According to the Daily Princetonian’s annual survey of incoming first-year students, only about 11.4% of the Class of 2026 would describe themselves as either somewhat or very right-leaning. The fact that Princeton’s student body tends to skew somewhat left of center (when it manages to break out of its usual political apathy, that is) means that it can be quite rare to hear conservative thought in classes or precepts.
But no one should be fooled by the apparent absence of conservative expression on campus; indeed, conservatism is alive and well at Princeton University. Instead of appearing in the classroom, however, it manifests itself online, through student groups like the Tory, and in print, via posters put up by the James Madison Program advertising its public lectures. The lectures themselves are particularly important for conservatives on campus, as they represent some of the only opportunities for right-leaning students and faculty to congregate with others of a similar political persuasion. These are spaces where Princeton’s conservatives can receive cues about the status of their movement—who are its rising stars, which are its trending fixations, and what is its current trajectory. In other words, these are the places where conservatives go to be conservative.
I recently visited one such space, in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the opposition, as it were. The occasion was a lecture presented by Matthew Continetti—a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute as well as a historian of American conservatism—entitled “The State of Conservatism 2022.” I was intrigued by this title, which had been plastered on posters that hung from what seemed like half of the campus lampposts in the week leading up to the event. Not that I was necessarily ignorant of the topic—who could be, after the events of the past seven years?—but I figured that hearing it directly from the horse’s (elephant’s?) mouth, so to speak, could provide a potentially interesting perspective.
In his lecture, Continetti provided a captivating account of conservatism’s recent history, the role of that history in determining the movement’s present state, and its various implications for the future of the American right. Recent developments within the conservative movement have fundamentally altered the longstanding balance of competing impulses (traditionalist, neoconservative, libertarian, religious) on the right, and certainly not for the better.
Nonetheless, conservatism at Princeton is still in many ways the same conservatism that it has always been, particularly in regard to the ideology’s usual expressions. For instance: Continetti took a self-righteously dramatic tone when talking about the current state of American politics, with a special condescension reserved for liberals and their ‘woke ideology’. He made the obligatory reference to George Orwell (“…the Inflation Reduction Act, at whose name George Orwell would smile…”), and he repeatedly displayed his obvious idolization of Bill Buckley and Ronald Reagan, two of the most iconic conservative leaders who successfully managed to police their movement and unite it briefly behind a common set of ideals and policies. Even that oft-repressed impulse of casual homophobia made an appearance at this lecture, with Professor Robert George (apparently still smug from the Dobbs victory earlier this year) blithely chiming in to set a new judiciary target on Obergefell v. Hodges;
Continetti: “…I think a great spur to the rise of the New Right was the Obergefell decision. I know from my students, who are on the New Right, the religious right—that decision radicalized them. And that decision is not likely to be reversed.”
George: “Give us 49 years.”
Continetti: “It would take another two generations, I think, right?”
George: “We did it once.”
But I digress. When I had first arrived in the lecture hall where Continetti’s talk was to be given, I found it nearly full—a testament to conservatism’s deceptive strength within this university. The lecture truly was an event, with students, professors, and community members all filling a room just to hear what Continetti had to say about the State of Conservatism in 2022. As I observed this crowd from my corner of the lecture hall, I wondered to myself: why had all of these people come to see Continetti speak? After hearing the lecture and the questions that followed it, I had a clear answer to this question. Princeton’s conservative community was eager to be told where their movement is heading because even they don’t know anymore.
The first thing to know about conservatism at Princeton is that it is a conservatism of the elite; it is intellectual, it is rigorous, and it is highly self-absorbed. At first glance, it shares very little in common with popular conservatism, the conservatism of those outside the Ivory Tower who are much less ideologically consistent or concerned with legitimizing their political beliefs using high-minded intellectual justifications. These two conservatisms share a professed love for the U.S. Constitution, of course, and they use mostly the same political language, but they have different priorities because they are accustomed to occupying disparate positions in the conservative hierarchy. Ordinary conservatives are the rank-and-file voters who tend to be fixated on the social and religious concerns of conservatism far more than they are interested in the movement’s fiscal orientation—often mounting significantly fewer objections to higher taxes for the rich or to extensions of government benefits than to trans athletes competing in high school sports or to race-based affirmative action policies.
Conservative elites, on the other hand, occupy the true positions of power within the movement. They are the policymakers who set the movement’s agenda, the intellectuals who outline its priorities, and the planners who shape its future trajectory. Their modus operandi has traditionally been to provoke culture war outrage amongst the conservative base using identity-based agitprop, then to harness the resulting energy in order to win elections and ultimately pass an unpopular fiscal agenda (i.e. tax cuts). Their most important power is the ability to define the conservative mainstream, to police and direct conservatism’s competing impulses—including laissez-faire economics, nationalism, religious fundamentalism, racial backlash, libertarianism, etc.—into a limited and unified front.
Or at least that was their most important power, until conservative elites lost it in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency. Trump was and is the natural result of the conservative base’s ever-growing appetite for culture war agitation, and his meteoric rise to the top of the Republican party caused a massive power shift in the balance of American conservatism, as elites took a backseat to a force they had helped create but could not control. Under Trump’s leadership, the traditionalist, Christian, and fascistic impulses in conservatism were strengthened at the expense of the neoconservative, corporate, and libertarian tendencies.
But this is old news. Today, more than two years after President Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, a power vacuum has emerged at the center of the conservative hierarchy as Trump has faded slightly into the background of American politics. This power vacuum—and the eminent contest to fill it—was the main subject of Continetti’s lecture. According to Continetti, conservatism’s future is up for grabs because the movement is divided, to a greater extent than ever before, between its competing and somewhat contradictory elements. It is not clear which of these elements will prevail because conservatism lacks a true leader, in the mold of a Buckley or a Reagan; there is no one conservative who can organize and unify these elements behind their own agenda while simultaneously limiting the scope of the movement in order to prevent the far-right from unraveling it from the inside.
This lack of conservative leadership is partly to blame for the rise of populist conservatism, whose main symptom was four years of Trump as president, and it is also behind the growing strength and brazenness of far-right elements such as the New Right and National Conservatism. From the perspective of Continetti and other conservative elites, the National Conservatives represent a particularly noteworthy threat not simply because their ideology is antithetical to traditional conservative principles, but also because so-called NatCon ‘intellectuals’ stand a chance of replacing traditional conservative elites as the controlling force of the movement. These far-right forces have made a point of being explicitly anti-establishment, and as they have attracted more and more people (especially youth) to their ideology, the conservative establishment of intellectual elites has become increasingly nervous that Trump’s usurpation of their ability to define the mainstream was not a temporary blip but a permanent deposition.
Even now, conservative elites have not yet managed to reassert their control over the movement. This is why conservatism is currently in a status of limbo, and why the mood of the room both before and after Continetti’s lecture was marked by an undertone of anxiety and gloom. There is much hanging in the balance of this eminent contest over the future of American conservatism; elites like Continetti are well aware that the New Right and the NatCons don’t share their self-declared values of freedom, constitutionalism, limited government, and the rule of law, and they understand that the stronger the far-right grows, the more and more these values will be eroded from the fabric of American political life.
Despite this purported difference of values, however, Continetti appeared to hold a certain amount of sympathy for the far-right. He strongly criticized the New Right and the NatCons, but his attitude toward them was still one of tolerance and engagement instead of condemnation. Near the end of the lecture, he argued that conservatives must find a way to identify why people have become so discontented with the conservative establishment and work to address that problem—a strategy that is tantamount to the accommodation of the far-right into the broader movement. In the end, even conservatives at Princeton, of all places, would prefer to appease the fascists rather than work with the Left to defeat them. Yet the fact that old-guard conservatives like Continetti seem willing to work with an increasingly menacing far-right should prompt us to consider just how different from the elites these so-called ‘extremists’ really are. After all, Bush v. Gore was just as much of an anti-democratic travesty as January 6th, and yet it too was supported and celebrated by the conservative elite.
But refusing to work with the Left against the far-right leaves conservatism with few options. The leading figures within the Republican Party are currently Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and new faces like Glenn Youngkin. Looking forward to the 2024 presidential election, conservative elites view the possibility of another Trump administration as a disaster in terms of their influence over and power within the movement. Trump would only further embolden the populist far-right and allow it to extend its influence at the expense of mainstream conservatism. Youngkin, on the other hand, is still relatively unknown, which makes him a wild card but also a bad bet for the time being. This leaves Ron DeSantis as the only politician capable of rescuing conservatism from the quandary it now finds itself in. Indeed, Continetti admitted that “DeSantis presents the best hope for people like me” in that DeSantis—who has increasingly come to embody the synthesis of elite mainstream conservatism with Trump’s populism—is likely the sole figure capable of 1) replacing Trump as the de facto conservative leader, 2) defeating the Democratic candidate in the electoral college, and 3) co-opting the far-right into the larger conservative movement, thereby limiting its influence as much as possible. Essentially, conservatives like Continetti see Desantis as the next Ronald Reagan: a unifying leader who can harness the electoral benefits of making not-so-subtle anti-democratic, racist, and chauvinistic appeals to voters, while keeping control of the movement solidly in the hands of the elite.
The real horror of this situation is that at the end of the day, in the absence of mutual cooperation, both leftists and conservative elites will be nearly powerless to do anything to prevent the rise of the far-right. Instead, the outcome of this struggle will ultimately be determined by the Republican presidential candidates and primary voters in 2024. In the meantime, conservative elites like Continetti seem to be signaling that they would rather flirt with fascism than compromise with the Left to save American democracy, and we will all have to live with the consequences.
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