A strong republic needs responsive institutions, so it is vital for conservatives to rebuild and reinforce them.

Underlying many contemporary debates about the American right is a deeper controversy about whether it should be a “conservative” force (that is, interested in preserving institutions) or counter-revolutionary movement focused on battling the entrenched progressive left. In a recent New York Times column that generated a lot of engagement online, David Brooks kicked off another iteration of this argument. To illustrate a “key difference between old-style conservatism and Trumpism,” Brooks highlighted the following claim by Christopher Rufo: “I am neither conservative by temperament nor by political ambition: I want to destroy the status quo rather than preserve it.” Brooks tied a loss of institutional credibility to the rise of political nihilism; but taking those institutional failures seriously might also reveal how correcting those institutions could itself be a conservative impulse.

I think it’s worth distinguishing between American conservatism and what we might think of as the Tory tradition. That Tory strand — rep ties, Bach concertos, and wine-and-walnuts symposia on T. S. Eliot — is an important component of American conservatism. With his Bösendorfer piano and mid-Atlantic accent, William F. Buckley had impeccable Tory branding.

Yet, as a complement to that Tory flair, American conservatism has also long nurtured a populist suspicion of existing institutions. Tapping into those populist energies helped distinguish postwar “movement conservatism” from the more patrician “old right,” and harnessing that populism was a central strategic insight of Buckley himself. He first launched onto the scene as a scathing critic of many existing American institutions. In a 1957 interview with Mike Wallace, Buckley called himself “a revolutionary against the present liberal order.” The “new right” might have more continuities with mid-century movement conservatism than some of its boosters and critics alike might want to admit.

Pressing even further at the current moment reveals a curious paradox underlying our politics: because many elite institutions have themselves been captured by revolutionary ideologies, a critique of those institutions might become an essential component of an effective conservative strategy. Likewise, those of a more revolutionary bent will find themselves adopting a kind of tactical conservatism, defending those institutions in order to safeguard the revolutionary project that has possessed them.

Many American institutions have signed on to ideologies fundamentally at odds with living in a pluralistic democratic republic. They have endorsed a centrifugal mode of identity politics that separates Americans from each other based on ethnicity, gender, and other traits. They cheered the destruction of “problematic” works of art and led cancellation campaigns against everyone from Ovid to Flannery O’Connor. They have cultivated a spirit of urgent desperation that has caused them to stray from their institutional purposes. The frantic bureaucratic contortions during the coronavirus pandemic exposed the hollowness of much of the “public health” elite. The breakdown at the border and the proliferation of disorder in the public square are testament to the systemic effects of that revolutionary ideology. In this context, a thorough reform of those institutions seems like a “conservative” impulse: a perpetuation of the institutional status quo would be a recipe for continued cultural corrosion.

In his column, Brooks rightly drew attention to the dangers of nihilism: Nihilists “can’t give up their own sense of marginalization and woundedness because it would mean giving up their very identity. The only way to feel halfway decent is to smash things or at least talk about smashing them. They long for chaos.” The realigned Right should recognize the poison within the temptations of nihilism. Glib calls to destroy the other side are fundamentally at odds with the reality of living in a democratic republic; elections always generate some “other side,” and the task of sustaining a republic means learning to live with that difference. Nihilistic doomerism portrays problems as so intractable that there is no solution other than the guillotine or the death camp. That radical pessimism is at once ethically corrosive and politically foolhardy; it allows serious politics to be replaced by a “you don’t hate them enough” performative pugilism. Nihilism is better suited to memes than to the systemic change that nihilists supposedly want.

As Noah Rothman has documented, however, it’s hard to say that the only danger here is right-wing nihilism. The progressive professional class has been uniquely susceptible to apologia for the slaughter of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson and the mass shooting in July at 345 Park Avenue in Manhattan. This sympathy for the murder of political undesirables — what the Manhattan Institute’s Jesse Arm has termed “Luigism” — bespeaks deeply nihilistic tendencies. Our institutions are not all right if this is what the people who staff and lead them believe.

Detachment from community, place, and civic bonds has watered the seeds of nihilism. A strong republic needs responsive institutions, so it is vital to reinforce those institutions and resist the false fiery promise of “burn it all down.” The right might also learn something else from the failed stewardship of our institutions in recent decades. The activist vanguard saw these institutions not as embodied networks with specific responsibilities but instead as mere vehicles for their preferred ideology. This ideological capture spent down institutional credibility for the sake of short-term political wins. Real institutional reform demands rebuilding that credibility — and restoring the inner workings of institutions themselves. A central test for a populist realignment is whether it will succeed in building and renewing those institutions that help preserve the bedrock of our regime.