Why Conservatism Imploded

The Rise of Trumpism Arose To Fill A Void That Threatens The Social Contract

The trajectory from Reagan to Trump is not what most Americans think it is - and that understanding makes all the difference.

I was having lunch at a steak house in New York City almost two years ago. I was in NYC for meetings and wrote my literary agent that I would be in town and she suggested we meet for lunch. It was one of those high brow places on Broadway that you get taken to when you get lucky and land a relationship with one of the country’s top agencies.

Somewhere between the disappearing of our steak and small talk she asked me a question: What’s your next book going to be about?

“I want to explain why conservatism died,” I said between mouthfuls.

She seemed intrigued by the idea - not because it would seel books - she didn’t think it would, but because it was a foundational question that might explain why it was that the Republican Party had turned into something that wasn’t only dangerous but unrecognizable to American observers of politics.

The market for books by assorted Never Trumpers and former Republicans had it’s fill of books related to the question, finding most of its buyers among wealthier white progressives who wanted to better understand how the GOP had lost its mind and make themselves feel better about saying things like “I wish we had a healthy conservative party in America - we need one” when I knew that was objectively not true.

Books like my frieds Stuart Stephens “It was all a lie” and Tim Millers “Why we did it” satiated the need for these book buyers, and while I agreed with their writings, they struck me as raw memoirs that balanced a tone between warnings to the country and mea culpa’s for their culpability in the rising specter of Donald Trump.

Good reads though they are, they did not get to the heart of the matter about why Republicanism and Conservatism departed from one another in such a dramatic fashion. Moreover, they did not explain the fundamentals of why Republicans embraced populist nationalism and bigger stronger government when the party had been defined by the opposite since the end of the Civil War.

I have thought about this for the better part of the decade and I’m going to share with you why I believe we have seen such a collpase and what it means for the country and our ability to find a new way forward. But first some caveats: The old GOP is dead much the same way as the Whigs left the scene. There is no coming back. Second, the Democratic party is the conservative party today - at least in the Burkean sense - as the guardian of institutions against populist destruction and counter cultural institutional attack manifested in todays GOP. If you think Reagan was a pre-cursor to Trump I would submit you have a very elementary understanding of what’s happening to our society - let alone our political system.

Trump is no more the heir of Reaganism than Obama is the Democratic heir to Bull Connor.

I chose to revisit this question because after a decade of contemplation, visiting with my book agent on the appetite for such an argument and watching the media, pundits and the chattering class conflate Conservatism with Republicanism for the past decade - the basic thesis of my argument is now beginning to play out, at least in public opinion.

There was a poll question this week that should have stopped every conservative in the country cold, and almost none of them noticed. Fox News asked voters a simple question it has asked before: what poses a bigger threat to the country’s future, big government or big technology. In 2019, the answer was lopsided. Big government won by 23 points. This week, that result didn’t just narrow. It flipped. Big Tech is now seen as the greater threat, a 28-point swing in seven years, one of the fastest reversals of a core political assumption I have seen in my professional life. In fact, in a article titled “Big Tech surpasses Big Government as Top Voter Concern Fox News no less, writes that voters are figuring out what it is that is actually creating the fear and anxiety about control over their lives and loss of freedoms.

If you have spent any time around conservative thought, you understand why this number matters more than almost any other in American politics right now. It is not a stray data point. It is a wrecking ball aimed at the load-bearing wall of the entire movement. But more than that it is threatening to unravel everything we’ve known about our politics, our institutions and the basis of human interaction.

From Burke to Goldwater to Reagan, conservatism in its American form has never really been a checklist of policies. It has been a theory about where danger to individual liberty comes from. The danger comes from concentrated power, and the most dangerous concentration of power in human history has been the state, because the state has a monopoly on legitimate coercion and an unmatched capacity to absorb the individual into the collective. Tax rates, regulatory burden, the size of the federal register, all of it was downstream of that one foundational fear. Get the architecture of liberty right, keep government enumerated, limited, and accountable, and the rest of freedom takes care of itself.

That was the whole proposition. It is what Reagan meant when he said government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.
For two hundred years that theory had explanatory power because it was true, or true enough.

Government was, in fact, the institution best positioned to surveil you, conscript you, tax you, jail you, and tell you how to live. Then something happened that the theory never anticipated, because nothing in Burke or Madison or Hayek could have anticipated it.

A handful of private companies built the capacity to know more about a human being’s inner life than any government in history ever dreamed of knowing, and they built it not through coercion but through convenience, not through a standing army but through a search bar and a feed. Worse, we have voluntarily given our data, indeed autonomy over our lives, to the Facebooks, Googles and Tik Tok’s of the world. A form of voluntary servitude, if you will.

Government can still arrest you. But it cannot predict, three days before you know it yourself, that you are about to leave your marriage, change your diet, or radicalize politically. Google can. Meta can. And Palantir can sell that capability to whoever is buying - including, and especially, governments around the world.

This is the part of the story that is going almost entirely unexplored, and it is the real explanation for why conservatism didn’t just lose an election in 2016, it lost its reason for existing. A philosophy built entirely around identifying government as the supreme threat to individual liberty has no language, no policy toolkit, and no emotional resonance left when the supreme threat migrates somewhere else. You can’t out-Reagan a problem Reagan never saw coming.

We have actually been in a similar situation before, and it is worth sitting with the parallel because it is instructive, if not perfectly analogous. During the Gilded Age, the dominant threat to ordinary Americans wasn’t Washington. It was the railroad, the oil trust, the steel monopoly. The Vanderbilts and the Carnegies and the Rockefellers were the oligarchs of their era, controlling the infrastructure that every farmer and shopkeeper and laborer depended on to live. And the response that emerged wasn’t purely a left-wing phenomenon. Quite the opposite. It came substantially from inside the Republican Party itself. Theodore Roosevelt went after the trusts. Wall Street Republicans who had no particular love for labor unions nonetheless understood that concentrated private power left unchecked was as dangerous to a free republic as concentrated government power. Hiram Johnson, a Republican governor of California, didn’t fight the railroads by making government bigger in the abstract sense conservatives fear. He fought them by handing power back to the people directly, the initiative, the referendum, the recall, mechanisms designed explicitly to let citizens leapfrog a state government that the Southern Pacific Railroad had effectively captured. The progressive era was, at its root, a conservative instinct applied to a new kind of threat.

Break the concentration.

Restore the individual’s leverage.

This was a time when Conservatism was far more concerned about protecting the republic and individual freedom. No longer.

The digital age should have produced its own Hiram Johnson moment. In some ways it briefly looked like it might. We were awfully close. The most interesting development of Trump’s first term, and one I don’t think has been given nearly enough weight, was watching Constitutionalists Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley start using the exact phrase Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were using. “Big Tech”. Not big government.

The right and the left, for one disorienting moment, agreed on where the threat actually lived. That convergence should have been the seed of a genuinely new conservative synthesis, an antitrust conservatism for the data economy, a Hiram Johnson for the algorithm age.

Instead it curdled into something else, because the underlying problem here is harder than railroads. A railroad is steel and timber. You can see it, regulate its rates, break up the company that owns it. Data infrastructure moves at the speed of a software update. By the time a congressional committee finishes a hearing on a specific algorithmic harm, the model has already been retrained twice.

Government, the institution conservatism spent two centuries training Americans to tame, started to look by comparison almost charmingly slow. Incompetent, even benign. Meanwhile Google, Meta, and Palantir kept getting better at knowing what you wanted before you did, where you were going before you left, who you were before you’d fully decided.

And this is the deeper reason the threat is categorically larger than anything Burke or Reagan equipped us to handle. The Gilded Age trusts could overcharge you for a train ticket. They could squeeze a farmer’s margins to nothing. That is a real and serious harm, an economic harm, and it was met with an economic and legal response.

What we are dealing with now is not primarily economic, even though the economic scope is staggering. It is epistemic and psychological. It is the capacity to model a human being’s desires, fears, and decisions well enough to shape them before the person is even aware a decision is being made. It is about the most fundamental essence of what human liberty and individualism is.

No agricultural-era government, no industrial-era government, ever had that. The question is no longer just who controls the rails. It’s who controls the picture of reality inside your head.

A movement whose entire vocabulary was built to name and resist the first kind of threat has nothing to say about the second kind. That silence - that void - is what created the implosion. It isn’t that conservatives lost an argument. It’s that the argument they were built to make stopped being the one that needed making, and nobody had written the next one yet.

Essentially, Conservatives were arguing for a defense of candle-making during the advent of the electric light bulb.

Into that vacuum walked performance, not philosophy. Popular anxiety about the emerging age fueled the rise of grievance about the collapsing age and its institutions. Trump didn’t offer a theory of how to govern data, privacy, or algorithmic power, and four years on he still hasn’t. You have never once heard Donald Trump extol the virtues of small government, not in the way every conservative thinker of the past two centuries has, because he simply does not believe in it.

He never did. He never will.

What he offered instead was the affect of someone fighting back, grievance as a stand-in for policy, hostility toward institutions as a substitute for a plan to discipline them. People weren’t wrong to feel that something enormous and unaccountable had attached itself to their daily lives. It had. They were just handed a tantrum where a framework should have been.

And the clearest signal of where this was always headed came on inauguration day, when the men who run the largest data-harvesting companies on earth sat in the front row, closer to the new president than his own cabinet. That image told you everything the polling now confirms.

When the republic needed Teddy Roosevelt we chose Donald Trump. Government was not going to be the bulwark against this concentration of power. It was going to be complicit in it. Government, in this telling, is not even the principal threat anymore. It has become the enabling feature, the institution that grants the licenses, awards the contracts, benefits from it financially and looks away while a handful of unaccountable hands absorb more and more of what used to be the citizen’s own domain. That should not surprise us if we are honest about what government has always been at its core.

Since the record tablets of Mesopotamia, government has fundamentally been a record-keeping institution, a data storage operation with an army attached. What is happening now is that function being quietly outsourced and sold, the state’s oldest job, knowing things about its people, increasingly performed on its behalf by private servers it cannot or will not regulate.

This is where the founding generation has something to say that we have stopped listening to. Jefferson fought as hard as he did to attach a Bill of Rights to the Constitution because he understood that a structure of government alone, however well separated and checked, would not protect the individual unless specific liberties were hardwired against encroachment, named, enumerated, made resistant to the passing will of a majority or a minister. His fight was almost entirely defensive, aimed at the one concentration of power they could see clearly from where they stood - the state. We are sitting on the same fault line he was, facing a concentration of power they could not have foreseen, and we have produced no equivalent act of hardwiring. There is no serious, sustained political movement insisting that the individual’s control over her own data, her own attention, her own predicted behavior be placed as far beyond the reach of Google, Meta, and Palantir as the First Amendment placed speech beyond the reach of Congress. We have constitutional language protecting you from a government search of your home.

We have nothing of comparable weight protecting you from a private company that knows the contents of your mind better than your own household does.

The debate between the collective claims of government and the individual’s right to pursue her own happiness has organized the difference between left and right in this country for two hundred and fifty years. We are simply not having that debate anymore, not in any form either party seems able to articulate, because neither has metabolized that the thing to be limited is no longer principally the state.

The threat is technology in private hands.

Government is not the greatest threat to our freedom and our way of life in 2026. It has become the permission structure for the greater threat. Recognizing that is the precondition for anything resembling a serious politics, and a serious politics would treat the protection of the individual from these companies the way Jefferson and Madison treated the protection of the individual from the Crown and from Congress, as something to be hardwired, not negotiated session by session in a Senate hearing room that the technology has already outrun.

I don’t think the answer is obvious, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who tells you it is. Antitrust helps but won’t be sufficient against infrastructure this fluid. Privacy law helps but lags the technology by definition. Tax policy, while necessary, clearly won’t be sufficient. What is clear is that no restoration of the old conservative catechism, no fresh recitation of Reagan’s line about government being the problem, will mean anything to a twenty-five-year-old who has never feared the IRS half as much as she fears what her phone already knows about her.

Conservatism’s founding insight, that concentrated power unaccountable to the individual is the central danger to a free life, was correct. But it desperately needs a new address, and a new document.

Until someone writes the digital era’s Bill of Rights, the individual’s claim staked out and hardwired against the gathering power of the companies that would otherwise absorb her into a collective she never agreed to join, the movement that once organized all of American politics around the proper role of government will keep mistaking volume for relevance. The void it leaves behind will keep filling with whoever shouts loudest about a threat real enough to feel and too new for either party to have actually named because they don’t understand it.

This is why you feel helpless. Why you feel no one is saying anything that will make a difference. Why you’re frustrated with your political party as out of touch and not doing anything that will actually change the countrys course.

Because they’re not.

We are struggling to address this centuries problems with last centuries ideas. If the American experiment is to be saved, the Democratic Party must focus on securing and protecting us from the emergent threat - no other policies matter until that is hardwired into the system. As for the Republicans? Well, they gave up in November 2016 when they capitulated on everything they believed in, with the false hope that they would be saved simply by not losing power.

First they lost their soul. Then their party. Now we’re perilously close to losing the country because they see it as lost already.