Take the Word Back
On the American conservative "intellectual" project — and the performance that finally collapsed
John Ganz is settling scores, and I’m here for it — because some scores need settling.
The American conservative “intellectual” project has been, for decades now, an exercise in opportunism dressed up in footnotes. These are not serious people engaged in serious inquiry. These are people who built careers on justifying the unjustifiable, and now — now that the house they built is collapsing exactly the way everyone said it would — they want credit for noticing the cracks.
No.
You don’t get to sell out an entire country for personal advancement, watch the consequences arrive on schedule, and then rebrand as the voice of reason. That’s not how this works.
Let’s be clear about what “conservative intellectual” has actually meant in America. In 1950, the literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote that conservatism in the United States didn’t express itself in ideas at all — just “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” He wasn’t being cruel. He was being accurate. There was no coherent conservative intellectual tradition. There were just grievances looking for a vocabulary.
Then William F. Buckley founded National Review in 1955 and set about manufacturing one. He stitched together libertarians, traditionalists, anti-communists, and ex-leftists into something that looked, from a distance, like a unified intellectual project. Buckley was smart enough to know it needed guardrails. He expelled the John Birch Society. He pushed out the overt white supremacists. He sidelined Ayn Rand. The project was to make conservatism respectable — to give it the appearance of intellectual seriousness so it could compete in the arena of ideas.
And for a while, it worked. The think tanks followed — Heritage Foundation in 1973, the Manhattan Institute in 1978, the American Enterprise Institute expanding through the Reagan years. They produced policy papers. They cultivated scholars. They built an infrastructure that looked, on the surface, like a genuine intellectual ecosystem. Reagan’s presidency was sold as the vindication of this project: proof that conservative ideas could govern.
But here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud: it was always a performance. The intellectual architecture was always in service of something else — the consolidation of wealth and power by people who needed better justifications than “I want to keep my money.”
The ideas were never the point. The ideas were the packaging.
And the proof is what happened when the packaging became inconvenient. When Trump arrived, every single one of those intellectual guardrails Buckley built was torn down in a single election cycle.
The Heritage Foundation — the institution that once prided itself on rigorous policy analysis — produced Project 2025, a document so ideologically unhinged that even its own architects tried to distance themselves from it during the campaign.
The Manhattan Institute? A former senior fellow resigned in protest, writing that the institution had committed “intellectual surrender to Trumpism” — and that donor money was dictating what writers could and couldn’t say.
The gatekeepers didn’t just fail. They opened the gates, took a bow, and asked for a raise.
And here’s the thing that doesn’t require morality, doesn’t require empathy, doesn’t require any of the values they’ve spent years dismissing as soft: it was never logical. Take right and wrong completely off the table. We were the richest nation in the history of the world. And these people — many of them among the wealthiest in the room — bet it all on the dumbest hand at the table. Not a risky hand. Not a bold hand. A stupid one. The kind of bet where everyone around you goes silent because they can’t figure out if you’re joking.
My two-year-old builds bridges out of couch pillows, watches them collapse, smashes his face, and tries again. That is a more intellectually rigorous process than what the American right has been doing for the last several decades. At least he’s testing a hypothesis.
I’ll be honest — writing about this is almost insulting. Not to them. To me. There’s a real gratification that comes from meeting a serious intellectual opponent, someone who puts up legitimate arguments, and coming out on top. That’s the game. That’s the sport. But this? This is an NBA player showing up to a four-year-old’s rec league and dunking on toddlers. You win, sure. But what exactly did you prove? The embarrassment isn’t theirs — it’s yours for having to be there at all.
The fact that these arguments even need to be made is the indictment.
I want the word “intellectual” back. They don’t get it anymore. There’s a reason most serious thinkers — people who actually lay out arguments on a page and take any honest attempt at applying logic — land somewhere between center-right and far left. It’s because when you genuinely reason through the evidence, you can’t get where these people are. You just can’t. Not without abandoning the process entirely.
Which, of course, is exactly what they did.
This is Part One of a three-part series.
Part Two: “Just Stop” — on why the most rational thing the American right could do is walk it all back tomorrow - Coming Soon
Part Three: “The World’s Greatest Experiment” — on what happens when authoritarian impulses meet genuine incompetence, and the rest of the world gets no vote - Coming Soon
This series connects to Proximity is Not Protection — the lie that standing close to power keeps you safe when that power was never designed to protect you — which is already wrapped up.
Proximity is not protection, Part I - On Marco Rubio, the Racial Draft, and the Dangerous Delusion of Adjacency
Proximity Is Not Protection, Part II - On the Room That Clapped, the Hierarchy Inside the Hierarchy, and the Blueprint Rubio Read Aloud
Dr. Yamicia Connor, MD, PhD, MPH
Founder & CEO, Diosa Ara | Creator & Editor-in-Chief, The Labora Collective
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