space, as it certainly will, realignment approaches will be poised for an outsize influence.

While the present stage of “realignment” is on hold, the ferment on the American right is continuing. At the same time, economic dislocation and geopolitical turmoil are more easily observed and diagnosed with the tools emerging from a political viewpoint focused on the world as it now is. The assumptions of the 1990s—that free trade would bring peace and prosperity throughout the world—are scarcely credible. Dramatic moments in foreign policy as well as the economy appear to lie ahead, with the potential to upend yet further the expectations of the post–Cold War liberal order. As time goes on, the need for a more nationally oriented economic and industrial approach will grow only more acute. Policies oriented toward that, while affirming conservative goals such as the protection of the family, can still win a national election. The question is whether the Republican Party, captured by donor interests and wearied at the thought of governing, will have the good sense to seize the opportunity in time.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VII, Number 1 (Spring 2023): 132–46.

Notes