Hank Hill, in his own way, models conservative principle: fidelity to place and a willingness to make the best of a changing world.
T ucked into a back room on campus, I found myself debating with one of the Yale Political Union’s last remaining conservative parties, with the resolution: Become a cosmopolitan. The room split sharply — some argued for steadfast loyalty to localist conservatism, others insisted it was our responsibility to ascend to the heights of elite society and reclaim cultural influence. When my turn came late in the night, I turned to an unlikely exemplar: Hank Hill. A Reagan devotee, assistant manager at Strickland Propane, and quietly loving family man, Hank is the archetype of the local conservative — an average American Joe, proudly rooted and resolute. But during the question and answer period following the speech, a flaw in my argument emerged: King of the Hill belonged to another era.
Airing from 1997 to 2010, the show lived in a post–Cold War, pre-MAGA moment — a world that still felt familiar and safe. Today, the ground has shifted. The revival of King of the Hill arrives in a new political landscape, asking the same question that lingered after our debate: Can a conservative still be that kind of conservative in the age of globalism and MAGA? Can we still have Hanks, or must he be replaced with something new?
Hank Hill, and, to a broader extent, his family, serves as a stand-in for a Reagan-era, rooted, and responsibility-driven conservatism. Throughout the series, there is an overlying emphasis on duty, place, family, and competence. Hank’s unwavering sense of obligation — to work, community, and principle — defines him: He takes immense pride in selling “clean-burning propane and propane accessories” in a job he sees not just as employment but as a calling of social value. Similarly, though Hank didn’t serve (he received a medical deferment because of a “narrow urethra”), he reveres military service, shown in how he treats veterans and commemorates holidays like Memorial Day.
As for place, Arlen, Texas, is not just a setting — it’s an identity. Hank is deeply tied to Arlen — he votes in local elections, attends neighborhood events, and wants to preserve its traditions. He supports the high school football team, attends church regularly, and insists on civic responsibility — even mowing his lawn is a form of civic virtue.
Family is not just a personal commitment — it’s part of Hank’s moral code. Hank struggles with Bobby’s nontraditional masculinity but never gives up on him. In the episode “Bobby Slam,” he supports Bobby’s right to pursue wrestling over football, even if it challenges his ideals of manhood. They disagree often, but Hank is faithful, respectful, and loyal. He doesn’t chase excitement — he builds stability. Despite his having been traumatized by his emotionally abusive father, Cotton Hill, Hank still tries to do the right thing by his son — visiting, supporting, and occasionally standing up to him when necessary.
Finally, Hank is not only professionally competent, in his selling “propane and propane accessories,” but morally competent as well. He’s also competent in judgment. In “Returning Japanese,” when his family discovers their wartime past in Japan, Hank acts as the quiet moral center that reconciles personal history with dignity and restraint.
However, none of this negates the fact that King of the Hill is a cultural artifact of a more stable, pre-2008, pre-MAGA America. Between King of the Hill’s 1997 debut and its 2025 revival, trust in government, media, and higher education has collapsed. Education is suspected to be a hotbed of indoctrination, and the government a swamp of 1 percenter elites. This trend has come to a head in the rise of populism on the American right. Localism feels insufficient and out of date. Today’s young conservatives find themselves pulled between two competing instincts: the temptation to infiltrate and reform elite institutions from within, and the desire to withdraw from them entirely in favor of a return to local, rooted life. For many, the aesthetic of traditionalism — starched linens, Latin Mass, rural homesteads — offers a sense of order and permanence in a disordered world. Online, this has been reinforced by postliberal thinkers who argue that liberal neutrality has failed and that conservatives must seize cultural and political power with unapologetic force. Yet that maximalist vision, though seductive, risks becoming unmoored from the very virtues it claims to defend: humility, restraint, and a sense of place. The tension is real — between influence and integrity, between strategy and simplicity — and no single path feels sufficient for the conservative trying to live like Hank Hill in a post-Hill America. (A conservative debating society at Yale, too, feels like a remnant of a bygone era; to sit and trade rhetorical baubles is a rarity in a polarized and supercharged political world.)
The question remains: Should conservatives enter elite institutions, become the cosmopolitans, and shape these bodies — or reject them entirely? Many young conservatives grapple with whether true cultural reform can come from the top — through elite institutions like Ivy League universities, media platforms, and federal courts — or whether these have become so ideologically captured that any effort to reform them amounts to legitimizing a hostile order.
The world has changed, and the idea of simply “checking out” is, in many ways, a luxury we no longer have. And to abandon elite institutions entirely risks ceding every lever of influence to the left, leaving conservative values confined to the margins. If the conservative movement is to remain vital, it cannot afford to abandon the local — but neither can it retreat into it entirely. The conservative who wants to preserve family, faith, and place must recognize that elite institutions still shape the culture. This raises a deeper question: Is cosmopolitanism always the enemy — or can it, paradoxically, be a tool? If rootedness and tradition are the ends, perhaps the strategic use of cosmopolitan means — education, rhetoric, institutional fluency — is not a betrayal but a way of protecting what truly matters. The challenge is not whether to engage elite institutions but how to do so without letting them remake us in their image and losing the virtues that made engagement with them worth pursuing in the first place.
This means learning how to be Hank Hill in the halls of power. It means carrying into elite spaces the virtues that once shaped quiet neighborhoods: integrity, competence, loyalty, and restraint. Localism must remain the heart of any serious conservatism — our source of identity and moral ballast — but institutional influence is the muscle. To cede cultural authority is to abandon the fight altogether. Reclaiming culture, then, starts not with shouting the loudest but with living lives that quietly testify to the enduring strength of rooted, dignified life. We must make that kind of life not only possible but also visible — and aspirational.
In the first episode of the new series, Hank and his wife Peggy come home from years in Saudi Arabia and are faced with the stark reality of a changed world: Bobby is busy at his own restaurant, boba and electric vehicles abound, and Hank can’t even make a left turn into the alley because of construction. At one point, as all the changes are setting in, Hank comments, “You know what, I’m beginning to think that the Aramco base in Saudi Arabia was more Texan than Texas — what happened?” The king has been shaken. But, as they pull into the Mega Lo Mart to calm down and buy a spanner, Hank and Peggy run into a troop of Girl Scouts selling cookies: classic, American, predictable. Save for the fact that the Samoas are now called Caramel deLites. The first new episode ends on this note, of a world different but still nice in its most everyday moments. The conservative identity crisis is real; Hank reflects this, but he will be okay.
Looking back, I think the Yale Political Union debate may have posed the wrong question. The resolution — Become a cosmopolitan — assumed a choice between opposing extremes. But in reality, the conservative path forward is neither full retreat nor full surrender. Hank Hill, in his own way, models a middle ground: fidelity to place, yes, but also an excellence that transcends it. He’s competent, principled, and decent — not because the world demands it of him but because he believes that it’s the right way to live.
In an age saturated with rage, irony, and ambition, quiet competence might be not only rare — it might be the very thing that renews our public life.