What the Conservative Civil War Means for Republican Policy

Philosophical debates over the true meaning of conservatism are fascinating. But what about policy?

In 2019, conflicts within the conservative intellectual movement that have warmed for decades and simmered for the past few years reached a boiling point.

The National Conservatism conference held in mid-July was an important step for the new tide of loosely populist, pro-Trump commentators to build an intellectual superstructure from which they can carry their ideas forward. As some journalists at the conference noted, despite President Trump calling himself a nationalist, speakers and attendees for the most part avoided focusing on him.

The conference seemed to be not so much pro-Trump but post-Trump, to adopt a term that the anti-Trump conservative and former National Review editor Jonah Goldberg used to describe his new publication, The Dispatch. In 2019, debate among conservatives shifted from being about Trump specifically, to what conservatism is, and on a less abstract level, what the GOP will look like once the current president is out of office.

In early 2019, the religious magazine First Things and Fox News host Tucker Carlson launched attacks on the libertarian and business wing of the…