This article makes clear that conservatism has failed and there is a need for an Alternative Right.
George Hawley writes in the New York Times:
Donald J. Trump campaigned as a populist rather than as a conservative, and won in the face of hostility from the conservative movement and Republican leadership. For all his faults, Mr. Trump recognized that the Republican path to the presidency was incompatible with many conservative shibboleths.
As the new leader of his party, Mr. Trump has the opportunity to change its ideological orientation. He should seize it.
If Mr. Trump makes peace with mainstream conservatives and defers to the likes of the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, by backing upper-class tax cuts, economic deregulation and reduced entitlement spending, he will be a failed president, and the energized voters who sent him to the White House will feel justifiably betrayed.
During the campaign, Mr. Trump threw out the traditional conservative playbook. He appealed directly to the demographic that, in the mid-1970s, the sociologist Donald Warren called “Middle American Radicals.” These voters are not persuaded by tropes about limited government, but they have little interest in the Democratic Party’s cosmopolitan egalitarianism. They identify with neither Wall Street nor Occupy Wall Street. They are frightened by the prospect of privatized Social Security, but roll their eyes at the far left. They are not against government; they want a government that works for their specific interests.
Yet the Republican Congress appears ready to disregard the voting bloc that has handed it power. Instead of secure Medicare and building projects, Mr. Trump’s supporters may end up with fewer banking regulations — which they never cared about. If Republicans push for a traditional conservative agenda, and Mr. Trump acquiesces, many of the Middle American Radicals will not turn out for them in 2018 or 2020.
This group has made political waves before, filling the ranks of Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” and serving as Ross Perot’s base in 1992 and Pat Buchanan’s during his failed presidential campaigns in ’92 and ’96. Since that time, and especially since 2008, both parties ignored the Middle American Radicals, and it showed in their declining turnout rates.
Mr. Trump brought them back into the Republican coalition without suffering significant losses among ideological conservatives. He did not even underperform compared to recent Republican nominees among minority voters.
The conservative movement — the constellation of institutions, journalists, intellectuals and politicians who stand for limited government, traditional family values and a strong national defense — has dominated the Republican Party for a generation. But as Mr. Trump’s rise suggests, mainstream conservatism is a failed movement that has little to offer 21st-century America.
