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One of the interpretations often heard about the 2024 elections is that the outcome represented a conservative “correction” for the progressive excesses of the Biden presidency. And indeed, it’s possible to view much of American political history as a left-right oscillation in which one major party’s dominance is countered by a reaction benefiting the other major party. Thus, for example, the Hoover administration’s conservative ineffectiveness against the ravages of the Great Depression led to a New Deal revolution that was mitigated significantly by a bipartisan “conservative coalition” in Congress and eventually the Republican landslide of 1952.
But as should be abundantly clear by now, any hopes that Trump 2.0 would represent a mild and conservative “correction” of anything in living memory are hallucinatory. Indeed, it’s as good a time as any to stop using the word “conservative” for this band of disruptive revolutionaries. Many of them believe America went crucially wrong not in 2021 (when Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat failed) or in 2008 (when Barack Obama was elected president), or even in the 1960s, when America’s “family values” were allegedly challenged if not destroyed, but instead near the beginning of the 20th century. That’s why on the far right the original devil figures of the left in the MAGA version of history are Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, the “elitist” progressives who seized permanent power for judges, bureaucrats, and globalists in pursuit of values like equality and social justice that were not part of the Founders’ vision of this country.
As MSNBC’s Ryan Teague Beckwith explains, much of Trump’s actual agenda represents an effort to repeal the policies of the 20th century:
When Trump promised to make America great again, many Republican voters thought he meant the 1980s or maybe the 1950s. But it’s increasingly clear he intends to take the country further back than that. At a recent town hall, Trump gushed about how in the 1890s America was “probably the wealthiest it ever was” (not true). His allies dream about bringing back the Comstock Act of 1873 to block access to abortion. He’s pledged to take advantage of the Insurrection Act of 1807 to send the military into American cities. And he’s talked about reviving the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to speed up deportations.
Meantime, Trump’s attacks on the Constitution would take us back before 1789.
Thanks to Elon Musk and Russell Vought, we are getting a vivid demonstration that MAGA plans to demolish the “deep state” are essentially an attack on the late-19th-century introduction of civil-service protections of public employees. The effort to purge DEI policies and programs from both the public and private sectors represent a conscious reversal of the civil-rights movement’s premise that the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow required affirmative action to create equal opportunity. And most obviously, the vast expansions of executive power being sought by Trump represent the belief that absolutely any means are justified to radically reverse the trajectory of American public policy prior to Trump’s own accession to power.
There are a host of conservative intellectuals who have spilled many gallons of ink challenging the MAGA movement’s claim to represent the conservative tradition or the Republican Party’s heritage. But history aside, it’s the smash-and-grab style of Trump 2.0 that is most alien to the temperament associated with many generations of conservative thinkers and activists. This is an administration (with the concurrence of its party) that has arrived like a thief in the night. It is seizing power and enemy turf with a speed and ruthlessness that suggest a determination to take steps that cannot be easily reversed by the very electorate that is supposed to have given Trump a virtually unlimited mandate. The initial phases of the mass-deportation program supervised by MAGA radical Stephen Miller all but courts the appearance of impropriety as masked secret policemen abduct people legally in this country. As former Republican U.S. senator John Danforth argued on the eve of Trump’s rise to power, the very founder of Anglo-American conservatism, Edmund Burke, would have been appalled by the contemporary American right:
The essence of Burke’s conservatism was his belief that political change should be gradual and not revolutionary and achieved through existing institutions. The result would be step-by-step change that would not be perfect in anyone’s eyes, but it would be better than the tyranny of absolutism that had terrorized France. For Burke, the greatest threat to society wasn’t some mistaken governmental policy but absolutists so certain of their own opinions that they would stop at nothing to force their opinions on the nation.
It’s a distinctive trait of Trump 2.0 that its leading figures prefer to achieve change outside of “existing institutions,” since the destruction of these institutions is a big part of their agenda. That’s why tariffs, federal budget and personnel cuts, and changes in federal agency duties that the administration might well have secured through the Congress Republicans completely control are instead being pursued by executive order and implemented by quasi-legal organizations like DOGE and an OMB director who believes the president should have the right to impound every nickel of appropriated dollars. Trump’s narcissism is perfectly matched to a cult of personality that is diametrically opposed to the measured and balanced approach to governing always associated with conservatism.
It’s no wonder that the first truly national protest movement of the second Trump administration goes by the headline “Hands Off!” It’s a movement with no demands beyond the restoration of the status quo ante enjoyed by its members before Trump and Musk and their allies assaulted their values, their interests, and their peace of mind. These protesters are the real conservatives in America today.
So you can call MAGA folks by all sorts of labels from “reactionary nihilists” to ultranationalists to the “alt-right” to apostles of an American Greatness associated with the distant past. But they’re not conservatives unless that term has lost all meaning. Trump and his acolytes are trying to create a very different country than the one whose leadership they have inherited. In the America most of us cherish, they see nothing worth conserving.
