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Ross Douthat

By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

This is not my first vibe shift. I was there the last time that the American right seemed to have suddenly claimed a real cultural advantage, the last time liberals and the Democratic Party seemed not just politically defeated but existentially baffled, the last time that people talked about conservatism as a rising counterculture poised to rout and remake the establishment.

These have been the vibes around Donald Trump’s return to power, and they were also the vibes of George W. Bush’s presidency in the period immediately following Sept. 11, 2001. I was a young conservative beginning a Washington career at the time, and it felt as though the terrorist attacks had changed the political landscape permanently: discrediting the progressive left, reviving a spirit of patriotism and heroism and national greatness, perhaps inspiring a large-scale return to religion, definitely shifting the entire American establishment toward the right.

But not, as it turned out, for long. By the time the Bush presidency limped to its conclusion, the right appeared generationally discredited, and the stage was set for Barack Obama’s triumph and the Great Awokening beyond. In hubris and in folly, conservatism had wasted its moment and let a generational opportunity slip away.

Could it happen again? Not in the same way or with the same kind of conclusion: Despite his talk about making Gaza an American development project, Trump isn’t likely to occupy a Middle Eastern country and attempt a nation-building effort, and cultural progressivism in 2004 had a lot more room to surge forward than does a retreating wokeness now.

But already, in the attempted shock and awe of the second Trump administration, you can see ways that the vibe shift of 2025 could be squandered. So it’s worth drawing some lessons from the Bush era that might apply to Trump and Elon Musk and other would-be counterrevolutionaries today.

The first lesson is not to overread your mandate. Bush-era conservatism built its strong position on one overriding issue — destroying Al Qaeda and killing terrorists — joined to a broader affect of patriotism and religious piety, with moderate stances on government spending and the welfare state. It lost its mandate by expanding the War on Terror from Afghanistan to Iraq, from counterterrorism to nation-building, and also by........

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