Maybe the left is worse than ever in some ways, but I think in other ways it’s almost certainly not. Things are complicated. But what is obvious to me is that the threat to the country is not lessened when conservatives think the answer to that threat is to emulate progressive tactics and categories of thought. To his credit, DeMuth doesn’t embrace some of the more sectarian and identitarian ideas swirling around national conservatism, but he ignores the fact that the nationalist populism fueling this movement is itself a form of identity politics. “We” must defeat “them” is its defining ethos, and if classically liberal or constitutional rules get in the way, they must be circumvented. As Donald Trump put it in 2016, “the only important thing is the unification of the people—because the other people don’t mean anything.”

The threats to constitutionalism and American exceptionalism are only new if you cut yourself off from the past. In reality they’re the same threats they’ve always been, just in different garb and with new buzz phrases. The political answers to those threats will change in some ways with the changes in partisan fashion. But the more fundamental problems—and answers—are the same as they have always been, because human nature does not change. As Ronald Reagan said in 1967, “Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.”