Rediscovering Our Ideological Roots

“When I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, there were two types of people: those who cared earnestly about ideas, and those who wanted only to shock the left. The reactionary fringe has won.” – David Brooks

I didn’t expect an article to hit me so personally, but reading David Brooks’s recent Atlantic essay, “I Should Have Seen This Coming,” left me with a knot in my stomach. Brooks, a writer I’ve long respected, puts into words the vague despair that many of us disillusioned conservatives have been feeling. He confesses that the conservative movement he joined decades ago has morphed into something unrecognizable — a movement with a moral and ideological void where its principled core used to be.  As someone who proudly identified as a Reagan conservative, I've struggled to articulate exactly why today’s political landscape feels so disorienting. Brooks eloquently pinpoints the source of that unease—what we're experiencing is not merely a shift in politics but, fundamentally, a drift away from ideology itself.

Brooks has correctly named the disease at the heart of today’s politics: nihilism. “Trumpism has become a form of nihilism that is devouring everything in its path,” he writes, describing a party now driven less by ideas or ideals than by a destructive urge to tear everything down, In his essay, Brooks recalls that when he first joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, there were essentially two kinds of people on the right: those of us who “cared earnestly about ideas” and those who sought mainly to shock or troll the left. The latter were, in Brooks’s words, “not pro-conservative—they were anti-left”.​ Over time, that reactionary, anti-ideological impulse — the urge to fight against enemies rather than for principles — has swallowed the intellectual, principled strain of conservatism. The result is a politics unmoored from any higher purpose, defined by a furious emptiness.

When Brooks mourns the current right’s lack of any high-minded vision, I hear an echo of a deeper lament: that America itself risks losing the creed that once united it. The triumph of cynical power-seeking leaves a vacuum where conviction used to be. Filling that vacuum will require us to reaffirm the core principles that long guided our imperfect but aspiring republic. It will require reminding ourselves and each other why ideology — understood not as rigid partisanship, but as a guiding star of values — still matters in public life.

American Ideologue is an attempt to define what once held the American project together — what gave our politics a moral center before this descent into nihilism. I believe it was a unique ideological equilibrium: an ongoing balancing act between our highest ideals. The American experiment, at its best, found a balance between liberty and equality, between rugged individualism and communal responsibility, between patriotic nationalism and democratic principles. This equilibrium wasn’t perfect, but it provided a shared moral framework. It bound Americans together in the belief that our nation stood for something more than just the struggle for power. It gave us a language of common purpose: freedom and fairness, personal opportunity and mutual obligation, national pride and respect for universal rights. That delicate balance of ideals is what made American democracy a compelling project — and it’s exactly what the nihilism of both the left and right has lost sight of.

Brooks doesn't merely diagnose the problem; he opens the door to a critical conversation we must have. Rather than simply lamenting what we've lost, we can reclaim it by clearly identifying and recommitting ourselves to the ideological principles that made America exceptional. This is the conversation I'm inviting you to join. No matter your political background, if you're worried by the emptiness Brooks describes, you're already part of this discussion.

Together, let's rediscover—and recommit to—the principles that once united and can again unite our nation. That's what conserving America should truly mean.

What is the American Ideology? America Ideologue is a new series that examines that question and introduces a bold and timely thesis: that America is, and has always been, defined by a coherent—if often unspoken—ideology. Most nations are bound by land, blood, or tradition. But as G.K. Chesterton observed, America is “the only nation...founded on a creed.”

This series explores how that creed was not merely an aspirational abstraction, but a working ideology deliberately enacted through constitutional design, civic institutions, and cultural norms. The analytic framework I developed as part of an unfinished doctoral dissertation aborted thirty years ago provides a way to define and possibly restore the American Ideology as a true ideology.

The question at the heart of the series is both urgent and enduring: Can the ideology that once bound us together still hold?