MAGA Needs a Gatekeeper

Reagan benefited from Buckley’s ideological groundwork, but Trump already sits atop the GOP. One might ask: Does neo-fusionism even need a gatekeeper?

In the 1950s and ’60s, American conservatism was a sprawling ideological frontier, divided among libertarians, traditionalists, and staunch anti-Communists, with no unifying doctrine or central authority to define its principles and rein in its extremes. It wasn’t until philosopher Frank Meyer introduced the concept of “fusionism” that the movement found a guiding philosophy—one that blended the Burkean right’s reverence for tradition, originated in both Protestant and Catholic thought, with an unwavering commitment to free-market capitalism as a bulwark against communism.

As political analyst Jonah Goldberg explained:

Meyer argued that libertarianism—then often called “individualism”—and traditionalism are the twin pillars of conservatism and, more broadly, of a just and free society. The chief obligation of the state is to protect individual liberty, but the chief obligation of the individual is to live virtuously. Coerced virtue is tyrannical: Virtue not freely chosen is not virtuous. Or as Meyer himself put it: “Truth withers when freedom dies, however righteous the authority that kills it; and free individualism uninformed by moral value rots at its core and soon brings about conditions that pave the way for surrender to tyranny.”

This vision gained momentum when William F. Buckley Jr. championed it through his magazine, National Review, transforming fusionism from an abstract theory into the ideological backbone of modern conservatism and forging a consolidated political force from its disparate factions.

William Frank Buckley, Jr. was an American conservative author and commentator who founded the political magazine National Review in 1955. He died in 2008. Bettmann/CORBIS

For much of the postwar era, fusionism commanded intellectual respect—even from its liberal opponents. Its credibility owed much to Buckley’s role as conservatism’s gatekeeper. He drew clear ideological boundaries, distancing the movement from the John Birch Society, white supremacists, antisemites, and reactionary cranks who might have tarnished its legitimacy. Under his stewardship, conservatism maintained a sense of discipline and coherence, ensuring its place as a serious political tradition rather than a chaotic collection of grievances.

Today, conservatism finds itself in a new era of ideological turbulence. Since Donald Trump’s re-election as President of the United States—achieved by appealing to a diverse and often contradictory coalition—many argue that the Republican Party has entered a big-tent phase, with the MAGA movement emerging as a kind of neo-fusionism for the 21st century. This new synthesis brings together nationalist populists (Steve Bannon), cultural and religious traditionalists (Ben Shapiro), the tech-right (Elon Musk and David Sacks), and disillusioned liberals (Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.).

Yet unlike its predecessor, this iteration lacks a Buckley-like figure—an intellectual architect to construct its vision, impose ideological discipline, and steer it away from either rudderless grift or extremism. As journalist Philip Klein observes, this neo-fusionism is less about ideological coherence and more about a shared desire to “blow up” a system perceived as corrupt and beyond redemption. Given MAGA’s roots in anti-establishment and anti-elitist sentiment, the very notion of gatekeeping is viewed as an elitist imposition. Klein elaborates:

Whatever the issue was that made them skeptical — Iraq, the financial crisis, Covid — this group of Americans wants to take dynamite to the people and institutions behind all of it. And anybody who raises objections to this approach is immediately dismissed as part of the problem.

But for MAGA to evolve beyond the realm of personality politics, it needs a stabilizing agent—someone capable of refining its identity, tempering its self-destructive tendencies, and molding it from an amorphous protest movement into a lasting political engine. History offers a precedent.

Conservatism faced a similar reckoning in the 1960s, and it was William F. Buckley Jr. who took on the helm of implementing order. At the time, the movement was threatened not just by external opposition but by internal forces that veered into paranoia and extremism. Chief among them was the John Birch Society, founded in 1958 by Robert Welch—a group that, while fiercely anti-Communist, trafficked in conspiracy theories that risked delegitimizing the entire right.

Robert Welch, the founder and head of the John Birch Society, in his Belmont, Mass., office in 1961. //AP

Welch’s most infamous claim—that President Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”—epitomized the fevered paranoia Buckley saw as a liability to conservatism’s credibility. Even though both men saw Communism as a dire threat, Buckley rejected Welch’s belief in a grand Soviet conspiracy lurking behind every policy failure. For Buckley, the problem was bad leadership, not secret agents infiltrating the highest levels of government. This distinction was critical: the John Birch Society saw enemies everywhere, while Buckley sought to build a responsible, strategic movement that could win elections and actually govern.

In 1962, Buckley took a decisive stand. Through National Review, he denounced Welch, arguing that his conspiratorial thinking wasn’t just misguided—it was an existential threat to conservatism’s long-term viability. Buckley challenged how a movement could succeed when its leader’s views were “so far removed from common sense” and criticized Welch’s inability to distinguish between an “active pro-Communist” and an “ineffectual anti-Communist liberal.” Of Welch’s refusal to tolerate dissent within his ranks, Buckley wrote, “He anathematizes all who disagree with him.” His message was clear: if conservatism was to survive, it had to shed the baggage of paranoia and embrace a more disciplined, reality-based approach. “Out of a love of truth and country,” Buckley urged, the right must reject Welch’s “false counsels.”

His decision came at a price—National Review lost subscribers, alienated donors, and faced fierce backlash from segments of the grassroots right. But it was a necessary sacrifice. By repudiating the Birch Society’s extremism, Buckley elevated conservatism from the margins, legitimizing it as an intellectual force and making it palatable to mainstream America. Without this bold position, conservatism might have languished as an outlier ideology rather than rising to become a dominant political movement.

The ultimate vindication of fusionism came in 1980 with Ronald Reagan’s election. In every sense, Reagan was the first fusionist president—the living embodiment of the ideological coalition that Buckley and National Review had spent decades cultivating. His victory was the culmination of years of disciplined ideological gatekeeping. And yet, in today’s political climate, “gatekeeping” has become a dirty word. The reality is that every successful political movement has had its gatekeepers.

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Like Trump, Reagan also had to take on the GOP establishment and the entrenched elite of his era. For a long time, Rockefeller Republicanism dominated the party, with figures such as Nelson Rockefeller and Gerald Ford carrying on the Eisenhower tradition of pragmatic, managerial governance—usually blurring ideological lines with the Democratic establishment. This New Deal-friendly wing considered Reagan a radical outsider threatening their hold on the party. His failed 1976 primary bid against Ford was an early skirmish in that struggle, but it laid the groundwork for his triumphant comeback four years later.

Grassroots conservatives spent years reshaping the party, winning the battle of ideas long before winning at the ballot box. The heavy lifting fell to National Review and William F. Buckley Jr., who meticulously crafted modern conservatism into a comprehensive philosophy. If it wasn’t for their efforts to delineate what conservatism stood for—and, just as crucially, what it rejected—Reagan might have been compelled into unsavory alliances with the very extremists Buckley had worked very hard to purge.

Consider the alternative. Had Buckley not exiled the John Birch Society and other fringe elements in the ’60s and ’70s, Reagan’s path to power would have been far more treacherous. He would have faced an impossible choice: pander to conspiracy theorists and extremists or waste valuable political capital disavowing them. Instead, by the time Reagan took center stage, fusionist conservatism was already the dominant ideological force on the right. The intellectual foundation had been established, allowing him to run on broad conservative principles—anti-Communism, free markets, limited government—without being weighed down by the cranks and conspiracy theorists.

Reagan’s admiration for National Review was no secret; he had been an avid reader since its early years and continued to rely on it throughout his tenure as governor and president. “I’d be lost without National Review,” he wrote in a note to Buckley in June of 1962. Much of the intellectual scaffolding for his policies came directly from Buckley’s magazine. As historian George F. Will famously put it:

Without Bill Buckley, no National Review. Without National Review, no Goldwater nomination. Without the Goldwater nomination, no conservative takeover of the Republican Party. Without that, no Reagan. Without Reagan, no victory in the Cold War. Therefore, Bill Buckley won the Cold War.

In time, Reagan’s brand of conservatism—the fusionism that Buckley tirelessly promoted—transformed from a once-radical outlier into the Republican establishment. For years, it served as the ideological template for future GOP leaders, shaping the party’s identity long after Reagan left office.

Of course, today’s political landscape is vastly different. Reagan benefited from Buckley’s ideological groundwork, but Trump already sits atop the GOP. One might ask: Does neo-fusionism even need a gatekeeper?

The core problem with MAGA—and personality-driven politics in general—is that it revolves around a single leader, fueled more by personal loyalty than by a cohesive ideology, policy agenda, or party platform. Such a model is inherently unsustainable; when the leader exits the stage, the movement risks collapsing under its own weight.

Historically, fusionism has always grappled with the challenge of reconciling competing factions. In Buckley’s era, he had to intellectually bridge the divide between libertarians and traditionalists—two groups with different worldviews. Today, MAGA fusionism faces a similar dilemma, attempting to hold together a coalition of nationalist populists, cultural traditionalists, disillusioned liberals, and the tech-right—without a unifying philosophical underpinning.

Photo-illustration by Newsweek/Getty

Up until now, MAGA has thrived on rejecting the establishment, but with Trump’s victory in 2024 and the GOP’s control of both houses of Congress, that dynamic has shifted. MAGA is the establishment now—and no movement can survive on opposition alone. It must define what it stands for, not just what it stands against. Without a Buckley-like figure to provide ideological direction and structure this new conservative movement, it is bound to stagnate as a politics of grievance, unable to evolve or sustain itself in power—just as other leader-centric movements have before it.

One of the starkest fault lines within MAGA’s coalition is between the tech-right and traditionalists. These factions are not just in disagreement; they are philosophically at odds. Take transhumanism, for example. The tech-right embraces it, seeing cognitive augmentation, life extension, and human-machine integration as the next frontier of human progress. To them, technology is a tool to transcend biological limitations, solve global challenges, and unlock untapped potential.

Traditionalists, on the other hand, recoil at this vision. They argue that transhumanism threatens to erode human dignity, disrupt social structures, and invite unintended consequences that could undermine the very essence of what it means to be human. Thinkers like Mary Harrington warn that such ambitions may not just alter humanity but diminish it, stripping away fundamental aspects of identity and experience.

Another major rift has emerged between nationalist populists and the tech-right, particularly over high-skilled immigration and H-1B visas. The late 2024 schism became apparent when tech leaders like Elon Musk advocated expanding the H-1B visa program to attract skilled foreign workers, arguing that it was essential for U.S. economic and technological leadership. Nationalist populists, however, fiercely opposed this stance, seeing it as a betrayal of the “America First” ethos and a threat to American workers. As long as these contradictions remain unresolved, MAGA’s fusionist experiment will be inherently unstable, leaving the question of whether it can outlast the personality that created it unanswered.

The most pressing consequence of the absence of an intellectual gatekeeper isn’t merely ideological drift—it’s the privation of a leader to determine demarcations, distinguishing the extremist fringe from the mainstream MAGA fusionist movement. This is largely a byproduct of the recent cancel culture era, in which once-trusted institutions and gatekeepers on the left morphed into authoritarian enforcers of censorship. As the Overton window of acceptable discourse narrowed to such a suffocating degree that dissent became untenable, MAGA’s response was to bulldoze through the wall, obliterating any semblance of guardrails.

This vacuum has allowed people like Candace Owens to become synonymous with the MAGA movement—not necessarily due to ideological merit, but because no one is in a position to arbitrate where the movement begins and ends. In an environment where opposing the establishment is the highest virtue, Owens has weaponized controversy, leveraging provocation as a political and cultural currency. Yet, her rhetoric hasn’t just courted outrage; it has veered into outright conspiracism and bigotry, highlighting the perils of a movement unmoored from intellectual rigor.

Among her most inflammatory claims, Owens has falsely alleged that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), as a descendant of B’nai B’rith, is a “Freemason organization” with the insinuation that it controls governments, banks, media, and global affairs. She has also asserted that “the ADL was born to defend a pedophile,” referring to Leo Frank—a Jewish man wrongfully convicted in 1913 for the rape and murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan and lynched in 1915.

Further amplifying incendiary falsehoods, Owens has claimed that “Israel right now is a safe haven for pedophiles” and that America is “sending our dollars overseas to a country that is protecting pedophiles.” At worst, this allegation is a thinly veiled expression of antisemitism emblematic of her brand of rhetoric; at best, it is grossly misleading.

Though it is true that some Jewish criminals—including pedophiles—have relocated to Israel to evade prosecution, this is not due to any state-sanctioned policy of protection but rather legal loopholes and enforcement failures—important distinctions that Owens omits. Under Israel’s Law of Return (1950), any Jewish person can immigrate to Israel and receive automatic citizenship. Some accused criminals exploited this provision to escape justice, benefiting from legal protections that made extradition difficult for crimes committed abroad. However, in 2005, Israel amended its extradition law to close this loophole, and further reforms have since strengthened its enforcement.

To be clear, a nation’s reluctance to extradite its own citizens is not unusual, especially for countries with histories marked by struggles for sovereignty and persecution. Take Hong Kong, for instance—when a proposed extradition bill emerged in 2019, it sparked mass protests. The bill was initially introduced in response to a murder case involving a Hong Kong resident who killed his girlfriend in Taiwan. However, many feared it was a Trojan horse for the Chinese Communist Party to target political dissidents under the guise of criminal justice. Yet, by Candace Owens’ logic, Hong Kong would also qualify as a “safe haven for murderers”—an absurd and reductive conclusion that mirrors the fallacy of her reasoning.

Owens is hardly the only conspiracy theorist elevated in this new wave of neo-fusionism. Consider pseudo-historian Darryl Cooper, who cast Churchill as a “psychopath” and the “chief villain” of World War II while portraying Hitler as a reluctant participant forced into war by Churchill’s machinations. Cooper went even further, suggesting that Nazi Germany “launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war… and they just threw these people into camps, and millions of people ended up dead”—a grotesque distortion that downplays the deliberate, systematic extermination of Jews in the Holocaust.

For many, encountering these ideas for the first time, Cooper’s rhetoric may seem like the revelation of forbidden knowledge. But in reality, none of this is new. His arguments are little more than a rehash of paleoconservative politician Pat Buchanan’s interpretation of World War II, best encapsulated in his book Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War. More importantly, these are the very views that William F. Buckley Jr. sought to dissociate the conservative movement from—calling them out directly in his National Review essay “In Search of Anti-Semitism.”

But in today’s conservative movement, Cooper has reached audiences in the millions despite the sheer absurdity of his revisionism—thanks to Tucker Carlson, a key MAGA influencer. Instead of challenging Cooper’s outlandish views, Carlson introduced him as “the best and most honest popular historian working in the United States today,” adding: “I want people to know who you are, and I want you to be widely recognized as the most important historian in the United States.”

This rejection of traditional gatekeeping is not unique to MAGA. Before it was the Tea Party—a movement that serves as a cautionary tale of what happens without ideological guardrails. What started as a principled revolt against government overreach, excessive spending, and crony capitalism quickly unraveled into a chaotic spectacle driven by performative populism.

Initially, the Tea Party attracted libertarians, constitutional conservatives, and small-government advocates, with intellectual figures like Ron Paul giving it legitimacy. It was ignited by middle-class frustration with both Obama’s policies—such as the Affordable Care Act and TARP bailouts—and Bush-era spending on Medicare Part D, the Iraq War, and Wall Street rescues. For a brief moment, it appeared to be a serious movement with a coherent fiscal conservative vision.

But then, the loudest voices drowned out the thoughtful ones. Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin abandoned substantive policy for reality-TV-style politics, trading serious governance for culture war soundbites. Rather than becoming a formidable leader, she became a meme—an early warning of how conservative populism could spiral into self-parody. Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, a religious firebrand, pushed the fringe too far, embracing conspiracy theories like the baseless claim that Obama’s administration was controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood. Once a rising star, she became a political punchline and quietly exited the stage by 2015.

Meanwhile, birtherism—a false conspiracy that claimed Barack Obama was not born in the United States—gained traction within the movement, further diminishing its credibility. As ideological infighting between factions intensified, the GOP establishment seized the moment and effectively neutralized the Tea Party by 2016. In many ways, the Tea Party was a prelude to MAGA—foreshadowing how populist energy, if left unchecked, can be co-opted, distorted, and ultimately self-destruct.

Who could serve as the gatekeeper of MAGA fusionism? Ultimately, that’s for MAGA to decide. However, there are key qualities to consider in a potential gatekeeper:

1. They cannot be politicians. Elected officials prioritize winning elections over enforcing ideological discipline. They are unlikely to risk alienating their base by calling out extremists or conspiracy theorists.

2. They must be independent of any single faction. A gatekeeper cannot be too embedded in one of MAGA’s subgroups—whether it’s Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire traditionalism or Steve Bannon’s nationalist populism. They need to command respect across the movement.

3. They must be intellectually credible. This person should have a deep understanding of conservatism’s ideological history and be capable of reconciling the principles of MAGA’s various subgroups. Their critiques should be based on ideological coherence, not just moral objections.

4. They need media presence and influence. To sway public discourse, they must have a platform—whether through a publication, podcast, or television network. William F. Buckley had National Review; a modern gatekeeper would need similar reach and legitimacy.

5. They cannot be perceived as part of the old GOP establishment. If they are seen as a legacy conservative or an establishment Republican, their criticisms will be dismissed as “RINO” rhetoric.

6. They must have the fortitude to challenge fringe elements. Gatekeeping is a thankless job. It requires calling out extremists while maintaining the support of the broader movement. Buckley excommunicated the John Birch Society despite losing subscribers and donors—today’s gatekeeper must have the courage to do the same with figures like Candace Owens, Darryl Cooper, and other conspiracy theorists.