Toward Ethical Populism

How should conservatism evolve in a post-Trump era?

Donald Trump could well lose the House of Representatives and come to be viewed as a lame duck, even if he keeps the world engrossed. Beyond 2028, the Democrats could win the presidency while in other western countries (U.K., Germany, France) a more populist right takes power. Imagine a Munich Security Conference in which President Newsom berates “intolerant” Europeans for their immigration restrictionism, hostility to Muslims, and retrograde views on trans rights.

Even if the Republicans retain the White House, the question of the meaning of Trump will loom large. The road ahead for conservatives across the West is not to reject populism outright, nor to imitate its excesses, but to refine it—to develop an ethical populism that fuses populist disruption with a reformed social, normative, and institutional order. It is not enough to criticize or tear down; one must preserve and rebuild. It is insufficient to exercise hard power without creating a more durable soft power through moral legitimation.

Trump’s behavior is defined by psychology, not ideology—something he does not really possess. Much of the intellectual and policy substance of Trumpism stems from those who have projected their motivations onto him. He has repaid the favor by often letting policy entrepreneurs act in his name. Trumpism is thus an emergent property: a complex system arising out of interactions between the man, his interpreters, and his administrators.

The Trump administration provides important demonstration effects for other western conservatives. It succeeded in elevating difficult issues conservatives in the past, or in other western countries, have preferred to pay lip service to or avoid entirely: immigration control, the laundering of radical race and gender ideology under the innocuous-sounding label “inclusion,” and the cultural left’s capture and weaponization of society’s meaning-making and administrative apparatus. 

Trump 2.0 challenged illiberal progressive norms around speech policing and acted against the Ivy League institutions that exemplify the drift from neutrality into ideological activism. For the first time, a conservative movement was willing to confront elite academic institutions over anti-white, anti-Asian, and anti-male discrimination, compelled ideological conformity, and the politicization of research. Importantly, these interventions enjoyed tacit support among many academic leaders, staff, and students who recognized that something had gone wrong. This willingness to act—to storm the citadel—broke important new ground.

Yet Trumpism also revealed the dangers of populism unmoored from ethical constraint. Interventions were often arbitrary rather than principled: sudden fines, shifting demands, selective defense of free speech (for conservatives but not pro-Palestinian groups), and breaches of due process in dealing with universities or enforcing immigration laws. Executive orders often lacked legislative backing, resulting in measures being blocked in the courts and opening them up to swift repeal under a new administration.

More fundamentally, there was no coherent moral message—only the assertion of power framed by inconsistent rationales or framed as revenge against enemies. Beyond institutions, this extended to a broader disregard for democratic norms such as conceding elections, respecting allies such as Canada or Denmark, being civil toward opposing politicians or personalities, and upholding norms of clean government by not employing family members.

While the Trump administration touted an amoral might-makes-right mentality, the most ideological corners of the online right slipped into anti-Semitism, conspiracism, and ethnonationalist purity spirals—revealing that the right can go off the deep end as much as the left. Indeed, the far left and far right ends of the horseshoe have shaken hands over Epstein, the Iran War, and much else.

Yet the liberal-conservative anti-populist alternative, espoused by a range of writers, from Jonah Goldberg, Richard Hanania, and David French on the right to Noah Smith and Matthew Yglesias on the center-left, is no solution. It is commendably anti-woke but believes that moral exhortation rather than government intervention can reform institutions, a highly unrealistic approach that condemns us to the DEI status quo. This school of thought is pro-immigration and highly individualist, viewing national identity in quantitative GDP terms, with scarcely a thought paid to preserving the particular texture of America, from folkways and architecture to the traditional morphology of ethnoreligious groups. Its individualism has no answer to late modernity’s main challenges, which revolve around birthrate collapse, declining social capital, and a fraying social fabric.

An ethical populism would fuse two British traditions: Thatcherite disruption, with its willingness to challenge entrenched interests and act decisively, and Scrutonian order, with its respect for established institutions and national community. This synthesis recognizes that disruption without order becomes chaos, while order without disruption entrenches ideologically corrupt norms and institutions.

The right must go beyond wielding power to advance an ethical vision based on rebalancing our race-gender focused, harm- and equality-obsessed moral order. Our dominant myths are based on guilt over racism, sexism, and LGBT-phobia, which is no basis for a flourishing civilization. 

The woke left has elevated equality of outcome—along race, gender, and sexual lines—above all other values. In doing so, it has tolerated or encouraged discrimination against majority groups and conservatives, substituted political loyalty for merit, and manipulated language—terms like equity, inclusion, and anti-racism—in Orwellian ways to legitimize illiberal practices. It has captured key institutions—media, bureaucracy, universities, even law and medicine—enforcing conformity through professional sanctions and politicized elite norms. The left then uses these legacy institutions to launder and promote radical cultural socialist ideas.

Conservatives must learn from Trump without inheriting his pathologies. We need executive action to remove the rot, but also require cultural legitimation to win the long-term battle of ideas. 

An ethical populism would accept the necessity of state action but bind it to principle. It would enforce borders and slow the pace of ethnic change, eliminate anti-white and anti-male discrimination, and reform universities and public institutions to end compelled ideology and activist capture. It would act transparently and consistently rather than arbitrarily, defending free speech universally rather than selectively.

Ethical populism must also reclaim compassion—not a narrow empathy focused on sacred identity groups, but a full-spectrum compassion that treats the claims of historically powerful and weak groups equally. It must extend sympathy to all citizens, including those disadvantaged by rapid social change, cultural displacement, or institutional bias. 

A populism that relies solely on hard power, unconstrained by norms or moral argument, will not endure. It will exhaust itself, alienate moderates, and ultimately fail.

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