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The Conservative Movement Needs a Reckoning, Not a Revolution
0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. There is a temptation, when a political movement stumbles, to conclude that its principles have failed. That the old ideas no longer fit the new problems. That what is needed is not better adherence to first principles but a wholesale reinvention: something louder, angrier, and more attuned to the grievances of the moment. That temptation is wrong, and it is not new.
Sixty years ago, American conservatism was also fractured, also searching, also beset by internal disagreement about what it stood for and who it served. Hawks and doves split over Cold War strategy. Traditionalists and libertarians clashed over the role of government in moral life. Deficit hawks quarreled with defense spenders. The movement seemed, to many observers, on the verge of irrelevance.
Then, on October 27, 1964, a former actor named Ronald Reagan delivered a televised address on behalf of Barry Goldwater’s doomed presidential campaign. The speech, later known simply as “A Time for Choosing,” did not resolve every dispute within conservatism. But it articulated something essential: a coherent vision of what the American experiment was actually about, and why the encroachments of centralized government threatened it.
Reagan warned of voices arguing that the profit motive was obsolete, that it must be replaced by “the incentives of the welfare state.” He quoted Senator J. William Fulbright, who had called the Constitution “outmoded” and demanded that the president be freed from its constraints so he could do for the people “what he knows is best.” Reagan’s response was characteristically direct: the Founding Fathers had designed those constraints deliberately. They understood that governments don’t simply control economies, they control people. And they knew that to do so, a government “must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose.”
That insight remains as true today as it was in 1964. And yet a significant portion of the contemporary right seems to have forgotten it.
What has risen in its place is populism, not conservatism — and conflating the two is a mistake conservatives cannot afford. Traditional conservatism, the fusionism that held the coalition together for several decades after Reagan, emphasized free markets, free trade, limited government intervention, fiscal restraint, strong international alliances, and individual liberty. It was skeptical of concentrated power in Washington. It believed that the proper role of the federal government was narrow and defined, rooted in the enumerated powers of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, with everything else reserved to the states or to the people themselves.
Right-wing populism shares conservatism’s enemies list but not its principles. It rails against elites while empowering a different set of them. It claims to speak for the working class while embracing protectionist tariffs that function as a tax on those same workers. It champions “America First” trade policy while intervening in specific industries and corporations in ways that would have struck Reagan as precisely the kind of government overreach he spent his career opposing. It is suspicious of legal immigration while abandoning the limited-government framework that made America an attractive destination in the first place.
Reagan observed that “no government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size” and that government programs, “once launched, never disappear.” He described federal bureaus as “the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” Reagan meant it as a warning: once you grant the federal government power to manage the economy, to pick winners and losers, to punish companies and reward constituencies, you do not get that power back. The machinery remains. Future administrations inherit it. And they will use it.
The frustration driving today’s populism is real. Inconsistent trade policy and cronyism has created genuine dislocations. Institutions have failed people who deserved better. The professional class that runs elite institutions has, in many cases, earned the contempt directed at it. These grievances are real. Conservatives who dismiss them outright deserve to lose.
But real grievances don’t validate any particular remedy. Trade wars, industrial policy, executive unilateralism, hostility to constitutional checks on presidential authority — these are not conservative answers to liberal overreach. They are the same overreach, rebranded. A government with the power to impose tariffs can impose anything. The constitutional guardrails don’t check your intentions, only your power.
None of this means abandoning the concerns that made populism attractive. The answer is to hold the line — even when the populist wind is blowing, even when the base is restless, even when it costs votes. Conservatives will make exactly that case in a few weeks at the Western Conservative Summit .
American conservatism has been here before. It recovered not by reinventing itself as something unrecognizable, but by insisting, against the drift, on what it had always believed.
Greg Schaller is director of the Centennial Institute , the conservative think tank of Colorado Christian University , which hosts the annual Western Conservative Summit July 31 to August 1.
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