It’s best to view the Alt-Right as the people and ideas who got evicted by Conservatism, Inc. in the last 50 years. There’s no doubt that race looms large in the Alt-Right worldview. While only a small minority of them are neo-Nazis, though their opponents frequently make that charge, what the Alt-Right terms “race realism” is mainstream in their ranks. They acknowledge biologically determined differences between the races and derive political conclusions from them. While this was once commonplace thinking, Movement Conservatism hasn’t wanted anything to do with such ideas for a half-century.

Although many Americans on the right wax nostalgically about the Founding Fathers, Conservatism, Inc. is a relatively recent creation. It was born in the 1950s as “fusionism,” an amalgam of social (often religious) conservatives, defense hawks, libertarians, and business interests. They shared a loathing of Communism—and not necessarily much else.

Fusionism took decades to mature politically and it wasn’t really normative in the Republican Party until the 1980s, when it triumphed under President Reagan. This is why conservatives still get teary about the Reagan years, not least because not long after the Gipper left office the Soviet empire fell apart and dissolved the anti-Communist glue that made fusionism work.