The conservative philosopher GK Chesterton is known for a parable about two lawmakers who encounter a fence. One, brash and overeager, announces that he can’t see the point of the fence so it should be removed. The other, who Chesterton labels the “more intelligent type of reformer,” scolds his companion, warning him that they should only remove the fence once they know why it was put there.
The point is that, before anything is changed, decision-makers should at least know why the thing that they are changing exists, lest they discover its true purpose after its removal ends in disaster.
Never has Chesterton’s wisdom been so apparent than the first months of Donald Trump’s second term, which, among other things, have seen a broadly worded freeze on domestic spending, a similar pause on foreign aid, and an indiscriminate effort to push as many federal workers out of their jobs as possible. All of these initiatives have had unintended consequences, from defunding a prison full of ISIS fighters to leaving the agency meant to safeguard nuclear material in dire straits.
Some of these decisions were rapidly reversed, but not all of them. And even a temporary error by the government can have catastrophic effects, because the government — unlike the business world — does the kind of work that must be done right every single time.
Every Social Security recipient must receive their check on time, lest they be unable to make their rent or buy food. Every hospital must be reimbursed by Medicare and Medicaid, lest they shut down and leave entire swaths of the country without care. The country still reels from a single terrorist attack that our intelligence and national security communities failed to stop a quarter century ago.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that change is happening so rapidly right now, because there is no meaningful political movement in the United States advocating for a more methodical, conservative approach.
We need leaders who believe that change should come only after careful deliberation, and that major changes call for even greater deliberation and planning.
The Republican Party, long the home of American conservatism, is now entirely under the sway of impatient reactionaries. The GOP isn’t just the party of Trump; it’s the party that made a notorious booster of quack medical theories health secretary, and that chose a Fox News host accused of substance abuse and sexual assault to lead the Pentagon — both with near-total support from Republican senators.
Democrats, meanwhile, often feel trapped into a role as the sole remaining defenders of institutions, and they chafe against that role. As Neera Tanden, recently President Joe Biden’s domestic policy adviser and now the leader of the Center for American Progress, told Politico, “it’s incumbent on us not to be defenders of the status quo.”
It’s not surprising that neither major party wants to be the voice of this status quo. Americans are discontent — according to Gallup, the last time a majority of the country were satisfied with “the way things are going in the US,” George W. Bush was still in his first term. And I am not making the case for stagnation. We don’t need to settle for broken systems; we just need to make sure we don’t make them worse in the name of “fixing” them.
But as we observe the chaos of Trump’s second presidency, where US trade policy can shift wildly over the course of any given day, it’s clear that something is out of balance. There is no one — or, at least, no one in a position of power — pushing for thoughtful consideration before half-baked ideas are implemented.
America needs conservative voices. Not the politicians who align themselves with the so-called conservative movement, but policymakers who are conservative in a more traditional sense. That means we need leaders who believe that change should come only after careful deliberation, and that major changes call for even greater deliberation and planning.
America needs lawmakers who instinctively kick the tires on new policies before they will vote for them. It needs a predictable legal system that allows businesses and ordinary Americans to plan for the future. It needs a president who at least asks why the United States provides foreign aid before he blithely cancels all of it. It needs leaders who are reluctant to mess with a good thing.
The blessings Americans enjoy today — liberal democracy, well-regulated capitalism, a welfare state, and global institutions that have successfully prevented great power conflict and nuclear war — are, to borrow from Edmund Burke, “an inheritance from our forefathers.” We sacrifice them at our peril, especially if we welcome chaos and uncertainty as their replacements.
The pre-Trump status quo was better than anything else that anyone has ever come up with
Democrats are temperamentally ill-suited toward conservatism. It was a Democratic president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who fought a conservative Supreme Court to bring the modern-day welfare and regulatory states into existence. It was another Democrat, Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed the legislation breaking the back of Jim Crow. Democrats were America’s dominant party when the United States became the world’s dominant nation, and they played an outsized role in building the international order that has successfully prevented nuclear war.
Today, large numbers of Democrats expect their party to continue in this tradition, expanding the welfare and regulatory state and extending freedom and prosperity to groups that have historically faced discrimination. Barack Obama, the most successful Democratic president of the last half-century, lends his name to Obamacare, the most significant expansion of federal public benefits in decades. In 2020, the last year the party held a presidential primary, nearly a quarter of Democrats chose Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a self-described socialist.
These voices pushing for shared prosperity are as essential to a just and stable society as voices of caution, and it is important to remember that the affluence modern-day Americans take for granted would not be possible without reformers like Roosevelt or Johnson.
But the admittedly quite rapid reforms of the New Deal era grew out of a unique economic catastrophe that simply does not exist today. And Johnson’s civil rights laws were the culmination of over a century of struggle that included a Civil War. The United States in 2025 does not face the same kind of moral or economic emergency that justifies throwing caution to the wind.
If Democrats are unaccustomed to thinking as conservatives, they also have a great deal to lose from the kind of smash-and-grab politics that now offers itself as an alternative to America’s liberal democratic status quo. And so do the rest of the American people.
Americans prospered under the business regulations and gradually expanding welfare state that began under Roosevelt, just as they’ve prospered under the racial, gender, and other forms of legal equality wrestled into law by Johnson. The United States is the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world — so powerful, in fact, that we’ve held back the full might of the Russian empire by spending a tiny percentage of our defense budget on Ukraine.
The entire globe faced economic turmoil and widespread inflation during the years following the Covid-19 pandemic. But no nation weathered this storm better than the United States of America.
Casting aside the most successful policies on the globe is a risky business, as is abandoning the most successful ideological approach to governance in human history. Liberalism, democracy, regulated capitalism, and an economic safety net are all worth defending on the merits.
Those who would abandon this status quo must show that they have somehow discovered a better way of governing a nation than the most successful system ever derived.
Even the most even-keeled Republicans abandoned conservatism
Rather than attempt to meet this burden, the Republican Party offers only a change in temperament, abandoning the deliberative process that has historically driven the federal government under both Democratic and Republican administrations in favor of ever-shifting calls for swift and disruptive change.
Trump is the embodiment of impulsive change over deliberation and caution, and he heads a party that’s been eager for such a leader for quite some time. Before MAGA, there was the slash-and-burn fiscal policies captured by the Ryan Budget, an agenda widely supported by Washington Republicans. Named for former House Speaker Paul Ryan, this budget tried to gut Medicaid and food stamps, kill Obamacare, and, at least in its early forms, repeal Medicare and replace it with a voucher that lost value every year.
Before the Ryan Budget, there was the Tea Party, a movement that launched the careers of politicians like Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rand Paul (R-KY), who’ve argued that a wide range of laws from the ban on child labor to the prohibition on whites-only lunch counters are unconstitutional. Tea Party Republicans also sought to constitutionalize a fiscal policy that was even more draconian than Ryan’s vision. Many of this era’s Republicans even claimed that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional.
Disruption, destruction, and a gleeful desire to bring about avulsive change have been the lynchpins of Republican politics for nearly two decades. This is true even in the one branch of government that is supposed to be a bastion of conservatism, because its nine members are the stewards of a fixed Constitution.
At first glance, Chief Justice John Roberts is as unlike Trump as a man can be. His first marriage is decades-old and ongoing. He presides over Court hearings with an almost-weaponized professionalism. He’s long persuaded opinion writers to pen fawning profiles claiming that he’s “worked to persuade his colleagues to put institutional legitimacy above partisanship.”
But Roberts is also the driving force behind the Court’s decisions holding that America has been so successful in eliminating racism, that it must dismantle the very laws that defeated Jim Crow — the equivalent, in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s words, of “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” He also authored Trump v. United States (2024), which gives Trump broad immunity from prosecution for crimes he commits using his official presidential powers.
Indeed, Roberts went so far as to declare, at a time when Trump was a presidential candidate threatening “retribution” against his perceived enemies, that, if elected, Trump may order the Justice Department to target anyone he chooses, even if he does so “for an improper purpose.” Trump v. United States is one of the most reckless opinions in the Court’s history, preemptively giving Trump permission to commit some of the most authoritarian acts he touted as a candidate.
It fell to Justice Sonia Sotomayor to offer, in dissent, a Chesteronian warning that Roberts’s “single-minded fixation on the President’s need for boldness and dispatch ignores the countervailing need for accountability and restraint.” There is still conservatism to be found on the Supreme Court, it’s just that it comes almost exclusively from the Court’s Democrats.
All of this has happened, moreover, despite the fact that Roberts is the most moderate member of the Court’s Republican majority, and he is one of the most even-tempered politicians in the country. And yet even his career is marked by the same Trumpian disinhibition that drives the Republican Party.
Americans who support liberal democracy need time to regroup and recover
It’s hard not to envy Germany in this benighted moment in American history. Like the United States, Germany recently had an election. And, like the United States, that election was fueled by the same anti-incumbent sentiment that plagued in-power political parties throughout the globe during the post-pandemic era.
But the German system, unlike ours, permits more than two parties to thrive. So, while the incumbent Social Democratic Party took a beating and the far right made gains in the German election, the big winner was the Christian Democratic Union, a normal center-right party that governed Germany as recently as 2021.
The absence of a conservative party in the United States has forced Democrats to do double duty, defending the system that we have while simultaneously pushing for progressive change. That’s left them unable to do either job well. The Democratic Party’s popularity is at historic lows.
What America needs right now is not more stagnation or quick fixes — it is more careful deliberation.
If the US election had played out like Germany’s, electing a conservative government that doesn’t threaten constitutional democracy or global stability, the American left could have spent its time out of power making long term plans for the future, as it has done in the past. Democrats spent most of Bush’s second term designing the legislation that became Obamacare, and building political support for it.
Now, by contrast, neither major American party is well-positioned to offer similar solutions. The GOP has become little more than a vehicle for Trump and his inner circle’s personal grievances. And the Democratic Party has been stuck in anti-Trump crisis mode for so long that its policy infrastructure has atrophied.
Democrat-aligned organizations produced hundreds of rapid response pieces clapping back at Trump’s outrage of the day during his first term, but there was no Project 2021 to match Republicans’ Project 2025. Now, many top Democrats mistrust those very organizations, which house the policy experts who are supposed to come up with the party’s long-term plans when it is out of power. Some mistrust their own staff.
The fact that America’s traditional conservative party has been replaced by reactionary chaosmongers, in other words, does not simply create crises in the present. It is a tax on the future. Endless crises prevent liberal institutions from doing the difficult, deliberative work of coming up with sophisticated solutions to the United States’ real problems.
What America needs right now is not more stagnation or quick fixes — it is more careful deliberation. If there is a better system than the liberal democratic capitalism that has dominated the United States since the 1960s, then we should embrace it. But we should do so carefully, cautiously, and only after our lawmakers understand why our current system exists and which parts of it are worth retaining.
Government should not move as quickly as Twitter. If it does, we are likely to wake up in a world that is far worse than the one that Americans thrived in for nearly a century.
