The Washington Examiner launched the Restoring America project during a crisis — not merely for the conservative movement, but for the nation.
In October 2021, the COVID pandemic was a year old, but it continued to sow paranoia and division. The chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Kabul was little short of a rout, and it shook the nation’s confidence in its ability to project power. Massive migrant caravans streamed across a wide-open southern border. Inflation roared.
Meanwhile, a malignant cultural revolution ripped through America’s institutions. Radical teachers force-fed leftist ideology to school children. Hollywood churned out agitprop dressed as entertainment. Corporate America pledged fealty to DEI initiatives. The military brass deemphasized combat readiness in favor of political correctness. The legacy media traded the pretense of objectivity for the thrill of activism.
This conglomerate imposed itself on the lives of ordinary people with uncompromising zeal. Dissenters were threatened with career and reputational cancellation, and those who persisted faced brazen censorship — the result of behind-the-scenes collusion between President Joe Biden’s administration and social media giants determined to silence dissent. Holdouts faced a simple choice: Recant publicly, perform the prescribed act of contrition, and promise to “do better” — or be destroyed. Indeed, you may be destroyed anyway.
With its Restoring America initiative, the Washington Examiner began to answer this assault more directly than ever. Under Biden, the nation had not merely lost its way but veered perilously close to becoming the antithesis of its own founding vision of being a nation based on liberty, order, and self-evident truths. Restoring these principles required a direct and sustained reassertion of America’s founding ideals that had been systematically undermined, misrepresented, and driven from the public square.
“Applying the brakes is not enough,” wrote editorial director Hugo Gurdon in the project’s founding essay. “We must go further and reverse the process, restore what has been lost, reclaim and embrace what has been abandoned.”
The project organized itself around six pillars that captured the essence of the founding and had to be rebuilt in any program of national restoration.
Patriotism & Unity sought to replace a culture of grievance with a shared, celebratory national identity.
Faith, Freedom, and Self-Reliance emphasized the individual’s spiritual and economic independence over state-mandated dependency.
Courage, Strength & Optimism called for a robust defense of Western values and a rejection of fashionable declinism.
Equality, Not Elitism insisted on a true meritocracy rather than the social engineering of a ruling class.
Community & Family championed the “little platoons,” Edmund Burke’s term for families, churches, and communities where character is forged.
And Fairness & Justice sought to ensure that the law remained a shield for all citizens rather than a weapon for the powerful.
To drive these ideas into the national conversation, Restoring America recruited leading conservative think tanks to focus their collective firepower on the project’s core themes, producing a quarterly series of essays that built the case for national renewal. Together, they produced a conservative intellectual arsenal to counter the Left’s onslaught.
Nearly five years on, much has changed. The Right’s counteroffensive against progressive extremism, of which Restoring America has been a part, culminated in the rejection of Biden. As flawed as he is, Donald Trump began immediately after he recaptured the White House in 2024 to secure many of the project’s goals. He sealed the border, dismantled DEI mandates, restored meritocracy to the federal workforce, and reasserted American strength abroad.
As former Restoring America editor Jeremiah Poff wrote in these pages last year, “The Overton Window on cultural and political issues, once seemingly in a permanent shift to the Left, has suddenly swung abruptly and significantly to the Right.”
But this shift has been a double-edged sword for conservatives. On one hand, it has reinstilled confidence in the movement’s ability to fight and defeat the Left in the political arena. On the other, it has exposed the movement’s deepest differences.
Political scientist James W. Ceaser identified this vulnerability for conservatives in his 2010 essay “Four Heads and One Heart.” Ceaser argued that the conservative movement’s unity has never rested on shared principles but on shared antipathy for progressivism. Remove or diminish this threat, and the four heads, traditionalism, neoconservatism, libertarianism, and the religious right, begin pulling in different directions.
Trump’s political strength has always flowed from his ability to channel this shared antipathy and embody it. Attempts to define “Trumpism” as a policy agenda inevitably founder because it is less a philosophy than a posture of defiance toward the elite and a promise to restore American greatness, loosely defined.
Trump’s second-term governance has delighted, confounded, and dismayed each of conservatism’s “four heads” in near equal measure. His tariff regime has energized economic nationalists while horrifying free-marketeers. His accommodational stance toward Russian President Vladimir Putin has delighted a New Right skeptical of foreign involvement but enraged neoconservatives, while his willingness to intervene in the Middle East and Latin America produced precisely the opposite reaction from each camp. His refusal to restrict access to the abortion pill has demoralized the pro-life movement, while his appetite for federal intervention elsewhere has unnerved those for whom limited government is a first principle.
As Trump’s second term advances toward its latter half, none of conservatism’s factions can legitimately claim Trump’s movement. The Left’s diminishment means that the common enemy, which once united the factions, has become insufficient to hold them together.
Conflict is inevitable, but not the kind that alienates and destroys the coalition. What the movement now needs is clarity forged through substantial good-faith argument. Only this can produce the dynamism the movement needs as it ventures into the post-Trump era.
The conservative movement has been here before. When the Soviet Union collapsed and anticommunism ceased to bind the coalition, the Right spent a decade adrift as factions sniped at one another without producing new ideas and energy. The result was George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” a thin intellectual foundation easily swept aside by utopian military interventionism following 9/11. The consequences were catastrophic for the country and for the conservative movement, which emerged from the Iraq War delegitimized and adrift once more.
But internal conflict can be conservatism’s greatest ally.
In the 1950s, libertarians and traditionalists seemed irreconcilably opposed. The libertarians who followed Friedrich Hayek held that traditionalism threatened individual freedom, while the traditionalists following Russell Kirk insisted that libertarianism was rootless and amoral. The ensuing argument between Kirk and Frank Meyer, with Meyer championing the libertarian cause, produced what came to be known as “fusionism”: the political theory that posits that freedom and virtue are not contradictory but mutually reinforcing. Libertarianism provided the preferred means, limited government and individual freedom, while traditionalism provided the preferred ends: a virtuous life guided by moral order. This synthesis became the backbone of the Reagan coalition, ushering in the movement’s most dynamic and dominant era.
It is in this spirit that Restoring America is launching a new kind of think tank series, “The Right Way Forward,” which does not ask conservatives to speak as a chorus but to argue in earnest.
Beginning the week of May 11, leading conservative think tanks will square off in the first of four debates that will tackle the defining questions of the post-Trump conservative movement. The opening installment will examine conservatism’s fault lines over the role of the state in the economy. In Trump’s second term, the Right’s long-held faith in free markets now collides with demands for economic nationalism. From the return of tariffs and industrial policy to emerging battles over tech regulation and entitlement reform, conservatives are engaged in a genuine reckoning over when the government should intervene in economic affairs and when it should get out of the way. These essays will appear at the top of the Washington Examiner homepage, rotating every few hours throughout the week, and select essays will appear in the Washington Examiner magazine.
Subsequent installments in July, September, and December will take up immigration and national identity, America’s role in the world, and culture, family, and the social order.
Alongside the written series, Restoring America is set to launch a new CTV debate program bringing together experts from competing think tanks to do in person what they do in print: Argue, in earnest, about the future of American conservatism. All of them want it to succeed, and there is much agreement between them, but there are also differences.
Not every voice on the Right will be featured in this project, and we make no apology for that. “Gatekeeping” has become a dirty word on the Right, hurled at editors and institutions that dare to draw lines. But “gatekeeping” properly understood as curation rather than censorship is necessary for any political movement.
Ironically, “gatekeeping” is practiced most ardently by those who wield the phrase as a pejorative. The brazen antisemites, racists, and cranks who have always prowled the fringes of politics left and right are the first to expel anyone who fails their purity tests.
If the past year has taught the conservative movement anything, it is that there indeed are enemies to our right who, if given the chance, will happily burn the coalition to the ground.
Nor will the project feature those who, under the guise of sophistication, now surrender, sometimes eagerly, to the Left’s premises. The “never Trumpers” who confuse reflexive opposition to the president with standing for principle have no place in a debate over the future of conservatism. These figures, who found it more profitable and pleasant to win approval from those who want conservatism to die, have made their choice.
We are committed to presenting competing arguments in full and without favor. The purpose is not to tip the scales in favor of any camp within conservatism, but to provide a public forum for the free market of ideas to do its work.
THE RENEWAL BEGINS: FOUR YEARS OF RESTORING AMERICA AT THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
After the midterm elections, new presidential candidates will emerge, and the Trump era will be perceived as winding to a close. This presents the conservative movement with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine itself by harnessing the power of its intellectual traditions.
Restoring America was built on the belief that the Founding’s principles are the last, best hope on earth and that every generation must rediscover them, argue about them, and make them their own. Let the debate begin.
Peter Laffin (@peterlaffin) is senior editor for In Focus and Restoring America at the Washington Examiner.