America Needs a Conservative Party

To defend the free world, free enterprise, and free thought

By Robert Zubrin

The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

The recent election presented rational Americans with the unpalatable choice of Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, or an impotent protest vote.

Harris and Trump were both unacceptable for any number of reasons. For starters, they both supported wildly inflationary fiscal policies while engaging in demagoguery to cast blame for the resulting soaring prices everywhere but their own monetary printing press. Both offered nutty economic policies, with Harris proposals for price controls on grocery stores and a regulatory war on fuel countered by Trump’s calls for a trade war.

Both proposed to desert the defense of the cause of world freedom, with Harris’s endorsement of Biden’s policy of stabbing its Ukrainian defenders in the back actually topped by Trump’s proposal to stab them in the front.

Both offered insane immigration policies, with the lunacy of Harris’s policy of open borders countered by Trump’s equally crazy proposal to deport seven percent of the US population.

Both Harris and Trump rejected America’s founding proposition—that all men are created equal—to embrace alternative forms of identitarianism. In Harris’s case the requisite group ideology was a novel but very odiferous “intersectional” mix of racism, genderism, transgenderism, wokeism, ecologism, and anti-patriotism. Metaphorically speaking, voting for Harris required one to vote for banning baseball and apple pie. That’s why she lost.

Trump is fine with baseball and apple pie. But his prescription for group identity—nativism—while more traditional, is equally toxic. As Friedrich Hayek explained in his seminal work The Road to Serfdom, there is no contradiction between nationalism and socialism. On the contrary, invoking the tribal instinct is the key to arouse the passion necessary to realize the full collectivist agenda.

While it has been assigned the designation “right-wing,” nativism is not a conservative orientation. It is not conservative, because it is anti-free enterprise, anti-Judeo-Christian, opposed to America’s founding proposition, and opposed to the traditions that built America. So it is not conservative at all. On the contrary, it is a form of radical tribal collectivism.

This is the deepest problem. Collectivization of property is very bad. Collectivization of minds is even worse. It is worse because it requires the abandonment of individual reason and conscience, the very essence of what makes us human. Conservatives viscerally opposed to what the Democrats have to offer are being told they need to board the Trump train and leave their minds behind on the station platform.

Whatever they might have thought before, if they wish to stay on the train they must now make themselves believe that printing trillions of dollars of funny money won’t cause inflation; that putting a 100 percent tariff on foreign imports will cause retail prices to go down, and certainly won’t result in retaliation; that endowing a president with such enormous power to reward his friends by suppressing their foreign competition, at public expense, is a great idea; that rewarding aggression will end aggression; that letting the largest allied army in Europe be deleted from the West’s order of battle while allowing Russia to radically expand its power will cost us nothing in blood or treasure; that we would all be so much better off if someone else—perhaps China—were to serve as the world’s policeman; that we can strengthen the resolve of Taiwan by demonstrating our unreliability as an ally; that it’s just fine for a sitting president to mobilize a mob to stop the counting of an adversarial electoral college vote; that in fact no crimes are crimes if they are committed by the president; that children would be healthier if we ceased vaccinating them; and that the nation’s food can be grown without modern agricultural technology and harvested without the help of its farm workers. All absurdities, no matter how disastrous in their consequences, must be accepted if they come from Trump.

Conservative heretics who would resist having their spirits so coordinated can just go away and cast a useless protest vote for Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, or Ronald Reagan. But with the Russia-China axis on the march, such a choice is unacceptable.

We need to create a viable alternative. We need to launch a Conservative Party, committed to constitutional government, free enterprise, rational thought, the rule of law, honor and decency, and the defense of the free world.

It is a commonplace that America’s two party system precludes effective participation by a third party. That is why the Conservative Party must not be a third party. It needs to be the first party. This cannot be achieved if the Conservative Party is launched as an abortive election-year escapade and organized around a particular candidate, such as Evan McMullin. No, it needs to be created as a genuine political party, with a full slate of candidates in every congressional district nationwide, and a political machine built well in advance of the next general election to support them.

The means to do this are at hand. There is a coherent body of conservative thought. Many public figures have expressed extreme dissatisfaction with their electoral choices. They do not want to vote for Woke mobs. They do not want to vote for MAGA mobs. If even a fraction of them were to lend their support to the effort, a founding convention of the Conservative Party, held next year, could easily draw 50,000 people.

Addressed and led by principled exiles from the pre-Trump Republican Party, the attendees at the convention could form state and local organizations, which would then run candidates for Congress and other offices nationwide in 2026. Then, well-established in advance, the Conservative Party could hold primaries in 2028 to choose a genuinely principled standard-bearer to lead it against JD Vance, Gavin Newsom, or whatever heart-sinking pair of candidates the two parties are sure to come up with next time.

We are tired of voting with clothespins on our noses. The American people want and deserve rational political leadership. The entire free world desperately needs America to return to sanity. The world now confronts the worst crisis since 1938. Standing on the sidelines and decrying the unfolding disaster simply won’t do.

We, the conservatives, the holders of the precious legacy of John Locke, Adam Smith, Edward Burke, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Friedrich Hayek, and Ronald Reagan, have a critical role to play.

If you would like to join the effort to pull together the organizing committee for the founding convention of the Conservative Party, please contact me at zubrinrobert@gmail.com.

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Dr. Robert Zubrin is an aerospace engineer and author of The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet. Join him on Bluesky at @zubrin.bsky.social.