Revising My Views of the Right

The changes I’m making to my course on American conservatism this semester

Conservative columnist and Republican presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan celebrating a strong second-place showing to President George H. W. Bush in the New Hampshire primary on February 18, 1992. (Photo by Steve Liss/Getty Images)

A little over a year ago, I published a post about the course I was preparing to teach at Penn in the Fall 2024 semester. Titled “Conservatism in Theory and Practice,” the seminar (for first-year undergraduates) was organized around an implied argument or overarching interpretation of the American right: Some on the right are Burkeans favoring prudence, defending tradition, and embracing moderate reform against demands for revolutionary change; but others follow Joseph de Maistre in believing themselves to live on the far side of a revolutionary rupture that must be reversed or actively destroyed in order to make possible a new beginning founded on primordial authority.

Those in the first group are conservatives; the second are reactionaries. My idea for the course was to have students apply these distinctions to various figures on the American right down through the decades and centuries.

But by the end of the semester, I had already begun to question this schematic approach to the material. I captured that unsettledness in a follow-up post from December 20, 2024—published at the end of the class, just after Donald Trump’s second, bigger victory in the presidential election, and exactly one month before the start of Trump 2.0. There just seemed to be too much variation in the right over time to place people and ideas into one of two camps: conservatism in practice had tripped up my ambition to say something big and sweeping about conservatism in theory. So I was mainly left to suggest there was no way of synthesizing the material into a coherent story of the American right.

Yet as I prepare to teach the course again, eight months into the second Trump administration, my mind has begun to do what it was too overwhelmed to accomplish last fall. On paper, I haven’t changed all that much about the class. But the way I’m thinking about the material has begun to coalesce into a new story that makes somewhat better sense of where we’ve been and where we find ourselves today.