Conservatives in America find themselves at a crossroads in 2026. For a half century, there was a pretty firm consensus on a few cardinal precepts. Conservatives advocated for economic growth as the primary means of generational advancement and American success, argued for limits to government power, supported the buildup of American military forces to be wisely deployed rather than unthinkingly restrained, and spoke out on behalf of the embodied person and the dignity of the unborn. All of these core beliefs have found themselves under challenge from inside the movement and the Republican Party. And yet, despite the impression given by both the mainstream media and the podcast wing of the GOP that the forces challenging these core beliefs have taken over the right, a recent authoritative survey of the same electorate in 2024 showed that conservatives of traditional stock retain the lion’s share of the electorate on the right.
That means the current conventional wisdom that the GOP’s future will be economically populist, isolationist, and anti-Israel is simply unsupported by data. But clearly conservatism is in crisis, even if that crisis is the result of a false belief that people and politicians who don’t reflect the true opinions of Americans on the right are the vanguard. So where do we go from here?
To determine the answer, a historical perspective is needed. We should turn to a previous hinge moment in American history, one that aligns with this one, and see how the arguments and policies to which conservatives gravitated created a bold new future on the right very different from the ideas and nostrums that preceded it.
Start with the conservatism that emerged and coalesced post-Nixon and -Ford: a conservatism of economic opportunity and self-government. This era is instructive because it began with Richard Nixon’s triumph over left-liberalism in the elections of 1968 and 1972 even as his presidency followed a much less conservative path—creating new activist agencies, imposing government controls on wages and prices, working toward détente with the Soviet Union, and, in general, evading the battleground issues of abortion and cultural relativism that impassioned voters. In his history of conservatism, The Right, Matthew Continetti focuses on the political evolution of the “new right” in the 1970s. This group included supply-side economists, an emboldened National Rifle Association, the newly established Heritage Foundation, the anti-feminist activism of Phyllis Schlafly, the rise of first-wave neoconservative foreign policy, and the growing importance of evangelical Christians represented by the rise of the Moral Majority.
What the “new right” brought to the forefront after the Nixon and Ford presidencies was the belief that core principles had to be front and center if the right was to achieve its aims. This was necessary not only to speak honestly to voters; it also allowed politicians and the movement to offer new answers and solutions to problems in American life and governance—both of which seemed to have gone off the rails.