For a long time, it looked as though, if there had been a battle for conservatism, the neocons had won. Or at least they had brought about a fusionist-neoconservative synthesis based in the think tanks of DC that kept the hard right elements at bay. In 2015, it was possible to write about the paleocons as a historical dead end: an Old Right last stand that petered out with Pat Buchanan’s political career. From 2026, however, I think it perhaps makes more sense to talk about a three-decade neoconservative interregnum that separated populist, anti-intellectual, anti-immigrant, tariff-loving, isolationist iterations of the American Right. I don’t want to overstate this thesis; I don’t think there’s enough evidence to call the Trump era a reversion to the “natural state” of the American conservatism. But I think it’s fair to say that, at least inside the Beltway, the neoconservative-influenced respectability politics and policy positions were dominant for a spell, divorced from the impulses of the conservative voter base. Trump obliterated those norms.
In 1986, critical elements of the paleocon grievance narrative were not yet in place.
Nevertheless, as traditionalist conservatives looked about at the state of the world after five years of Reagan, they were despondent. Some of this was temperamental. If a traditionalist isn’t despairing about the state of the world, is he really a traditionalist? Those drawn to jeremiads will, of course, be over-represented in traditionalist literature. And so it was in a symposium hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute on “The State of Conservatism.” Seven traditionalists – Gregory Wolfe, Clyde Wilson, Gerhart Niemeyer, George Carey, M.E. Bradford, Paul Gottfried, George Panichas – depicted Reagan’s America awash in greed and filth. Casting around at the conservative movement, they saw compromisers, a narrow politicization, populism, and activism over ideas.
Conservatism had failed the country, they wrote. But it had failed in large part because it had accepted into its ranks a caste of false conservatives. These “interlopers” and “refugees” were liberal victims of a mugging. They had turned to the right without abandoning their core commitments. The conservative movement, entranced by the neoconservatives’ credentials and access, embraced them with open arms and, in doing so, unmanned themselves. Gottfried saw the elevation of neoconservatism as a liberal gambit to narrow the bounds of acceptable discourse. “Liberal intellectuals have designated the neoconservatives as the official conservative opposition, sparing themselves the necessity of taking seriously any thinker to the right of Cold War liberals.” “Lines of demarcation must be drawn, and swiftly,” wrote Bradford.
The traditionalist-dominated symposium was a shot across the bow at some of the most prominent articulators of conservative sentiment. It left no readers unclear as to how traditionalists saw the neoconservatives. Six of the seven essayists found fault with the neoconservatives in some way or another for the state of the world.