The fall of American conservatism.

Though we are still some distance from election day, I think it’s fair to predict that the 2024 U.S. Presidential election will go down as an important one in American history. We’ve already seen some political developments that are highly unusual, if not unprecedented. While it’s always a little dangerous to point at broad historical trends before we have significant hindsight on them, I believe I’m safe in saying that this election will probably figure prominently in future historians’ assessments of the larger trajectories in American politics. The decline—and perhaps the fall—of modern conservatism may be one of those trajectories. If that’s where this historical narrative is going, it may represent the completion of a prominent story in recent American history, and one whose end we could only guess at. Until, perhaps, now.

The sturm und drang of campaign season, and the way the clueless checked-out media typically covers it as a blue vs. red horse race, tends to obscure a broader truth in recent American history: the conservative movement is a pale shadow of its former self, and its decline has been going on for a long time, 30 years or more. American political historians often talk of a “conservative movement” as the political force that began to coalesce in the mid-1960s and reached its full apogee in the era of Ronald Reagan. The ideological ideas of the movement are familiar to most of us: pro-business, pro-capitalism, stressing the opportunities for private economic gain, resistance to taxation and top-down government regulation, and a desire to roll back—or wholly abolish—any sort of social safety net provided by the state. But, as a means for achieving this political vision, the conservative movement not only appears to have failed, but they seem to have stopped trying to achieve it. Conservatism, in the end, has been co-opted by politics.