After this ghastly campaign, whose ghastliness reached new heights with the performance of the Republican nominee in the first presidential debate, conservatives will have no other way left but—upward. By November 8, the destruction, intellectual and perhaps political, will be too great for us simply to rebuild, renew, reconstitute, or restore. The time will have passed for re-doing anything. Emerging from the wreckage of Trump and Trumpism, it will be necessary to build anew. We will of course have to use materials already at hand, many of them fine materials. We will of course have to learn from the past—the American past and the conservative past. But we will not be able to go back. After 2016, we will need a fresh start.

It will not be the first time. William F. Buckley in 1955 drew, needless to say, on thinkers of the past and the lessons of history. But his conservative movement was not so much a rebirth of something old as a founding of something new. As Buckley wrote in the first issue of National Review,