When I joined America’s conservative movement in the 1980s, says David Brooks in The Atlantic, there were two types of people in it: conservatives and reactionaries. The former “earnestly” read Milton Friedman and Edmund Burke, wrote for intellectual magazines and surrounded themselves with liberal friends. The reactionaries were more interested in TV and radio, had contempt for anyone not on the anti-establishment right, and mainly wanted to “shock the left”. Donald Trump is, of course, a reactionary rather than a conservative. He has signed swathes of executive orders waging a “civil war” on left-wing elites. His administration has slashed the areas where they think liberals work: foreign aid, education, science, arts and culture. And he has launched an unprecedented trade war, pushing the country to a point of “traumatic rupture”.

Yet I’m confident “America will survive this crisis”. When Andrew Jackson – a “power-hungry, rash, narcissistic” president – was in office in the 1830s, he made the “classic mistake of a populist”: he overreached, wrecking the Second Bank of the United States (an early precursor to the Federal Reserve) and sparking an economic depression that “ruined the administration of his chosen successor”. It was proof that nihilists like him, and now Trump, know only how to “destroy, not build”. What’s vital is that when these authoritarian populist types eventually self-implode, they are followed by “true civic and political renewal”. After the collapse of the Jackson administration, the Whig Party arose as a “cultural, civic and political force”. Devoutly anti-authoritarian, it lobbied for prison reform, women’s participation in politics, government-funded public schools and pro-business policies, ultimately transforming into the early Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln. When the US begins its recovery from Trumpism, it will need “its next Whig moment”.

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