The death of American conservatism

American conservatism could be described as part of the traditional republican party. Conservatives largely support Christian values, moral absolutism, and American exceptionalism, while generally opposing abortion, euthanasia, and various LGBT rights. They tend to favor economic liberalism, and are generally pro-business and pro-capitalism, while opposing communism and labor unions. Under Trump, a new breed of conservative has emerged, one that paradoxically seeks radical change by yearning for a mythologized past and quite different from the conservative as the guardian of the existing order of time and place.

Historically, the concept and the forces that have adopted it have always possessed a certain ambiguity, shaped by cultural and historical contexts. Yet, a novel form of conservatism is now taking shape, a kind of reactive revolutionary. Figures like Trump and his supporters appear to have little interest in preservation; they challenge the prevailing order, embrace experimentation, and seem to envision a fundamentally different state, a different America, a different society.

The era in which conservatives were the upholders of the state and its symbols seems to be receding into history. The traditional virtues of prudence, decency, and bourgeois traditions now appear to be championed by centrists and, in part, by those on the left. This new conservatism exists in a curious tension between revolution and reaction. If revolution, is the sudden culmination of previously obstructed progress, is this new conservatism then the abrupt regression of previously hard-won advancements?

Karl Mannheim famously argued that conservatism was a reaction to the French Revolution, a point also made by the renowned conservative thinker Edmund Burke. He spoke of the state as being formed by forces concealed behind a “sacred veil” that we ought not to lift. This underscores the notion of a natural, stable, and necessary order, underpinned by pessimism and the class interests of the powerful.

In the 20th century, a radical right-wing, fascist-leaning conservatism emerged. This movement saw contemporary themes, such as nationalism, intertwine with a rejection of democracy, modernity, and socialism. Thinkers spoke of the decline of the West, prioritized instinct over intellect, dismissed the interest-driven politics of democracy.

Following the Second World War, conservatism largely transformed into a political ideology characterized by caution regarding political reforms and ambitions. This conservatism of no experiments diminished itself to a secondary virtue, lacking a distinct political objective. However, driven by economic instability and the successes of the left, a new interpretation surfaced in the 1980ies, seeking to extend market principles to all spheres of life. Here, traditional conservative ideas of a just and natural order were to be realized through the market. This libertarian conservatism was already both revolutionary and reactive: it sought the rule of the supposedly capable and fought for dominance over order. Consequently, everything fixed and stable that conservatives once sought to preserve began to erode at the hands of conservatives themselves.

Yet, since at least 2016, the world has once again encountered a new iteration of conservatism, one that bears a closer resemblance to the conservatism of the early 20th century. This is a conservatism that seeks to re-enchant the world through mystery, that espouses a belief in nature. Once more, we hear pronouncements of the decline of the West, the collapse of liberalism, the allure of the good old days, the fall of Rome, and a crisis of masculinity.

Central to conservatism in general, and this new conservatism in particular, is naturalization. Existing conditions are portrayed as either necessary or the only possible reality. This is a curious assertion, given the significant transformations the world has undergone, the evolution of economic, political, and gender relations. To transform history into nature, the new conservative relies on a range of ideological metaphors. The aim remains to reshape the reality of the world into its ideal image, with the crucial difference that this ideal reality is now situated in the past. A traditional metaphor is the ship, a non-place devoid of history, a realm of natural facts rather than political possibilities.

For the conservative, we are trapped on the open sea, perpetually destined to maintain an imperfect but functioning order. A vessel for which one should be grateful simply for its buoyancy. In this view, the world as it exists is the only conceivable world. For the new conservative, today’s world is a ship that has strayed too far, too far in altering gender relations, too far in expanding public welfare, too far in acknowledging non-heteronormative ways of life. We are, in their eyes, living in an age of late-Roman decadence.

While utopia, in the sense of something is missing, seeks to reimagine and improve the world, retrotopia desires to turn back to “make someplace great again.” Back to a golden age that is typically left vaguely defined so as not to disrupt the comforting illusion of a supposedly intact past. This is a worldview steeped in nostalgia and a fear of the new. Trump’s MAGA movement is trying to bring America back to its true values and save the nation from the path of destruction and decadence.

Where utopia is driven by the aspiration to eliminate deficiency, retrotopia is fueled by the conviction of loss, the loss of identity, of order, of uniqueness. Progress is viewed as a thief of authenticity. The past is treated as the sole possible stable world. The present world exists, but only as a form of late-Roman decadence, perpetually on the verge of collapse.

Many themes that were once conservative also feature in contemporary conservatism: tradition, order, cohesion, and nature. However, restraint and caution have yielded to the fervor of a conservatism of revolutionary reaction. Mystery and pathos have been reintegrated into the conservative amalgam. This is truly what is attractive to Trump. People long for the past and it is not even worth calling it conservatism.

One could generally argue that this new conservatism is not particularly invested in conserving things. It seeks a return to the point before change, before decadence and back to moral values. Trump is not a conservative, he is a revolutionary who is trying to save America by bringing back morals, decency, and battle corruption and deviance.