Quick Thought: The Path to Conservative Renewal

We can't just reset things to 2015, we have to go back to the '50s and '60s and rebuild all over again.

In 1960, 90 students from 44 different states gathered at the home of Bill Buckley in Sharon, Pennsylvania to draft a conservative credo that became known as the Sharon Statement. This, along with the founding of National Review in 1955, was one of the pivotal, foundational moments of modern conservatism.

A successful conservative renewal cannot simply be an attempt to reset things back to 2015. The very fact that populism so easily rose up and overtook the Republican Party demonstrates that if we are to renew conservatism, we have to understand what was already wrong in 2015 and provide a corrective to where the movement and party was at that point...not just defeat the populism that has overwhelmed us.

Instead, the realities of social media, of intellectual and philosophical drift, and the reframing of the issues right-wing Americans care about and how they feel solutions should play out dictate that we have to go much farther back in the necessary reset than 2015. We need to go all the way back to the ‘50s and ‘60s. We're essentially starting from scratch.

We have to build the movement all over again, learning through trial and error how to re-articulate the meaning of conservatism in a new age. We can't just hope to defeat populists at the ballot box and secure an automatic reset to before the populists showed up. We have to win every heart, every mind, one by one back to conservative ideals and principles.

And we have to provide answers to contemporary problems through the application of timeless ideals. We have to not only demonstrate that conservatism is more than high-minded, pie in the sky, abstract principles, we have to also demonstrate that conservatism translates to real solutions that are actually better than populist solutions. And, crucially, we have to convince people that conservatism is better than populism at defeating progressivism not only in the long-term but in the short-term too.

Just like the early conservatives had to establish themselves as a credible alternative to red scare populism AND new deal progressivism, we have to reclaim the footing in the political landscape as the credible alternative to national populism AND woke progressivism.