In the aftermath of the Republican Party's recent midterm elections debacle, right-liberal sharks are circling. These devoted acolytes of what a prominent 2019 First Things manifesto called the American Right's "dead consensus" think they see blood in the water. Indeed, the "dead consensus" praetorian guard has apparently decided that now is the time for a counterattack against the more nationalist- and populist-inclined forces of what has, broadly, been dubbed the "New Right." A recent anti-national conservatism fusillade from The Federalist's David Harsanyi is reflective of the broader subgenre.

The opportunistic timing of this ascendant strand of argumentation is as obvious as its logic is facile. The basic argument is: Trump the individual is largely inextricable from the substantive political commitments of the "New Right"; Trump was primarily responsible for the GOP's ballot box losses last month; therefore, the "New Right" is at "best" vicariously responsible itself, and at "worst" is merely hurting badly. Either way, Republicans' midterm election disappointments present, for beleaguered right-liberals, a perfect opportunity to turn the tables and go on the offensive.

This cynical strategy must not succeed. A return to the "dead consensus" status quo ante would be a disaster for the American Right and the Republican Party—and thus for the nation as a whole.

Trump's manifold personal flaws and recent headline-grabbing self-inflicted wounds aside, there is still much to learn from his dominance of the 2016 Republican presidential primary field. Trump ran to the "right" of his median competitor on some issues, such as immigration, but he ran well to the "left" of his median competitor on other issues, such as trade, health care, and entitlements. On foreign policy, he was the most critical of all candidates on the debate stage of the instinctive ultra-hawkishness that had become post-Cold War GOP orthodoxy.

While it is impossible to ignore the dominant halo effect of Trump's global celebrity status, GOP primary voters also rallied to Trump's nationalist, populist strand of conservatism. He broke through the Democrats' Rust Belt "blue wall" in the general election, upsetting Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin (not coincidentally, all states that were disproportionate victims of globalization). He narrowly lost those same states in 2020, but all of them—along with Wisconsin's western neighbor, Minnesota—are now considerably closer each election cycle, in the age of this more nationalist and populist GOP, than they were during the "dead consensus"/"zombie Reaganism" years of the 1990s through the mid-2010s.