The post-war American right has been led by a Boomer intellectual elite in thrall to laissez-faire dogmatism. A new, aggressively populist generation of conservatives will have to recapture the heart of the common man.

In August 1945, an apocalyptic weapon turned two Japanese cities and 200,000 of their inhabitants to dust in a display of force so awesome it brought the world’s deadliest war to a screeching halt. Germany had surrendered three months earlier; now Japan, long wearied, was utterly subjugated. The detonation of the atom bombs marked a transition every bit as dramatic as the end of the reign of the dinosaurs, or the onset of an ice age: this time, a movement from the age of man to the age of the machine.

If 1945 marks the moment man’s mastery of nature slipped beyond his control, it also marks the dawn of a new age for America. All the powers of the world had been brought to their knees. The whole continent of Europe was a ruin. China and Russia, the two great civilizations of the East, had both suffered death tolls many times as high as any other nation. The physical infrastructure, the prime-age workforce, and the national spirit of all but one developed country across the globe were utterly devastated.

America was not just the moral hero of humanity’s darkest hour. She was not just the watchful guardian of a new international order. She was, at the end of 1945, humanity’s first true superpower: an economic dynamo whose potential, surrounded by vanquished enemies and friends, knew no bounds.

The children born in the post-war boom knew only this America: the global hegemon. They knew the easy prosperity of the Pax Americana, the rapid development of the atomic age, the unshakeable stability of the nuclear family. In their early childhood, American church membership reached an all-time high of 76 percent; it stayed fairly steady, with only slight declines, until the 1990s—incidentally, the era of the first Boomer president. A large minority of them experienced the trial of war in Vietnam; far more numerous were those who spent the ’60s stateside, immersed in hippie counterculture, in the civil rights revolution, and in the age of rock ’n’ roll. Their fathers, when young, had stormed the beaches at Normandy; at the same age, perched before a television set, they watched a man walk on the moon.

When we speak of the conservative establishment in America today, we must understand it as the product of these extraordinary circumstances. Those who now shape the national conversation are the children of the Cold War, the first generation with a television and the last with a white picket fence. The very oldest Boomers on the right entered adulthood voting for Barry Goldwater in 1964; the youngest, for Ronald Reagan two decades later. Their political faith was formed by the old fusionist and neoconservative magazines and by the radio kingpins of a bygone era; in these latter days, it is nourished by Fox News. The American Conservative Union, the American Enterprise Institute, the myriad organizations of the libertarian Koch network, and the Heritage Foundation of a bygone era have for decades been their lodestars.

Even as the eldest Boomers push towards their eighties, the grip they retain on power in America is remarkable. With the exception of Joe Biden—a member of the Silent Generation four years too old but formed by the same broad circumstances as his proper Boomer compatriots—every president since 1993 has hailed from this age cohort. Mitch McConnell is also of the Silent Generation, but 18 long years ago it was a Boomer from whom he took the Senate Republican mantle; and it was a Boomer to whom he handed it back in January this year. (The Republican leadership in the House of Representatives, meanwhile, is almost exclusively Generation X.)

The president of every think tank, the editor of every journal—not to mention the fellows, the senior fellows, the visiting fellows, the distinguished fellows, the fellows emeriti; the senior editors, the editors-at-large, the contributing writers, the intelligentsia without portfolio. The cable news viewers, the newspaper readers, the precinct captains, and small-dollar donors. The billionaire philanthropists, the party apparatchiks, the titans of talk radio, and the cable talking heads. From top to bottom, coast to coast, the American right is a Boomer operation.

This is more than an incidental observation. The conservatism of the Baby Boomers is tailor-made to the circumstances of their generation. It assumes widespread economic opportunity, consistent social stability, and an irrevocable mandate for American global leadership. It has weathered economic downturns, but nothing a little bootstrap philosophy can’t fix. It has seen disorder—the usual cycle of riots and protest movements—but never considered the possibility of a real internal threat to the American regime. Even Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs lie beyond their consciousness; Congressman Nixon and Senator McCarthy are only half-remembered as unpleasant relics of their fathers’ GOP. It has waged wars far and wide, directly and by proxy, but it has not had to weigh the costs of a global confrontation like the ones it could yet provoke with Russia or with China. 

There are exceptions, of course, on both sides of the matter. President Trump, who has done more than any other to shake the old establishment from power, is a Baby Boomer himself. So are many of the public intellectuals working most diligently to give form and meaning to the political truths he half-stumbled upon. And National Review, the most spiritually Boomer of all conservative magazines, has had a Gen X editor for nearly 30 years.

By and large, however, the transformation of conservatism in the Trump era has entailed a shift in the balance of power toward younger institutions and younger thinkers who represent a newer—or, arguably, an older—strain of the right. No conservative politician is valued higher at present than J. D. Vance, the Midwestern millennial who became, on Inauguration Day, the third-youngest vice president in history. Kevin Roberts (born 1974) succeeded Kay Coles James (born 1949) to the presidency of the Heritage Foundation in 2021 and has spent the last three years steering that most respected conservative establishment in a clear America First direction. American Compass, the heaviest hitter among New Right think tanks, is the brainchild of 41-year-old Oren Cass (in a past life, the wunderkind domestic policy guru of uber-Boomer Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 campaign); the group operates a membership program designed to identify and cultivate the best and brightest young policy minds.

This post-Boomer right differentiates itself primarily on economics. The laissez-faire dogmatism of a bygone era is giving way to an aggressive populism. Out with free trade, the free movement of labor, and the concentration of corporate power; in with child tax credits, antitrust enforcement, and a towering tariff wall.

The Boomer right dealt with the economy in the abstract: rising GDP and vague notions of freedom. The new right prefers to speak of economics in human terms, as the welfare of American workers and their families. Though conservative Boomers retained a vocal commitment to faith-and-family conservatism, on the bedrock social issue, the right-left divide in the generation was only the gap between second– and third–wave feminists, both of whom happily accepted the premise of men and women as interchangeable economic units. 

The obvious criticism of Boomer conservatism is that it is materialistic: a political prosperity gospel. If we are being precise, the opposite is true. The great defect of the old right is that it does not deal with the hard realities of the material world. It never had to. The security of the post-war economic moment granted an illusion of invulnerability. (In the ’80s, as Japan’s recovery threatened American dominance in a few highly developed markets, a brash New York businessman took to the speakers’ circuit to call for a new protectionism; his warnings went unheeded—until 30 years later.)

For many (but not all) of the Boomers, raising a family at a middle-class standard of living with a single ordinary income was still possible. American Compass’s Cass has best framed the young right’s grievance on this subject with what he calls the Cost-of-Thriving Index (COTI). The COTI measures the amount of labor it would take an ordinary worker to cover the food, housing, health care, transportation, and higher education costs of his middle-class family of four in a given year. 

In 1985 (when the Baby Boomers were between 21 and 40), paying for these baseline expenses it took 39.7 weeks of work at the median income. This meant that the income from roughly 20 percent of the year was left to cover other expenses and save. For the median American man to cover his family’s costs in those same five buckets in 2022 would have taken 62.1 weeks of labor.

The year has not grown 10 weeks longer since the golden age of the Boomers. The conduct of the mass economy has simply been unlinked from the experience of the common man, both as a worker and as a consumer. Even accounting for the challenges of yesteryear—such as the astronomical interest rates of the ’80s—the typical American today has a drastically higher debt burden and greater obstacles to property ownership than any his father or grandfather might have faced. In 1983, when the elder Boomers were at their prime and the youngest were just entering the adult labor force, 68 percent of jobs required only a high school diploma. By 2021, that number had been slashed by more than half to just 31 percent.

That is not altogether the Boomers’ fault, but it is an unacknowledged chasm that separates their experience of American life from that of the generations that have followed. They lived through an apocalypse more sweeping, though less bloody, than the one endured by their parents. Most incredible of all, They did not even notice.

Boomer conservatism’s anti-material slant has another important source: For the whole second half of the 20th century, the United States faced an ideological, not a material, enemy. The challenges of Boomerdom were not the usual calculations of power against power or the distribution of scarce resources, but the struggle of the Free World against an Evil Empire. The American answer to the Cold War was to become an ideological empire in its own right. In his original “Evil Empire” speech of 1983, President Reagan concluded with a quote from Thomas Paine: “We have it within our power to begin the world over again.” That is unbridled Utopianism, totally alien to the conservative traditions of pre-war America. To the Boomer right, it was simply the air they breathed.

There is no Soviet specter for the youngest generations. The attempt to manufacture national unity in the third millennium by means of a War on Terror did not just fail but backfired massively, demolishing American credibility both at home and abroad. On foreign policy, the new right is far more inclined to the type of restraint embodied by Trump at his best. But it also means that, on domestic policy, the libertarian pressure of the Cold War has lost its force. 

The political and economic thinking of post-Boomer conservatives is shaped not by the global dynamic of democratic capitalism versus totalitarian communism but by the unprecedented mixture of abundance and austerity that has come to define the new economy. And so, the new right will be profoundly bitter and not without good reason.

In the first decades of the new millennium, the baseline standard of living for all but the very poorest has been markedly higher than that of all but the very richest one or two generations earlier. The average working man owns an iPhone, a technological marvel that the Boomers in their younger days would have regarded as science fiction even as they watched Neil Armstrong’s giant leap. So does the knocked-out heroin addict he must step over on the sidewalk on his way into the office. At any moment, that working man can take out his iPhone and, in a matter of seconds, arrange for a hot meal to be delivered to his doorstep by a Somali migrant working for a few dollars an hour. Every few months, one of those migrants might plow a van through some innocent crowd in his city, killing dozens. Such is the way of the world.

Such is the cost of prosperity—or, more precisely, the cost of prosperity championed at the expense of all other goods. Even in the worst-case scenario, material conditions in America will not approach Depression-era levels at any point in the 21st century. But the great-grandchildren of the Depression generation do not have the benefits of the civic, religious, and social support structures that bore their ancestors through those earlier challenges. The late empire is a more prosperous, more powerful, more open society the old republic; and it is remarkably more fragile.

Take, for instance, the matter of migration. If anything, Boomer conservatism is desperate to affirm its commitment to effectively open borders, provided the i’s and t’s are dotted and crossed. The connection of this position to their historical circumstances is not difficult to draw: Cheap labor makes the economic numbers go up, and decades of preaching about a global empire of freedom will turn a few poor souls into true believers. (Incidentally, when the Boomers were very young, one of the largest immigration enforcement operations in history cleared the country of more than a million illegal Mexicans who were distorting the American labor market.) The Boomers came of age with the passage of Hart-Celler, and they cheered the Reagan amnesty 20 years later. They did not count the costs of demographic change because the costs were never levied in real time.

It was the Boomers who began the shift away from marriage and family formation. In the key age range of 23-38, 85 percent of the Silent Generation that preceded them lived with a family of their own (spouse, child, or both). For Boomers, that figure dropped sharply to 69 percent. As of 2020, the rate among millennials was just 55 percent; only three out of ten lived with both a spouse and a child.

Inertia counts for quite a bit. Some three-tenths of the Boomers were able to forgo the obligations and rewards of family life without drastic personal consequences because they still lived in the world their fathers and mothers had built. By definition, that gambit only works for a single generation. There was also a clear ideological sorting in who formed families and who did not, such that Boomer conservatism was in large part insulated from the era’s spouseless and childless liberals.

Similar dynamics are apparent in the decline of religion (in 2020, for the first time ever, fewer than half of Americans belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque), the normalization of drug use, the pornification of culture, the digitization of society, and countless other radical transformations the Boomer generation sowed without having to reap.

All this leaves the young right at a crossroads. On the economic question, the shift toward populism is inevitable and already well underway. But what the movement makes of the social revolution it inherited remains to be seen. Will the sheer magnitude of the immigration crisis force some kind of settlement with the hyper-capitalistic globalism of the Big Tech wing of the right, exemplified by Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk? Will the unusual fervor and shrewdness of the deeply religious minority that remains allow a new Christian politics, either Protestant or Catholic, to seize the levers of power despite their diminished status in society at large? Will the collapse of the nuclear family drive a critical mass of instinctively right-wing young men toward one brand or another of secular degeneracy masquerading as bold new conservative insight, à la Bronze Age Pervert or Andrew Tate? Will the dearth of meaningful, productive, and fairly paid employment simply drive them to despair, quashing both the economic and the political power of the average American citizen? Or will some new, unexpected force exert itself on the will of a new class of Americans without property, without purpose, without family or identity?

When the old conservative establishment was taking form (and the Boomers were in diapers), it looked for inspiration to Albert Jay Nock, an early libertarian who had written in 1936 that would-be prophets must turn their attention away from the masses and toward the tiny Remnant with “the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, [and] the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct.” 

When National Review was founded in 1955, its publisher admitted, in prose as Buckleyish as prose can get: “The launching of a conservative weekly journal of opinion in a country widely assumed to be a bastion of conservatism at first glance looks like a work of supererogation, rather like publishing a royalist weekly within the walls of Buckingham Palace.” His justification for the magazine was that, though the American people were conservative broadly speaking, control of the country been seized by a radical elite. 

For seven decades, the young Boomer conservatives who heard Buckley’s call flipped the equation. They shaped their own intellectual elite, but they allowed the conditions that made the common man of 1955 a natural conservative to unravel. A Remnant, indeed. There is no task more worthy, or more daunting, for the post-Boomer right than reversing that achievement.