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It’s a turbulent time for Trumpism. President Trump’s approval ratings have sunk to new lows, and congressional Republicans have left Washington for their districts showing greater alarm over their chances in the upcoming midterm elections.
Have the strains of Trump 2.0 taken any wind out of the sails of the populist right — and will they prompt a reconsideration of what it means to be a conservative?
Stephanie Slade, the author of “Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue and the Future of the American Right,” explored those questions in a written conversation with John Guida, an editor in Times Opinion. It has been edited for length and clarity.
John Guida: With the political fortunes of Trump and the G.O.P. looking shaky, at least for the moment, are you hearing concerns or doubts about Trumpism itself or the direction of conservatism from conservatives?
Stephanie Slade: Oh, yes. I’ll give you two examples. As I speak with conservative voters, including some who cast votes for Trump in three elections in a row, I’m increasingly hearing them say they feel betrayed — over his war of choice in the Middle East, over his reluctance to release the Epstein files, over his administration’s apparent focus on anything and everything but people’s No. 1 priority of bringing down the cost of living. Trump once said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his base would stand by him, but I think that’s finally starting to change, at least on the margin.
The second thing I would point you to is the exodus last winter of scholars, donors and board members from the Heritage Foundation. When the Heritage president, Kevin Roberts, proudly defended Tucker Carlson after Carlson hosted Nick Fuentes for a chummy interview, a number of conservatives suddenly awoke to the ideological extremism and moral rot that had taken root on parts of the right, and many people showed fairly decisively that, however they may feel about Trump, they wanted nothing to do with groyperism.
Guida: Do you see these developments as a sign that conservatives are retreating from some of the commitments of Trumpism — like, say, tariffs — or are they just disappointed with Trump himself?
Slade: There’s a dawning recognition that Trump the man is an unreliable ally. He will say one thing on the campaign trail — no new wars! — but not feel the slightest bit constrained by his promises while in office. Another thing is the self-dealing: the genuine corruption of historic proportions in which the president’s powers are being abused to enrich his allies and family members, sometimes at taxpayer expense. People see that and wonder what happened to draining the swamp?
Guida: This week, some intellectuals of the populist right — the New Right, or as you call it, the Dissident Right — are meeting at the National Conservatism conference in Jerusalem. At the first edition of these gatherings, in Washington in 2019, the Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony declared an “independence day” from many conservative predecessors and principles. Does the decline in Trump’s standing, even at the margins, have any impact on the broader national conservative project?
Slade: Many self-described national conservatives, including Hazony and the aforementioned Kevin Roberts, bet all their chips on Trump and Trumpism as the future of the conservative movement. That bet looks at the very least more questionable now. Polling suggests that the American people do not believe the MAGA agenda is delivering for them. This is going to be a definite challenge for the folks who have turned their whole intellectual and institutional purpose to the promotion of what I call “will-to-power politics” on the theory that this is what voters really want.
Guida: What is will-to-power politics?
Slade: It’s an approach that sees politics as purely a war to determine which side will get to wield power to reward its friends and punish its enemies. On the right, it explicitly repudiates the old-school Reagan-style commitment to limited government and free markets and instead calls on conservatives to be more “muscular” and less squeamish about using the coercive power of the state to enact their values and their conception of the common good.
At the end of the day, hatred toward the opposition is treated as a virtue. The goal, above all, is to defeat and destroy the other side rather than try to figure out how to coexist peacefully in a diverse society of 342 million people.
Guida: You have argued for a different path for conservatism — related presumably to the Reaganite approach — in which Republicans rediscover fusionism, a philosophy that emerged in the postwar years and prevailed on the right until the emergence of Trumpism. What is fusionism?
Slade: It’s the idea that both liberty and virtue are necessary for human flourishing. Mid-century fusionists argued that the American founding represented a synthesis of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition, with its lessons about the habits and choices that lead to a fulfilling life, and what we would eventually come to call the classical liberal political tradition, with its commitments to individual rights, the rule of law and so forth. Until about a decade ago, this was more or less a consensus position on the American right. But that consensus has now broken down.
Guida: So it’s a synthesis of what you call virtue (the moral tradition) and liberty, or freedom. A citizen needs to know how to live virtuously with that personal freedom. You need both.
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Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times
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