William F. Buckley Jr. once said that a conservative is “someone who stands athwart history, yelling, 'Stop,' at a time when no one is inclined to do so.” To me, that captures the essence of conservatism—not a blind resistance to change, but the defense of what endures when everything around us rushes toward the new. Conservatism begins with the recognition that there’s an enduring moral order, that society isn’t a contract to be rewritten at will but a covenant among the living, the dead, and the unborn. Russell Kirk wrote that politics must rest upon “the permanent things,” while Roger Scruton reminded us that the task of the conservative is to love what’s ours and to preserve what’s good.
Conservatism isn’t a purity test, but it does require some shared understanding of what’s fundamentally true. We should be able to agree that the sky is blue, that the grass is green, that the sun is hot, and that Hitler was evil. We ought to be America First without being America Only. We ought to be able to discuss immigration without descending into 19th-century nativism. We ought to be able to debate Israel’s policies without wading into the sewers of antisemitism. And we ought to be able to defend liberty without abandoning any semblance of decency.
Even these self-evident truths, though, feel increasingly tenuous. Since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, something troubling has started to surface on the Right. These divisions were always there, but his absence seems to have removed a stabilizing force. The conversation online has grown darker, angrier, and more conspiratorial. It has begun to fester like an epidemic inside a movement that has otherwise proven quite robust.
The question is how these kinds of maladies take hold. Some of the most-followed figures in the world—the hosts of top podcasts and streams—are the very ones amplifying this conspiratorial and identitarian mindset. Some believe these ideas sincerely, perhaps victims of their own echo chambers. Others peddle them cynically, chasing attention, influence, or money (propheteering, if you will). Still others seem stuck somewhere in between, half-aware that they’ve mistaken paranoia for wisdom. Whatever their motives, the effect is the same: a distortion of conservative thought into something tribal, conspiratorial, and unrecognizable.
We need to talk about this honestly—not to excuse the Left’s radicalism, which remains deeply diseased in its own way, but to admit that there’s rot within our own house, too. I say this not as an outsider. I did, however, spend years as a Democrat and watched that party surrender to its most radical elements. The far Left didn’t just get louder; it took over. Pro-life Democrats were told they no longer belonged. Support for the Second Amendment—or sometimes even the First—became heresy. Figures like Joe Manchin were treated as enemies. “Real” Democrats were defined not by principle but by purity. That suffocating orthodoxy ultimately pushed me away.
The populist energy of Donald Trump brought new life—and many new people—to the conservative movement. But even populism has to rest on principles. The challenge is channeling that energy without losing the moral high ground. Modern politics tempts every movement toward excess, but what the algorithms reward and what’s actually healthy for society are two different things. The more outrageous the statement, the greater the reach. So political commentary becomes a performance, not a pursuit of truth. When a movement feeds on outrage long enough, it forgets what it was fighting for in the first place.
James Madison warned of factions in Federalist No. 10, describing the danger of passion unrestrained by reason. Those factions now live not only between parties but inside them. The Left’s radicals already dominate their agenda. If we don’t build guardrails for ourselves, we’ll repeat the same mistake—and hollow ourselves out from within.
Horseshoe theory helps explain what’s happening. The far Left and far Right, though seemingly opposite, bend until they almost meet. Spend enough time online and you can see it: polar opposite extremists retweeting one another, echoing the same conspiracies, united more by hatred than by reason. When anger becomes the organizing principle, ideology no longer matters. And anger, once severed from moral truth, isn’t conservative anymore—it’s revolutionary.
We can be a broad coalition—libertarians, traditionalists, populists, and former Democrats like me—but not a coalition without boundaries. A conservatism that embraces everything ultimately stands for nothing. The Republican Party rightly calls itself a big tent, and it should stay that way. But being a big tent doesn’t mean we ought to become a circus. A movement that wants to represent a great and diverse nation must be broad, yes, but it also has to be serious. We can’t make Faustian bargains with Mephistophelian figures whose ideas betray everything we claim to defend. Inclusion without discernment isn’t magnanimity; it’s self-destruction.
I spent four years as a high-school history teacher, teaching about 20th-century totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Communist China. These were subjects I talked about every day, and the experience shaped how I understand what happens when moral clarity disappears. That’s why I’ve always been critical of the Left’s habit of calling every Republican a fascist or every populist another Hitler—it’s lazy, and it betrays ignorance of what those systems truly were. But it’s also why I’m critical now of the far Right’s disturbing flirtation with those same ideas. When people on “our side” post admiringly about Hitler or indulge antisemitic conspiracies, it isn’t “edgy.” It’s abhorrent. And it shows just how far some have drifted from reality.
Since 2020, I’ve lived in Warsaw, a city that bore the consequences when reason collapsed and extremism devoured truth. Living here, surrounded by reminders of what totalitarianism does to nations, has made me even more grateful for the American experiment. It’s also made me more determined not to see it corroded by hatred and ignorance. Too many Americans, Left and Right alike, have lost touch with history. They throw around words like “fascist” or “communist” without grasping their weight. They don’t know what those ideologies actually did to human beings—or to civilization itself. That ignorance isn’t entirely their fault. We’ve built an education system rich in technology but poor in moral literacy. We’ve spent years replacing history with cynicism.
Despite what some progressives think, to be conservative isn’t to be hateful. It’s not to be racist, or sexist, or closed to compassion. True conservatism, as Burke, Buckley, and Kirk understood it, is a moral disposition before it’s a political one. It’s the effort to conserve what’s good and to improve what’s not. For those of us who are Christian, it’s to try—imperfectly—to model Christ in public life. For others, it’s to live honorably, keep one’s word, and seek order, gratitude, and virtue. What drove me from the Democratic Party was the unrelenting hatred I saw there. I don’t want to see that same hatred consume the Right. And I’m not talking about the “hate” the Left accuses us of—I mean real hatred, the cold, poisonous kind that corrodes the soul.
This is more than a question of party health; it’s a question of national health. Once the moral dam cracks, it’s hard to repair. Charlie Kirk, for all his differences with people across the movement, served as a kind of linchpin—a reminder that energy and principle can coexist. Since his death, the fractures have become more visible, but they were always there. What we do with them now will decide whether we restore coherence or slide further into chaos.
Electorally, the stakes are obvious. The Democrats’ indulgence of their extremes has cost them the trust of ordinary voters. If Republicans follow the same pattern—alienating moderates, independents, and former Democrats like me—we’ll squander what we’ve gained. Imagine a world where the Left finally starts to temper its excesses while the Right drifts deeper into its most conspiratorial corners. That would be a disaster, politically and morally.
We can avoid that fate by building a movement that’s broad, but principled. A healthy Right welcomes debate but rejects what is reprehensible. It argues from facts, not fantasies. It knows that liberty without virtue becomes license—and that the point of freedom isn’t to indulge our passions, but to govern them.
That’s my warning, and my hope: that we not repeat the unraveling I already saw on the Left. Let’s ground ourselves in the wisdom of Burke, the clarity of Buckley, the reverence of Kirk, and the moral seriousness of Scruton. Let’s maintain populism’s fire but guide it with an unmistakably conservative conscience. Conservatism, at its best, isn’t mere opposition; it’s stewardship—the quiet work of keeping a nation steady through the storm.
If we can do that, the Right won’t drift into the abyss that’s already consumed the Left. It’ll remain what it was meant to be—the ballast that keeps the republic steady.
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