Happy New Year, America. Hope You Survive the Experience

2024 is the year we find out whether American conservatism is fit to survive.

2024 is finally here. And while every new year brings promise of highs and lows that the following months may or may not live up to, this one really does have the potential to be the most momentous of our lifetimes—not just because it’s an election year (which are also historically accompanied by reflexive hyperbole about their importance), but because this particular election presents a test of American conservatism so stark as to make the choice between Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford look like a choice between two Reagans.

In Ron DeSantis, we have hands-down the most thoroughly conservative officeholder since Reagan, utterly unmatched in reliable policy positions, ideological depth and authenticity, proactive and effective pursuit of results, electoral vindication of conservatism, and personal background and character. He is, quite literally, the personification of everything that conservatives have spent decades claiming to want in a politician and endlessly berating the Republican Party for not giving us.

In Donald Trump, we have a strong finalist for most thoroughly unfit chief executive ever to stain the White House with his presence, a man whose decades of public and private conduct mock the very concept of personal character. The policy outcomes of his presidency were on net preferable to the average Democrat because economic growth is not rocket science and because conservative skepticism forced him to outsource countless policy areas to normal Republicans, but his toxic personal makeup of incompetence, laziness, ego, and complete lack of anything resembling principles squandered countless opportunities and created an astonishing string of crises both for himself and everyone else depending on him, culminating in his being replaced by Joe Biden and a litany of legal troubles for Trump and his associates that are poised to make him toxic in voters’ eyes.

And yet, Republican primary voters appear on track to nominate the latter over the former this year. Whether or not they actually do will teach us a great many things.

First, in just a couple weeks, we’ll learn if Team DeSantis’s singular faith in its Iowa ground game has been well-founded. Then we’ll find out if the polls really are more unreliable than ever before, or if Trump opponents’ insistence to that effect has merely been a mirror image of MAGA’s coping habit. And we’ll learn if DeSantis’s political team is capable of adapting to new information as well as his administration did with Covid-19.

We’ll learn whether the conservative masses really are the independent, rational thinkers we so often credit ourselves as being, or if we are every bit as susceptible to emotionalism and groupthink as the Left. Whether Republican voters question what they hear and seek out information for themselves, or whether they mindlessly accept whatever claims and narratives they get spoon-fed by the right-wing infotainment complex.  

We’ll learn whether Trump’s 2016 victory was a unique convergence of conservatives’ betrayal-fueled desperation, Trump’s potential as a genuine blank slate, and the division of the anti-Trump majority, or if it really did herald a devaluation of character in our political leaders like David French and his ilk claimed. We’ll learn whether religious and pro-life voters care about candidates spitting on their most deeply-held moral values.

We’ll learn whether the Right’s innumerable projects and institutions ostensibly geared toward cultivating civic literacy and responsibility—Hillsdale College, Prager University, Young America’s Foundation, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, etc.—have been worth the money poured into them, or if they’ve accomplished nothing more than training young conservatives to get rich going through the motions.

In short, 2024 will be the year we find out whether the American Right still has enough functioning survival instinct to cast off its parasitic hijackers, demand real leadership to begin to restore sanity to our government and culture, and live up to the intellectual and moral traditions left to us by better generations...or if it really has been so thoroughly hollowed out by greed and negligence that we really are just a pack of lemmings destined to walk off the cliff...and take the greatest nation in human history with us.