How the Republican Party Forgot It Was Conservative
This article appears in the April 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
The main theme in much writing on contemporary politics is how ideologically polarized Democrats and Republicans have become. But the truly consequential change is that Republicans have broken with their own past. Under Donald Trump, the party hasn’t just reversed its positions on specific policies. It has routinely betrayed basic tenets of the conservative philosophy that Republicans have long claimed was the bedrock of their party. No one is shocked by Trump’s betrayals. What is more surprising is that most Republicans haven’t seemed to care.
I’ve been thinking about the Republican betrayal of the party’s own tradition because of a comment about my work by Glenn Loury, the conservative Black economist. When I was on The Glenn Show in December, he criticized my new book American Contradiction because of my “apparent disregard for the positive contributions of conservative thought and policy to American life.”
Loury and I could probably agree about many historical contributions of principled conservatism, including respect for America’s constitutional tradition and rule of law, skepticism about concentrated governmental power, and support for the independence of civil society and private initiative. I’m sure we’d agree about the importance of patriotism, civility, tolerance, and other values that have been part of a democratic conservatism—democratic in the sense of upholding the democratic “rules of the game,” including free speech and fair elections.
But as Trump has acted with reckless disregard for those principles, Republican leaders, major donors, and corporate supporters have either fallen silent or actively enabled his lawlessness and corruption. That complicity makes you wonder: Were they ever serious about those conservative principles? And since they don’t speak up for them now, what do they stand for?
Since when, for example, was it a conservative principle to concentrate all federal power in the president and deny Congress its constitutional role? How does a party that ostensibly opposes centralized state power square that opposition with the centralization of power in one man?
Some crises do require more latitude for executive power, but this is not one of those moments. It’s only “wartime” because Trump, of his own volition and without provocation, has undertaken a war with Iran that Congress didn’t authorize in the face of strong public disapproval and that the administration even refuses to call a “war.” We do not face any other kind of national emergency, except insofar as Trump instigates or fabricates emergencies as a pretext to free himself of restraints. Yet Republicans claiming to be conservative have accepted Trump’s seizure of powers, including powers over the economy that run diametrically contrary to their professed devotion to limited government.
Conservatives once stood for gradualism and a defense of institutions slowly developed over centuries.
Consider the Republican turn from free-market conservatism to Trump’s “state corporatism.” Trump has repeatedly squeezed or lured corporations into doing his bidding. Eleven companies have given the federal government a stake in their ownership, making the government in most cases their largest shareholder and giving the president leverage over them. Imagine the outrage among Republicans if a Democrat had done that.
This past year, in exchange for an export license needed to sell advanced AI chips to China—a license previously denied on national-security grounds—Nvidia secured Trump’s approval by agreeing to pay the government 25 percent of the proceeds. As Aziz Huq and Vanessa Williamson point out, “Federal export law bars any such license fee, but paradoxically, that works in Mr. Trump’s favor: Since Congress banned the collection of that money, there’s also no statute directing how the funds can be spent.”
The money from Venezuela’s oil is an even more stunning example of Trump’s power grab and the breakdown of congressional control of the public purse. More than a billion dollars has gone into an offshore account in a Qatari bank that Trump has claimed the right to control, though the funds are supposed to go to Venezuela. Sen. Elizabeth Warren points out: “There is no basis in law for a president to set up an offshore account that he controls so that he can sell assets seized by the American military.”
Conservatives once stood for gradualism and a defense of institutions slowly developed over centuries, designed to ensure a government of laws and to uphold principles like due process. Yet the subversion of those institutions is happening on their watch. Trump has sought to politicize the entire government, including institutions with nonpartisan traditions like the armed forces and the IRS. The party of conservatives raises no objection when Trump dispenses presidential pardons to enrich himself and acts as if the Constitution had no emoluments clause. Conservatism did not have to be associated with corruption. But it has that association now.
The right-wing majority on the Supreme Court bears a large part of the responsibility for this development. Their decision on presidential immunity invited abuses. Under that ruling, no court can even consider evidence about a president’s motives for official actions such as federal prosecutions and the issuing of pardons. The Court seems likely to extend the president’s unfettered power further in a decision ending the independence of independent agencies, except for the Federal Reserve.
In February, the Court did overturn the global tariffs that Trump imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. But he immediately began circumventing the Court’s decision by exploiting provisions in other laws. Trump loves tariffs partly because companies come begging him for relief, and he can then exact more tribute from them. Both the tariffs and the jockeying for special favors ought to be abhorrent to the party that holds itself up as the defender of the free market. But nearly all Republicans have fallen in line.
HOW DID REPUBLICANS COME TO BETRAY their own philosophy? A key factor has been the party’s weakness, the fear that it was only getting weaker, and a consequent openness to desperate measures that could enable it to entrench itself in power while it could.
In his 2017 book Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, Daniel Ziblatt argues that the strength of conservative parties in the 19th and early 20th centuries determined whether a country followed a stable, settled path to democracy or an unsettled path with authoritarian reversals. Britain’s history is an example of the first; Italy’s, the second. Although Ziblatt’s book is about Europe, the political process he identifies seems to be playing out now in the United States.
“Strong conservative political parties,” Ziblatt argues, “led to a stable long-run path of democratization” for several reasons. Conservatives had “a realistic basis for assuming electoral success” and “the resources that allowed them to sideline their own radicals.” They accepted the “rules of the game” in a democracy because they believed they could win that game or at least keep radicals on the left out of power. But when conservative parties saw themselves as likely to lose, they often turned against democracy. That has been the story of recent American politics. In this case, Republicans have also turned against their old leadership and many of the defining elements in the conservative tradition.
Snowballing demographic and cultural changes since the 1990s have created a rising sense of danger on the right. A high rate of non-European immigration, a falling proportion of Americans identifying as Christian, and increased numbers self-identifying as LGBTQ led many on the right to believe they were irretrievably losing cultural hegemony and political power. Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 intensified the feelings of desperation, and conservative figures in politics and the media stoked those emotions until the Republican Party was ablaze with catastrophism. In 2016, while the Democratic establishment kept Bernie Sanders from winning the party’s presidential nomination, Republican elites were unable to “sideline their own radicals.”
Trump’s populism is all in the rhetoric and the scapegoating, not the substance of government.
That year, a viral article by Michael Anton of the Claremont Institute epitomized the right-wing state of mind: “2016,” Anton wrote, “is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die.” Flight 93 was the flight on September 11, 2001, where passengers tried to seize control from the terrorists, only for the plane to go down. A Hillary Clinton presidency, Anton suggested, would mean “certain” death, but if voters charged the cockpit by choosing Trump, at least they would have a chance of survival.
In every election in which Trump has run, he has warned that this is Americans’ last chance and that they won’t have a country unless they elect him. If you’ve agreed that America is in extreme danger, it has made perfect sense to repudiate a conservatism that didn’t just fail to prevent the dire trends wrecking the country but contributed to them through its support of pro-immigration and free-trade measures.
Republican elites haven’t cared all that much about Trump’s betrayal of conservatism because of what he hasn’t betrayed: the party’s corporate and class allegiances. Trump’s populism is all in the rhetoric and the scapegoating, not the substance of government. His tax legislation in 2017 and again in 2025 has redistributed income upward; his government appointees side with corporations over workers. Pro-business policy is what many Republicans mean by free-market policy. They are not bothered if the “invisible hand” is replaced by a “conspicuous fist,” as long as that fist generally comes down on their enemies.
Republicans go along with the betrayal of conservatism also because they care more about results than rules, whether those are the rule of law, the rules-based international order, or the rules of civility and decency that Trump routinely flouts. They admire that Trump gets things done and look the other way at how he does it. Although they must know he is corrupt, because he hardly makes a secret of it, he is also delivering the result that matters most to them: power for “us” over “them.”
What Stephen Miller famously said about international politics—“we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power”—reflects the mentality now dominating the Republican Party. Some analysts make the mistake of intellectualizing Trump and taking seriously the ideas of the various schools of right-wing thought that compete to provide fig leaves for the worship of power. But as Jan-Werner Müeller has suggested, it’s an error to assume that right-wing political leaders today are “inspired by comprehensive worldviews” or “that far-right parties succeed because voters find their philosophies attractive,” when the leaders are opportunistic and self-interested and “most citizens have no clue” about what right-wing intellectuals are saying.
The driving impulses on the right are old and primitive. As Never Trump conservative intellectuals discovered to their horror, ideas and principles don’t much matter in the party that Trump took over. It’s a world where, as Miller says, strength governs, power governs, force governs—and conservative thought is expected to be loyal and submit.
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