ChatGPT says: Alliance Theory would interpret Jonah Goldberg, William Kristol, and the “principled constitutional conservative” Never-Trump cohort not primarily as defenders of abstract norms, but as members of a collapsing alliance network who chose to remain loyal to an old coalition even after its mass base defected.
Their original alliance position.
They were central nodes in the post-Reagan conservative super-alliance:
Neocon foreign policy elites
Free-market globalists
Constitutional originalists
Cold War national security institutions
Donor class Republicans
Prestige media and think-tank world
Their shared rivals were:
The Soviet bloc
Third World authoritarianism
Domestic New Left radicalism
Later, Islamism and rogue states
This coalition was hierarchical, elite-driven, and institutionally embedded. Its moral language was constitutionalism, democracy promotion, free markets, and rule-based order. Goldberg and Kristol were not just thinkers. They were alliance legitimizers. Their job was to provide the moral and intellectual grammar that made this elite coalition feel righteous and coherent.
The rupture.
Trump did not merely change policies. He redefined the rival map.
Suddenly, the primary enemies became:
The permanent bureaucracy
Intelligence agencies
Global trade institutions
Corporate media
Universities
Transnational NGOs
The old Republican donor class
In Alliance Theory terms, the mass base reclassified many of the Never-Trump conservatives’ core institutional allies as out-groups.
That created a transitivity crisis.
Goldberg and Kristol faced a choice:
Reassign allies and update moral language accordingly, or
Remain loyal to their existing alliance and reinterpret the populist base as the new out-group.
They chose the second.
Why their “principle” language intensified.
Alliance Theory predicts that when an alliance loses dominance, its moral vocabulary becomes more abstract, legalistic, and universalist. That is a classic coalition defense move. When you cannot win on numbers or emotional loyalty, you elevate procedural norms and legitimacy rules. You turn “our side” into “the Constitution,” “liberal democracy,” “the Founders,” “norms,” “the rule of law.”
This is not fake. It is functional.
They were not lying about caring about the Constitution.
They were using constitutionalism as a coalition-preserving signal.
Who they were really defending.
They were defending:
The foreign-policy establishment
The intelligence community
The judiciary
The prestige press
The donor class
The Atlanticist world order
The post-Cold War elite settlement
These institutions were their allies for decades. Trump and MAGA directly attacked them. Alliance Theory says loyalty to long-standing allies is cognitively and morally prior to ideological consistency.
So they reframed the conflict:
Not elite vs populist
But constitutionalism vs authoritarianism
Not institutional decay
But “norm erosion”
Not alliance shift
But “moral emergency”
Why they aligned with liberals.
Once their old coalition lost its mass base, transitivity logic kicked in.
Their enemies’ enemies became their friends.
Progressive elites, media, security agencies, and globalist Democrats now shared a rival: Trump and the populist right. So Never-Trump conservatives found themselves in a new bridging alliance, even while insisting they had not “changed sides.”
Alliance Theory predicts this exact rhetoric.
When alliances shift, actors insist values stayed constant and only “one side went crazy.”
That is how coalition realignment is experienced subjectively.
Their future.
Alliance Theory would say their long-term role is not to lead a mass coalition again. Their natural habitat is:
Elite magazines
Think tanks
University centers
Bipartisan democracy-defense NGOs
Transatlantic policy networks
They will remain morally confident and culturally influential within elite institutions, but structurally disconnected from a mass right-wing base that no longer shares their rival map.
In short:
They are not traitors.
They are not heroes.
They are loyalists to a fallen alliance order who chose institutional continuity over populist transitivity.
Their “principles” are real.
Their alliance commitments are deeper.
