OpinionRoss Douthat

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By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

Donald Trump spent his first term as the frustrated caretaker of the decaying Victorian mansion called the American conservative movement — floating plans to tear it down and build anew but mostly just knocking down a few walls, adding a gilded bathroom, doing some renovations that the residents had long desired (the Federalist Society Ballroom got a special shine-up) while letting mold and time do its work on the Limited Government Wing.

His second term has been a different story. The smoke of demolition is everywhere, cranes are swinging wildly, and if the shape of the original building is still vaguely visible through the smoke, it’s clear that the final renovation is going to be radical. More of the original residents have fled to nearby properties (you can see a bunch of them clustered in the Mike Pence Gazebo), while others have barricaded themselves inside the True Conservatism Suite, where folks are pouring tea and wearing earplugs. A bunch of newcomers are throwing up competing additions (the A.I. Tower is a shiny spire overshadowing the Based Medieval Turret and the Garden of Cronyism), and the contractors are having a fistfight in the Hall of Christian Zionism.

Out front, emblazoned with the Trump logo, a builder’s sign promises, “Future Home of American Nationalism Inc.”

Trump is abnormal in a million ways, but demolitions like this one are a regular feature of American politics. Political coalitions come and go; alliances and clusters of ideas outlive their usefulness; time and chance happen to us all. The Whigs and the Mugwumps and the Progressives all had their day and departed. No one should be surprised if the movement that William F. Buckley Jr. and Barry Goldwater forged and Ronald Reagan brought to power is giving way to a quite different mode of right-wing politics.

But we’re in an odd position because the new mode can be defined only broadly; the specifics are so tightly bound to the whims and charisma of one man that it’s hard to visualize exactly what shape it will take when he’s no longer the president.

It’s not that Trump alone is the decider, since the overall process of destruction and renovation is linked to the deeper forces that have made nationalism potent the world over. Against that backdrop, we can predict that a nationalist right will be more intensely focused on American interests in foreign policy, less internationalist and idealistic than prior incarnations of conservatism. We can assume that it will be more open to government interventions in the economy than the laissez-faire or libertarian style of right-wing politics. We can take for granted that it will be more concerned with issues of immigration and national identity and less engaged with the cultural issues that motivated the religious right. And we can expect it to be more radical — more reactionary in some ways, more futurist in others than — than the Burkean conservatism it has seemingly displaced.

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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook

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