To put this in stark terms: somehow Vice President JD Vance, a fierce Trumpian critic of the neoconservatives, ended up in government at the highest levels, only to help implement the foreign-policy preferences of, say, John Bolton or Elliott Abrams. The Vance who once sharply critiqued a foreign policy of “moralizing” is overseeing strikes explicitly aimed at freeing the people of Iran.

In 2016, as it became clear that Donald Trump represented the future of the GOP, three paths presented themselves to respectable conservative intellectuals, such as those at the Wall Street Journal’s comment pages, where I was working at the time. The first was the path of slow, cynical accommodation: having opposed Trump to the last, as a heretic from foreign-policy hawkism and free trade, the accommodators slowly began to wonder: well, what can we get out of this guy?

Then there was the path of unbending Never Trump defiance. A subset of conservatives, especially those of a hawkish bent on foreign policy, resolved that they would sooner become politically homeless and embrace liberal media organs than bow to the vulgarian from Queens, who railed against “globalism”, called the Iraq War a “disaster”, and dunked on George W. Bush-era neoconservatives.

Among those at the Journal who took this approach was an energetic op-ed editor, Bari Weiss, and her mentor, the columnist Bret Stephens, both of whom decamped for the Left-of-center opinion pages of The New York Times soon after Trump’s first ballot-box triumph. I, too, belonged to this group initially. I endorsed Hillary Clinton in the paper and traded many an email with Bari and Bret venting our disgust at the institution’s leaders for choosing what we saw as accommodation.

But not all of the hard-line Never Trumpers would stay that way forever. There was also, finally, the path of the converts. These were right-wing intellectuals who, overcoming their disgust at Trump’s antics, tried to understand why the Republican base had elevated a populist former reality-TV star who challenged our conventions and orthodoxies. What had free trade and decades of a hyperactive foreign policy wrought for “flyover country”?

I was one of the Trumpian converts. Having endorsed and voted for Hillary Clinton, I would go on to conclude that the old, pre-Trump consensus had been a disaster. It had left American power overstretched abroad and hollowed out its domestic foundations: visible in the abandoned factories of the heartland, its streets now littered with the needle-mark-strewn, opioid-addicted bodies of the sons and daughters of once-proud manufacturing workers.

I spent much of the first Trump administration as the op-ed editor of the New York Post, a more populist tabloid and a favorite of the President, who would often clip columns I’d commissioned and mail them to their respective authors, signing them with a thick Sharpie pen and adding words of encouragement: “Attaboy!”

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The Islamic Republic’s bloody endgame

By Christopher de Bellaigue

In my extracurricular hours, I served as the principal drafter and organizer of “Against the Dead Consensus,” a 2019 manifesto for the so-called New Right that blamed the Old Right — my comrades of just a few years earlier, figures like Bret and Bari — for failing to “retard, much less reverse, the eclipse of permanent truths, family stability, communal solidarity, and much else”. Conventional conservatism, my cosignatories and I charged, had “surrendered to the pornographization of daily life, to the culture of death, to the cult of competitiveness. It too often bowed to a poisonous and censorious multiculturalism.”

Conventional conservatism was scarcely different from liberalism. And it had allowed “an ideological liberalism seeks to dictate our foreign policy” — meaning we’d too often gone abroad seeking autocratic monsters to slay and freedom-seeking peoples to emancipate. Many of the signatories were converts: to the Catholic faith, but also the Trumpian one. Another convert who might as well have signed but didn’t (because we didn’t think to ask him) was JD Vance.

A Yale Law-educated venture capitalist, Vance was also the author of a best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which soon became a go-to guide for coastal journalists figuring out what made Trumpian America tick. Although he poignantly described the miseries of Trumpian America, Vance was by no means prepared to throw in his lot with Trump in those years. On the contrary, his book’s diagnosis of what had gone wrong with his Appalachian kinfolk was very much aligned with that of the respectable conservatives: what ailed his people, Vance concluded, was a failure of bootstrapping self-help — not the GOP’s neoliberal trade policies and neoconservative defense policies. Trump himself, meanwhile, was a latter-day “Hitler,” as Vance told a friend in an infamous leaked text message.

Yet a few years later, just as I would strive to lend intellectual coherence to the Trumpian project (don’t laugh), Vance would emerge as a democratic tribune of Trumpian America. Eventually, he’d be elected a US senator from his home state of Ohio after a campaign that saw him crank up the Trumpian rhetorical quotient to 11.

Once in office, Vance sought to govern as a thoughtful populist, launching major legislative initiatives in collaboration with the economic progressives: a railroad-reform bill, an attempt at breaking the credit-card duopoly, a bid to lower insulin prices, and the like. While most of these initiatives would fail — falling victim to opposition not from the Democratic Party, but the Senate GOP’s free-market old guard — Vance would be tapped as Trump’s 2024 running mate. All along, he continued to sound anti-interventionist notes, not least on Iran. In 2024, for example, he declared: “Our interest, I think, very much is in not going to war with Iran. It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.”

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Iran's cycle of revenge

By Sohrab Ahmari

But here we are. Trump has now launched an all-out, and deeply unpopular, war against the Islamic Republic, with Iranian “freedom” as its primary objective. Vance, though not exactly leading the charge on messaging, has been photographed running a sort of Team B situation room in Washington (the President’s own situation room is in Mar-a-Lago). Again, for those of us who have been inside these circles and debates, the ironies are mind-boggling.

How to explain them? I’d venture four reasons.

First, there are the structural realities of the GOP. Despite the realignment of the two parties — working- and lower-middle-class voters’ shift from Left to Right beginning in 2016 — the institutional party remains dominated by the old-line foreign policy: the think tanks, the senior staffers, the octogenarian senators for whom it’s always 1983.

Yes, the party has its “restrainers” — those who favor a less expansive foreign policy — and the “prioritizers” — those who want to pivot from Europe and the Middle East to confront China — including many in the Pentagon and the intelligence apparatus. But these are typically younger, and their influence in the Trump administration is dwarfed by that of the traditional hawks in the President’s orbit. People such as the acting national-security adviser and secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles.

Second, there’s the role of anti-woke-ism as new skin for old wine. The hawks — not least Weiss, through her outlet The Free Press — championed popular grievances with the inanities of the “peak-woke” moment and successfully married this to the same old agenda. Many of the would-be populists were all too happy to go along, hailing a once-more culturally muscular and unembarrassed America as it pursued the very policies that they’d deplored just a few years earlier. As one online wit remarked somewhere: “Good thing [Secretary of War] Pete [Hegseth] purged the trannies from the military so beefy white guys can do a regime change in Iran.” Based and red-pilled!

Third, there was the reframing of regime-change wars to mean only operations that put boots on the ground. In this telling, the true hallmark of the old failed neoconservatism was not its globe-spanning scope or its shoot-first-ask-question-later reflexes, but its idealism: its naïve faith in helping oppressed peoples and the deployment of troops for nation-building. Under the new dispensation, America would simply break things and leave it to others to pick up the pieces.

As Vance told me in a 2024 interview, the new Trumpian foreign policy would be “a mixture of extreme skepticism towards intervention overseas, combined with an extremely aggressive posture when you do intervene overseas…. Don’t punch often, but when you punch, punch really goddamn hard.” But this logic — that you aren’t a neocon as long as you don’t actually dispatch ground troops — soon became a beguiling invitation to punch quite often indeed. The “extreme skepticism” soon melted away; the second Trump administration has now launched interventions in no fewer than seven countries.

Finally, and most simply, there’s Trump himself: a product of a generation of Americans for whom the Iranian regime is — not unjustly — remembered for the 1979 hostage crisis and the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing. The Islamic Republic has historical agency, after all, which it used for nearly five decades to prosecute a strategically foolish ideological war against Israel and the West. And while Tehran doesn’t loom as a menace (or bogeyman) for younger Americans to nearly the same degree (or at all), that’s neither here nor there. Trump is the commander-in-chief, and he perhaps sees himself as the avenger of those older Iranian sins.

It remains to be seen whether voters in 2026 — and, more important for Vance, 2028 — will conclude that revenge was worth the candle.

And yet. Biden’s approval ratings keep falling. Polls show the Republicans leading on a generic congressional ballot and suggest an even split in a potential Biden-Trump rematch in 2024. Voters have more faith in the Republicans on the top issue, the economy, as well as on inflation, immigration, crime, and foreign policy. They think the President is well-meaning but clueless. A March poll from the Wall Street Journal found that 50 per cent of voters agreed that “Joe Biden tries to do the right thing”, but only 39 per cent agreed that he is “focused on the issues that are most important to me”; a February Washington Post poll found that 54 per cent believed Biden lacked the “mental sharpness it takes to serve effectively as president”. Thanks to Biden, the GOP, far from being “dead”, could be gearing up for its strongest election cycle in a decade.

What to make of the paradox that the Republicans appear politically strong but remain completely toxic among those who by and large govern the country? A new book by Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, does not address itself directly to this question, but it does suggest an answer: this is the consequence of Trump’s destruction and discrediting of the conservative intellectual and policy elite.

Continetti could be fairly described as conservative royalty. A senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the most respectable of the right-of-centre DC think tanks, he was a long-time employee of The Weekly Standard during its run as the house journal of the Bush administration. He is also the son-in-law of Bill Kristol, neoconservative founder of the Standard and The Bulwark and perhaps the most prominent Trump-era defector to the Democratic Party. Continetti’s perspective is that of a consummate insider, one tied by professional and familial bonds to the Beltway intellectual establishment that was all but obliterated by the 2016 election. He is, as a result, better attuned than most to the role of elites in the conservative ecosystem, as well as to the limits of their power.

The book is a work of history rather than a commentary on current events, and Continetti refrains from splashy arguments. But his framing of the American Right over the past century has obvious implications for the present day. Broadly speaking, his narrative is one of the “endless competition and occasional collaboration between populism and elitism”. Conservatism, in his telling, “has toggled between an elite-driven strategy in both content and constituencies and a populist strategy that meets normal people where they are and is driven by their ambitions, anxieties, and animosities”. Only a synthesis of the two is capable of anything other than fleeting victories — elite-driven politics fails at the ballot-box, populism fails at governing — yet such a synthesis has been difficult to come by, which explains the “tenuous” and “fragile” nature of Republican successes.

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Is the New Right a grift?

By Park MacDougald

Since FDR’s expansion and reorganisation of the American state in the Thirties, conservatism has always been a minority faction in the American elite, which tends toward welfare-state, social-reforming liberalism with occasional forays into radicalism. The broad middle of the social spectrum is more conservative, or at the very least more suspicious of elite liberalism and its various improving crusades. As a political project, post-war conservatism, embodied by figures such as National Review founder William F. Buckley, was an attempt to harness this popular, anti-liberal political energy for electoral purposes, with the implicit understanding that the elites would do the actual governing, softening the edges of populist anxieties (which often shade into bigotry and conspiracism), while translating them into a viable political programme.

For liberals, of course, this relationship looks like the cynical manipulation of the electorate’s base instincts, and at times it can be exactly that. But, as conservatives like Continetti would point out, it serves an important political function. A liberal governing class ruling over a conservative populace is not an inherently stable political arrangement. When persuasion fails — and people can only be persuaded of so much — there will always be a temptation to coerce, cajole, or mislead. Sometimes, as in the case of desegregating the South in the Sixties, coercion may be justified in the name of a higher moral purpose. But the language of “moral clarity” (not to mention technocratic expertise) can also be used to disqualify legitimate criticism of unpopular or wrong-headed fads.

Plus, in a democracy, the people get a vote. You can only ignore their preferences for so long without incurring a backlash. As Eric Kaufmann argues, the rise of populism in the West is in large part the result of conservative elites colluding with liberals to remove immigration restriction from the policy debate at a time when a large portion of the population felt very strongly about it. This did not make the issue go away, however, and the glaring mismatch between popular demand for the policy and its conspicuous lack of supply in the political system provided the opening for political entrepreneurs such as Trump. But the point can be stated more generally: Conservative elites mediate between their voters and a wider American elite, ideally acting as a check on the excesses of both. When they fail in this role, as they did in the years prior to 2016, the entire system becomes vulnerable to outside disruption.

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Twilight of the American Left

By Park McDougald

Where does that leave conservatism today? Continetti is pessimistic about Trump’s effect on the Right — he has shattered elite conservatism as an independent force and made the party’s brand toxic to the professional class, whose buy-in was critical to Reagan’s victories and relative effectiveness once in office. He notes, despairingly, that the rise of cable news and social media may have simply eliminated the ability of any conservative elite to perform their gatekeeping and mediating function — constantly at risk of being outflanked by Fox News and Twitter influencers, their options may be to join the populists, join the Democrats, or fade into irrelevance.

Not mentioned, though relevant, is the fact that the radicalisation of the liberal establishment over the past decade has made the old role of conservative elites less tenable. If they represent the interests of their base, they risk forfeiting their status and respectability among their fellow elites. But if they capitulate to each new progressive taboo as it is erected, they forfeit their credibility with the people they are supposed to represent, making themselves superfluous. Few on the Left or the populist Right are likely to shed a tear over this outcome, but absent any group able to effectively translate popular demands into the language of professional-class respectability, the two sides will lose their ability to talk to one another, and American politics will descend further down the road of all-out, zero-sum warfare.

The turning point, at least in the medium-term, will be the 2024 presidential primary. Whoever wins the party’s nomination will be in a strong position to win the presidency, and perhaps to enjoy at least a few years of unified control of the government. A Trump victory would not herald the “end of democracy in America”, but it would be a disaster for the country — four more years of chaos, mutual enmity, and partisan radicalisation in which political disputes are subordinated to the private whims and grievances of one man.

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Joe Biden's gender agenda

By Park McDougald

But there is a reason, beyond the Electoral College, why Republicans are in good political position, despite these obvious problems: many Americans, including some of the professional elites now solidly in the Democratic camp, are deeply uncomfortable with the direction that liberalism has taken since 2016, as seen in the rising numbers of “anti-woke” liberal intellectuals and in the emergence of at least rhetorically law-and-order Democratic politicians such as New York mayor Eric Adams. As Continetti notes, an earlier wave of elite defectors from a radicalised Left — the neoconservatives — infused conservatism in the Seventies and Eighties with a previously lacking cultural cachet and intellectual sophistication. They were able to appeal to the mainstream with plausible accounts of what had gone wrong with the Great Society and how to fix it.

There is no guarantee that a non-Trump candidate in 2024 could pull off such a trick, but they could, perhaps, establish facts on the ground to start clawing the party back from the Trumpian abyss, and start rebuilding an elite and professional class constituency. There would still be culture war, and much of the stupidity that makes contemporary American politics so unbearable. But it might be the best chance to finally leave the grim disputes of the present behind.