[The European Journal] European Conservatives at a Crossroads

It's not just Trump. The European right is undergoing similar tectonic shifts as its American cousin.

Editor's note — this essay features in the 2021 print issue of The European Journal, the official magazine of New Direction, the hub of European conservatism founded in 2009 by Margaret Thatcher. Read the freely downloadable PDF copy of the issue here.

Upon a storied career at the intellectual apex of the conservative movement, Washington Post columnist George Will parted ways with Donald Trump’s Republican Party in what will likely be the last of a long and illustrious bibliography. The Conservative Sensibility, hailed as Will’s magnum opus when published in June of 2019, urged the American right to re-commit to the classical liberal principles of the country’s Founding. To Will, this meant steering clear not just of the national-populism that has dominated the party since the electoral upset of 2016, but of the movement’s older failures to meaningfully trim down the state, promote enough originalist jurists to the federal benches and protect the Republic’s constitutional design, with its system of so-called checks-and-balances.

In the run-up to last year’s presidential race, Will joined a slate of former Republican…