America Needs a Conservative Party

To defend free enterprise, free thought, and the free world

The recent election presented rational Americans with the unpalatable choice of Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, or an impotent protest vote.

Harris and Trump were both unacceptable for any number of reasons. For starters, they both supported wildly inflationary fiscal policies while engaging in demagoguery to cast blame for the resulting soaring prices everywhere but their own monetary printing press. Both offered nutty economic policies, with Harris proposals for price controls on grocery stores and a regulatory war on fuel countered by Trump’s calls for a trade war. Both would desert the defense of the cause of world freedom, with Harris’ endorsement of Biden’s policy of stabbing its Ukrainian defenders in the back actually topped by Trump’s proposal to stab them in the front. Both offered insane immigration policies, with the lunacy of Harris’s policy of open borders countered by Trump’s equally crazy proposal to deport seven percent of the US population.

Both Harris and Trump rejected America’s founding proposition – that all men are created equal – to embrace alternative forms of identarianism. In Harris’ case the requisite group ideology was a novel but very odiferous “intersectional” mix of racism, genderism, transgenderism, wokeism, ecologism, and antipatriotism. Metaphorically speaking, voting for Harris required one to vote for banning baseball and apple pie. That’s why she lost.

Trump is fine with baseball and apple pie. But his prescription for group identity – nativism, while more traditional, is equally toxic. As Friedrich Hayek explained in his seminal work The Road to Serfdom, there is no contradiction between nationalism and socialism. On the contrary, invoking the tribal instinct is the key to arouse the passion necessary to realize the full collectivist agenda.

While it has been assigned a “right wing” designation, nativism is not a conservative orientation. It is not conservative because it is anti-free enterprise, anti-Judeo-Christian, opposed to America’s founding proposition, and opposed to tradition that built America. So it is not conservative at all. On the contrary, it is a form of radical tribal collectivism.

This is the deepest problem. Collectivization of property is very bad. Collectivization of minds is even worse. It is worse because it requires the abandonment of individual reason and conscience, the very essence of what makes us human. Conservatives viscerally opposed to what the Democrats have to offer are being told they need to board the Trump train and leave their minds behind on the station platform. Whatever they might have thought before, if they wish to stay on the train they must now make themselves believe that printing trillions of dollars of funny money won’t cause inflation; that putting a 100% tariff on foreign imports will cause retail prices to go down, and certainly won’t cause any retaliation; that endowing a president with such enormous power to reward his friends by suppressing their foreign competition at public expense is a great idea; that rewarding aggression will end aggression; that letting the largest allied army in Europe be deleted from the West’s order of battle while allowing Russia to radically expand its power will cost us nothing in either blood or treasure; that we would all be so much better off if someone else – perhaps China - were to serve as the world’s policeman; that we can strengthen the resolve of Taiwan by demonstrating our unreliability as an ally; that it’s just fine for a sitting president to mobilize a mob to stop the counting of an adversarial electoral college vote; that in fact no crimes are crimes if they are committed by the president; and that the nation’s food can be grown without modern agricultural technology and harvested without the help of its farm workers. All absurdities, no matter how disastrous in their consequences, must be accepted if they come from Trump.

Conservative heretics who would resist having their spirits so coordinated can just go away and cast a useless protest vote for Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, or Ronald Reagan.

But with the Russia-China axis on the march, such a choice is unacceptable. We need to create a viable alternative. We need to launch a Conservative Party, committed to constitutional government, free enterprise, rationality, and the defense of the free world.

It is a commonplace observation that America’s two party system precludes effective participation by a third party. That is why the Conservative Party must not be a third party. It needs to be the first party. This can only be achieved if Conservative Party is not be launched as an abortive election year escapade grouped around some alternative candidate, like that attempted by Evan McMullin in 2016. No, it needs to be created as a genuine political party, with a full slate of candidates in every congressional district nationwide, and a political machine built well in advance of the next general election to support them.

The means to do this are at hand. There is a coherent body of conservative thought, and a sizable group of widely-read conservative writers staffing publications including National Review, The Dispatch, The Bulwark, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and even The New York Times who have all made clear their extreme dissatisfaction with being forced to choose between joining either the wokeist or Trumpist mobs. If even a significant fraction of these writers were to lend their support to the effort, a founding convention of the Conservative Party held next year could easily draw 50,000 people. Addressed and educated by such writers as well as some of the principled political exiles from the pre-Trump Republican Party, the attendees at the convention could form state and local organizations, which would then run candidates for Congress and other offices nationwide in 2026. Thus well-established in advance, the Conservative Party could then hold primaries in 2028 to choose a strong standard bearer to lead it against JD Vance and AOC or whatever other tribal collectivists the Republican and Democrat decide to put on offer.

The American people want and deserve rational political leadership. The entire free world desperately needs America to provide such leadership. The world faces its worse crisis since 1938. Standing on the sidelines and decrying the unfolding disaster simply won’t do. We, the conservatives, the holders of the precious legacy of John Locke, Adam Smith, Edward Burke, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Friedrich Hayek, and Ronald Reagan, have a critical role to play.

To quote Shakespeare; The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Dr. Robert Zubrin @robert_zubrin is an aerospace engineer and author of The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet https://www.amazon.com/New-World-Mars-Create-Planet/dp/1635768802/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.7CO4pdRvL8H17LVNWUDSYa0KKnyJ_MfnhzkY4QSKkbRSOu2SyePr4Q9tjEhq2rw7ns1I7UqAn8e0Ok2iolwuil9DilwIyEMrY6Iomxdz5pQI1DMWAA_ECM3DM9Gx8vLpGzOvGCTAZTlGv6YBWWBFHkXsxf0AkVZnhxqeLqwa2B9aF1ngeShGrYvBBKiwJOD773Y4VoYSXM_pWDZ3Du1DqHDzwoy8h5mwXnAxzdyyClc.b4Kc23jvkxFxdvEyH657niKeg07Ew0m7-TVo1Axvs0A&qid=1730311816&sr=8-1