This conservative lie made Trump possible and will hasten our downfall

For decades, Americans were told that “conservative values” stood for restraint, responsibility, and respect for the rule of law. The rise of Donald Trump forces an unavoidable question: were those values abandoned, or were they a generational lie that made his authoritarian takeover possible?

The billionaires and CEOs funding Trump and the Republicans in Congress believe they’re invincible. They believe the GOP’s abandonment of the principles that animated John McCain and Mitt Romney in favor of authoritarianism and oligarchy will keep them fat and happy.

They’re wrong.

Former Republican congressman Joe Walsh said something on my radio program on Monday that would have been shocking just a few years ago but now is becoming increasingly self-evident to anybody with a conscience and an honest view of American politics and history.

He said the GOP as a party with an ideology, a set of principles, or even a governing philosophy is now almost entirely dead.

It’s been replaced by a violent, racist, lawless, unprincipled cult organized entirely around Trump. It’s a cult that demands total loyalty and punishes dissent with both political annihilation and, increasingly, with threats of real-world violence.

Remember when Romney said there were plenty of Republicans in the Senate who wanted to vote to convict Trump in his impeachment trial, but they began flipping when senators started getting death threats against their families?

His biographer, McKay Coppins, wrote that Romney told him “story after story about Republican members of Congress, Republican senators, who at various points wanted to vote for impeachment — vote to convict Trump — and decided not to, not because they thought he was innocent, but because they were afraid for their family’s safety.”

That terror is delivered from the hands of both prosecutors who can threaten imprisonment and MAGA lone-wolf assassins like the one who murdered Melissa Hortman and her husband in Minnesota, and those who routinely terrorize federal judges who rule against Trump.

Republican elected officials, Walsh said, echoing Romney, now live in a state of deep fear. Not a metaphorical fear, but genuine terror.

It includes a fear of physical violence, the fear of being primaried and losing their jobs, and the very legitimate terror that Trump will turn the power of the state against them and thus break them financially with legal fees and the threat of prison, as he’s trying to do today with Letitia James, James Comey, Adam Schiff, etc.

Mark Twain noted that history rhymes, and this one is getting downright alarming.

The end of the modern-day GOP and its conversion into a fascist-tolerant party started with Ronald Reagan flipping classical economics on its head with his “supply side” scam and his scapegoating Black people to justify gutting social and educational programs, all to benefit his morbidly rich donors.

Reagan’s policies destroyed the American union movement, exploded the costs of health care, housing, and college education, and stole $51 trillion from working class people, putting almost every penny of it into the money bins of the GOP’s morbidly rich patrons.

He did this because devastating the working class was actually part of the plan to return “stability” to the American social order, following the outline of Russell Kirk in his 1951 book The Conservative Mind, the Heritage Foundation’s 1980 Mandate for Leadership, and Lewis Powell’s infamous memo.

Out of the chaos of the collapse of the middle class, Republicans believed they could rebuild our nation along the lines of a new form of feudalism, one of the most stable of the ancient governing systems. And when Trump came along, riding the wave of outrage at the economic devastation Reaganism had caused, they thought they could control him, too.

Pro tip: you can’t control the madman.

Fritz Thyssen, the steel baron who was one of Germany’s richest industrialists in the 1930s, wrote a book about how he’d made the same bet American billionaires and Republican politicians are making today: he thought he could ride a tiger that would make him massively richer but never turn and devour him.

His book I Paid Hitler (my book-collecting father gave me a copy 54 years ago for my 21st birthday) — which lays out how he personally convinced Paul von Hindenburg to make Hitler chancellor and raised the Nazi Party’s first 3 million Reichsmarks so they could win their first national election — reads like a modern-day tragedy.

At first, Thyssen got along with Hitler and even believed he was influencing the man, but when he began to object to some of the Nazi leader’s worse excesses he had to flee the country with his family to avoid being murdered.

Dictators, he learned — even those who only start out as a “dictator for a day” — play for keeps.

Thyssen described how traditional German conservatives also convinced themselves they could ride a demagogue into power and then control him. They feared the left more than they feared authoritarianism, believed “order in society” mattered more than democracy, and were certain that once Hitler’s power was secured, moderation would follow.

What followed instead, however, was a demand for total submission or the threat of total personal and national destruction.

Thyssen’s story shows us how fear dissolves loyalty to principles and power silences the soft voice of conscience. Loyalty to a man replaces loyalty to the law and its traditions.

By the time conservatives realized what they’d enabled, escaping Germany was the only remaining option; Thyssen fled the country in 1939 (although the Vichy French captured him and turned him over to the Nazis, who imprisoned him until the end of the war).

That brings us back to Russell Kirk and his landmark book The Conservative Mind that I write about at length in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. Although Kirk argued strongly for “classes and order,” claiming that inequality is both natural and good, he also tried to anchor American conservatism in moral restraint, historical humility, institutional continuity, and a deep suspicion of demagogues and mass movements.

He warned repeatedly that if conservatives were to abandon those restraints out of fear or resentment, they’d become something else entirely. He explicitly feared rightwing hate ideology, leader worship, and the belief that force could substitute for virtue.

There’s little doubt Kirk would have despised Trump. Trump embodies almost everything Kirk warned against: contempt for history and institutions, appetite over restraint, grievance over stewardship, and power over a moral order. Trump is not even remotely a conservative in any Burkean or Kirkian sense.

He was able to seize control of the GOP because, over the past four decades, much of American conservatism has simply hollowed itself out as it embraced racism (Southern Strategy); promoted lies about trickle down, voter fraud, and tax cuts; and conducted debt-financed foreign adventurism including Iraq and Afghanistan.

What survived was hierarchy, nationalism, hostility to the left, cultural grievance, and the protection of wealth. Tragically, the GOP has discarded the moral restraint, constitutional humility, reverence for truth, and respect for institutional limits that were once elevated by men like Dwight Eisenhower, Barry Goldwater, and Mitt Romney.

Starting in the 1980s, American conservatism became less a philosophy than a set of race- and gender-based resentments married to perpetual deregulation and tax cuts for the party’s morbidly rich donors. Once that happened, the GOP was defenseless against a charismatic authoritarian who promised dominance and control instead of democracy.

Trump didn’t hijack conservatism from the outside: he stepped into a vacuum created by the GOP’s abandonment of constitutional and traditional American principles. Like Thyssen’s peers, today’s Republican donors and leaders believed they could use the wannabe dictator, ride his popularity, placate his followers, and keep the machinery of government power under control.

They were wrong in the same way German conservatives were wrong, and for the same reasons. Once fear takes over as a governing principle, the most ruthless and outspoken leader will inevitably own the party. Everybody else gets destroyed, some sooner, some later.

Now the GOP exists as a sort of permanent loyalty test. Tell the truth and you’re exiled, uphold the Constitution and you’re primaried, defy the leader and you’re threatened with death or imprisonment.

As Walsh pointed out, most Republicans know exactly what’s happening. They know the lies are lies, the elections weren’t stolen, and under Trump and Kristi Noem violence is being normalized. Many know where this road leads, but fear of Trump’s wrath silences them more effectively than their conservative ideology ever unified them.

This is where the comparison between today’s Republicans and their donors to Thyssen becomes unavoidable. In Germany, conservatism didn’t just die the day Hitler seized power. It began to collapse a decade or more earlier, when conservatives decided that democracy, law, and moral restraint were simply political tools rather than binding commitments.

Once they crossed that line, they lost both the authority and the moral courage to resist Hitler and his Nazi Party. As a result, when the time of real terror directed at them arrived a few years later, that terror was all that was left of the system.

That is where the GOP now stands. It’s no longer a party arguing about tax rates or regulation or even federalism. It’s become, instead, an cult of personal loyalty dedicated to the deification and enrichment of one man and his family. That’s neither conservatism nor democracy.

Which brings us to the question Democrats — and the rest of us — today find ourselves confronting: what do we do about it?

• First, Democrats must stop treating this as a normal partisan contest. This isn’t a disagreement over policy, it’s a struggle over whether the United States remains a constitutional republic governed by law or becomes a fascist regime organized around loyalty and fear. Democrats must say that plainly, repeatedly, and without euphemism. Not “threats to norms,” not “concerns about rhetoric,” but the clear truth: one of our two major parties has abandoned democracy and embraced fascism.
• Second, Democrats should relentlessly frame Trumpism not as strength but as weakness. Authoritarian movements thrive on the myth of invincibility, and Thyssen tells us how that myth collapses when its confronted. Democrats should point out, over and over again, that a party that can’t tolerate dissent, won’t allow truth-tellers, and must rely on hate, fear, and intimidation is not strong, but is fundamentally brittle and weak.
• Third, Democrats should invite disaffected conservatives like Joe Walsh and independents into a pro-democracy coalition without demanding ideological conformity. This is not the moment for purity tests: traditions — including our democratic traditions — survive by coalition and continuity. As fanatic a progressive as I am, I also know Democrats must welcome former Republicans, libertarians, faith conservatives, and business leaders who still believe in the Constitution, even if they disagree on taxes, healthcare, or regulation. The message should be simple: democracy first, arguments later.
• Fourth, Democrats must model the courage of our Founders and the generations since who fought for democracy. That means unrelentingly defending courts, free speech, and the rule of law. The contrast matters: as we saw in South Korea when Yoon Suk Yeol was removed from power last year, authoritarian movements collapse when their opponents are willing to fight for democracy rather than flee or hide in panic.
• And finally, this isn’t just about politicians. We average citizens have the biggest role to play, and Thyssen’s story makes clear what happens when we don’t.

Speak up loud and frequently. Support local journalism. Show up to school board meetings, city councils, and your local Democratic Party meetings. Defend your neighbors who’re being targeted by Trump and his ICE goons. Double-check your voter registration every month at vote.org.

Authoritarianism feeds on isolation; democracy survives on solidarity and participation.

The most chilling part of Thyssen’s book isn’t that he and his family had to flee Germany: it’s that by the time they did in 1939, it was the only option left.

For those of us who Trump identified in his National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), it might be a matter of months or a year or two unless he and his regime are blocked from moving forward with their repression. America’s top three experts on fascism have already fled the country; if we don’t win this battle for the soul of America, the same may become necessary for many Americans sooner than we’d like to imagine.

Although the media covered it as a one-day story, NSPM-7 directs the FBI, ICE, other federal police agencies, and over 200 local police departments coordinating with them to begin putting together dossiers on any person or group who meet it’s “indica” (indicators) of potential domestic terrorism.

They include, as Ken Klippenstein first reported:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

If that list includes you or people you love, now is the time to speak up and take positive political action to stop this missile aimed at the heart of our democracy and our Bill of Rights.

Russell Kirk warned that social and political order without moral restraint becomes despotism. Fritz Thyssen taught us that conservatives who empower authoritarians don’t survive the experience. Joe Walsh is describing the end state of that process in real time: a party that has ceased to exist as a governing institution and now operates only as an extension of one demented man’s will.

History doesn’t guarantee outcomes, but it does show us trajectories. Fear is never a stable foundation for politics and only delays the day of reckoning. And the longer the party exploiting it delays, the more catastrophic that reckoning becomes.

The lesson here isn’t that conservative values inevitably lead to authoritarianism: it’s that any political movement without courage, conscience, and adherence to constitutional principles and individual freedom eventually dies.

If “conservative values” can be so easily discarded in favor of fear, loyalty, and power, then they were never values at all, only a story they cynically told us to get elected.

Hopefully that’ll sink in for enough Republicans — and be loudly pointed out by enough Democrats — soon enough to rescue our republic from Germany’s fate.

• Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.