The American Right is currently at a significant crossroads and I am speaking about it here not as a critic but as a lifelong insider. But even for an outsider, it should be valuable to understand why things are the way they are, why the Right currently has an ideological crisis and what this means for the future.

Some ignorant American conservatives believe that the American conservative movement dates to the time of America's Founding Fathers. This, of course, is absolutely not true nor even close. The true origin of American conservatism as we understood it in the first quarter of the 21st century starts with William F. Buckley and his National Review magazine in the 1950s.

What Buckley did was to form a large right-of-center coalition to go on a crusade against Communism and its creeping influence in American society, but to carefully moderate it enough for it to recieve and maintain mainstream acceptibility and (through efforts like his Firing Line television program) intellectual credibility. This meant that the "far Right" radicals of various stripes too far outside America's Overton Window had to go. No more John Birch Society, no more Ayn Rand and most crucially, no more white nationalism. Buckley was responsible for making American conservatism respectable, in no large part by carefully, strategically curating it so that these fringe kooks were deliberately, systematically excluded.

Buckley's fusionism explicitly embraced and promoted the Civil Rights movement not only by voting for the Civil Rights act in the 1960s but also by making Dr. Martin Luther King's philosophy in "Letter from Birmingham Jail" theirs -- permanently. They did not stay aligned with the direction of black racialist activism after King's death, obviously, but their acceptance of this as a shared premise and baseline for the American political conversation made it so that King's post-racial dream became a non-partisan consensus for nearly all Americans while also granting themselves enough mainstream credibility to have taken over the Republican party completely by the 1980s, with Reagan as their champion.

This is why American conservatives said "No" to white nationalism but "yes" to post-racial liberalism, civic nationalism and anti-Communism. The brains of the operation (Buckley & friends) constructed the coalition out of three main factions:
1. Libertarians, who got to control economics.
2. Neoconservatives, who got to control foreign policy.
3. Christian traditional moralists, who got to control social issues.

If you're astute, and not too heavily trapped within the assumptions of the American political scene of the past 40 years, then you'll notice something about the ideologies of these three factions who controlled the Republican party's platform: They have almost nothing whatsoever in common besdies anti-Communism.

If it wasn't for Buckley's fusionism, then there is absolutely no reason why Christian traditional moralism would be connected with libertarianism (they're opposites!) nor why libertarianism would be connected with neoconservatism. (again, they're opposites!) The formation of this coalition in American politics was never inevitable: it was always very historically contingent. But never accidental: this was Buckley's plan and it worked. (even though it didn't make a whole lot of sense and relied on not talking about numerous ideological premises at the same time)

Until the Soviet Union fell in 1991. This actually threw the movement into its first ideological crisis, with the question: "What do you even do after you win?" It wasn't very clear, actually, and that crisis made some of the fault lines in the coalition start showing in the 1990s. Remember, the coalition was held together by one key issue: resistance to international Communism. But Communism, after the fall of the Soviet Union, was no longer seen as a genuinely threatening international system. Communism had become a very national thing for China and a few other holdouts but was obviously no longer seriously going to be the dominant ideology of the 21st century. Capitalism had won. We no longer needed to worry about Communism so ... why do we need to vote for Republicans?

Bush campaigned as a moderate in 2000 (I supported Alan Keyes) but he barely made it over the finish line by trying to paint Al Gore as a psuedo-Communist radical. But then, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.

9/11 made it so that, for a few years there, the neoconservative faction became absolutely dominant. Their rhetoric about security threats seemed to have been vindicated, and the idea in the Bush years was that Buckley's coalition could be revitalized and held together by identifying a new civilizational enemy to replace Communism, which they called "radical Islam" solely because they didn't have the balls necessary to just call it, "Islam."

And at the time, I totally believed in what the Bush administration was doing, I supported the Iraq war and believed we needed a crusade to change the Middle East the same way we had changed Europe and Japan after WW2. Indeed, I saw Bush's War on Terror as a direct analogue to WW2 and the only opposition I heard from popular media at the time didn't even seem like a live option to me because it was coming from people who pretty much were Communists, who were only anti-war when non-Communist countries went to war. They saw it as a direct analogue to Vietnam and didn't seem capable of evaluating any war outside the context of Vietnam -- and I still don't agree with their premise about Vietnam.

But it turns out, Bush was in fact wrong about Iraq. And critically, what I didn't hear in the 2000s -- what I wasn't ALLOWED to hear in the 2000s -- was one specific voice that could have changed my mind: William F. Buckley's. In his old age, he disagreed with the Iraq War, identifying it as a mistake and as not being what he had built this coalition for. A principled conservative opposition to the Iraq War was absolutely not within the Overton Window of the time and frankly seems hard to imagine fitting into that world. But it was there, just suppressed. I think that's something Buckley should be remembered for. He didn't just create our movement but also, he was right when the rest of the Republican party was wrong. He warned us and we should have listened.

After Bush, we got two very, very moderate candidates in McCain and Romney. Despite McCain's "maverick" reputation, neither of those guys were going to rock the boat. They were going to carry on Buckley's fusionist coalition just like George H. W. Bush had tried to do back in 1988. The GOP primaries from this period were funny, because the question everyone was asking was, "Will the real Ronald Reagan please stand up?" Every single candidate was trying to make the case that they, and not the other guys, were the new Ronald Reagan. And none of them actually were.

Here's where I get beyond just the history of the Republican party and into my opnion of what's happened: The failure of Iraq disqualified the neoconservatives as incompetent to govern. The 2008 financial crisis, the dominant mass censorship of Big Tech from 2014-2024, the massive inflation and the rise of "You'll own nothing and be happy" rent seeking literally everywhere have disqualified libertarians as incompetent to govern in much the same way. And the clear, undeniable loss of the culture war has pushed the Christian traditional moralsts (That's my faction) out of the mainstream voting bloc status we used to have. These events have created not just a power vacuum, but also a massive internal ideological crisis for the American Right. The Buckley fusionist coalition worldview has been tested against real world conditions and, without the threat of Communism to excuse its mistakes, has been found wanting in practice. Followers of Buckley have been labelled as, "Conservative Inc" or "Boomer Conservatives" now, because they dogmatically cling to an ideology that has manifestly failed. An ideology that I used to hold and which I still admire certain aspects of, has failed in practice.

Into the power vacuum created by the slow but steady death of fusionism in the 2010s stepped Donald Trump. Love him or hate him, he's America's first "Meme President." I hope he'll do some good things and I hope we can survive the bad things he does and I don't see him as either the savior of America or as the absolute devil that the American Left always says every Republican President always is and always has for my entire life and probably always will. He's no angel, but there's also no sense in crying wolf about him. Trump is, for the most part, a pretty normal politician.

Except for one thing: Trump isn't connected to the old Buckley fusionist coalition. He and his followers call themselves "conservatives" but in fact, their ruling ideology is even less clear than Buckley's fusionism was. At least fusionism dividied up policy into distinct areas and then handed out control of those policy areas to different Republican factions.

Trump's populism does not have an underlying philosophy of governance! And that's why you can't even meaningfully attack it, since it isn't ideologically solid enough even to attack! The idiotic critiques of Trump I usually see fail to recognize this! They want to say he's a Nazi. LOL. A Nazi would have definite stances Trump doesn't have! If Trump was a Nazi, then at least his stances would be clear!

And please note, my point isn't that Trump's populism is good or bad: it's that it's temporary! It can't be permanent! That's the problem with it!

This cannot last. The American Right needs a new governing philosophy. It needs a coherent, less interventionist foreign policy to replace neoconservatism. It needs a new, more interventionist economic policy to replace libertarianism. And while I can't advocate for it to replace my own faction as well, I can recognize that this is likely to happen.

What I would like to happen is for the new American Right to:
1. Reject anti-white policies & rhetoric, but on the grounds of a moderate liberal civic nationalism, not white nationalism.
2. Stop seeing "socialism" as the boogeyman and instead work to get responsible people appointed and responsible policies made for real governance, not just opposition.
3. Actually get control of Big Tech, reigning it in so that tech works for the benefit of people and not the other way around.
4. Pursue pro-natalist, pro-family, pro-home-ownership policies across the board. See if we can make friends with labor.
5. Stay home from foreign wars.

But the future I actually see happening for the American Right, without a new governing philosophy is that it will fall prey to two possible dangers:
1. Once Trump's populism runs its course, how ideologically vacuous it is will become evident and it will be abandoned by the American people, taking the American Right with it.
2. The white nationalist kooks from before Buckley, who have been lurking underground for over 40 years, may truly emerge into mainstream political prominence again. And they're armed with a great deal of truth on their side this time, because overtly anti-white policies, explicitly written to reject liberalism in order privilege "historically marginalized groups" (meaning non-whites) have become not just openly debated but normalized in both government and corporate policy. There's a backlash against this coming, and without some force to moderate that backlash, to keep it contained within reason, we may see the American Right go in some very ugly directions.

The Left has actually identified this danger, but foolishly, they think it's already here and often they think that people like Charlie Kirk, who just wanted to debate them, were the threat. Idiots. The debate guy isn't the threat. The armed militia guys are the threat. Obviously. The debate guy is what's keeping them in check, keeping alive the belief that differences can be settled and an amicable solution can be found through the democratic process in civil society. Don't attack the debate guys as if they're the threat because, in reality, if your project is to preserve and maintain civil society, then the conservative debate guys are your allies.

You can't fly a plane with two left wings. (or two right wings) There's going to be an American Right, in some form. It's a two party system. This is reality. I am just hoping that the new American Right after Trump can be one which still promotes liberty and justice for all -- and to do that, it's going to need a new political theory, beyond Trump's populism.