by Paweł Skała-Piękoś
Note on method: This essay was written through an AI-enhanced process, as were my previous columns here. The argument, the structure, the successive revisions and the final judgement are mine. I developed the line of thought in Polish and used two AI systems, ChatGPT 6.1 and Claude (Anthropic’s Fable 5.1), as critical assistance: to test formulations, to flag overstatement and redundancy, to check transitions, and to help transcreate the Polish text into English. One Claude instance worked throughout in the anti-dogmatic register I have borrowed from Kołakowski since my first column: accept the thesis generously, then examine it sceptically, then say what survives. Because the essay rests on events of the past ten days, the models also ran successive fact-checks against current sources; their own knowledge of 2026 was out of date and had to be corrected several times, which is a useful reminder of what such assistance can and cannot do. My instructions asked the models to challenge the argument rather than flatter it, to hit both sides of the political divide wherever the criticism applied, and to keep the English natural while preserving my voice.
In October 1978 Leszek Kołakowski published a short credo in Encounter under the title “How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist”. He took its motto from a Warsaw tram, where a conductor used to shout what he rendered as “Please step forward to the rear!”, and he proposed it as the slogan of a mighty International that will never exist, because it cannot promise people that they will be happy. I referred to that essay a month ago, writing here about relations between Canada, Europe and the United States. I return to it today because history has added another chapter.
The Democrats won, and won as they have not in a generation: as of 8 November they hold at least 54 seats in the Senate, with counting still under way in Mississippi and Alaska, and 254 seats to 162 in the House, with 19 districts uncalled. The background is the war with Iran, fought since 28 February, and the price of petrol, which rose from $2.98 a gallon before the war to more than $4 in the spring and still cost that much on election day. Even Vice President Vance had the honesty to write that the problem was not turnout but the fact that people who voted for Trump in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026, and among the causes he named the war with Iran. We know whose decision that was.
One of the three traditions named in the credo, the conservative one, lost, and the first reflex of its present custodians was to do what they had been doing for the past ten years. Four days after the midterms the President called on the Department of Justice to deal with the Democrats who, having won, had announced impeachments of members of his cabinet; he called those announcements extortion, offering no evidence that anyone had been threatened. This essay, however, is not about why the right lost. It is about what is left of it, and about what in it was left-wing.
I use Kołakowski’s measure, though I am not sure I have the nerve to enroll in his International, since the founder himself ruled that it will never come into being. But institutions that do not exist have an advantage over those that do: they need not win elections, they issue no muddled statements after defeats, and they let us picture problems whole and ask questions that no existing institution will ask, because each has something to lose. Kołakowski called the components of his credo a set of regulative ideas, Kant’s term: not a description of what is, but a measure held up against what is. Let me declare that I write this essay as a man who cannot stand his own country’s right; the reader gets my prejudice at the outset. But a negative attitude to the custodians need not determine one’s attitude to the deposit, that is, in the old sense of something held in trust, to the handful of principles the right was supposed to keep, which I shall speak up for in the second half of this text. So the question is what, of everything the right calls important, we must not throw away, even if those who were supposed to guard it first betrayed it and then lost anyway.
Two Rights
“The right” means several things, and most arguments about it consist in the speaker sliding between the meanings. There is the right as a disposition: to prefer the known to the unknown. There is the right as a doctrine: claims about human nature, about the limits of reason, about evil not being something you can remove from the world like a defect in a machine. And there is the right as a coalition, in which, since 1955, libertarians, traditionalists and anti-communists have shared one tent. Over the years that coalition grew into a mosaic of conservatisms, from the salon to the folk variety, which formed a unity of sorts; a unity built on tensions, hard compromises and contradictions first passed over in silence and then swelling, on mutual dishonesty and a growing tolerance for dishonesty. On top of that, traditional conservatism lost its cultural appeal for its own voters. This right, made up of disposition, doctrine and coalition together, I shall call the old mainstream right. For many years it held, in the United States, a monopoly on the deposit this text is about.
There is also a second right, and it was under its leadership that the Republicans lost on 3 November. It is called populist, but the word papers over the phenomenon and explains nothing; everyone who wants to win appeals to the people. Every ideology has at its source some first question, first fear, first reflex. I would make a fairly safe bet that ideologies become most dangerous, and the worst versions of themselves, when they degenerate to their simplest form, when they give up their own tradition and their own experience. So whenever we hear too often about a return to “true roots”, we should start paying attention.
That, in my view, is the heart of the trouble with the big MAGA tent. It reacts with its first reflex. It answers fears, and in doing so throws away its own traditions and principles, degrading its own ideology and its own political camp down to the roots. In certain respects it becomes so conservative that it discards a large part of conservatism’s own achievement.
A reflex becomes a view only when it turns into a claim that can be tested and refuted; fear of immigration is a reflex, while the statement that immigration lowered wages in construction by such and such a figure is already work, because it is a bet you can lose.
The old mainstream right, not free of those reflexes itself, nonetheless had institutions and milieux that turned fear into knowledge of what must not be touched; the right of the first reflex turned fear into a goal that has to be kept alive.
Curiously, an apparent paradox followed. The nationalist right founded an international of global reach. CPAC has met in Budapest since 2022, most recently in March, a month before Orbán lost an election after sixteen years in power. Bolsonaro, sentenced to twenty-seven years for an attempted coup, and Trump understood each other without an interpreter whenever the talk turned to pardons for their own people, contracts for the family and courts to be remade. The name “right of the first reflex” belongs above all to those who service the reflex, because the reflex itself is no more to blame than fuel is.
It should of course be said at this point that the left has its own temptations and passions, an anger at injustice that goes feral just as easily; and the liberal centre has its contempt for those who know less and do not fit the meritocratic checkboxes. My “cannot stand” from the opening probably also stems from the limits of the liberal way of thinking.
A Code without an Ethics
On 25 July 2016, in Philadelphia, Michelle Obama said: “When they go low, we go high.” Coming from her, it was a decent thing to say; nobody has the right to demand that the person cheated roll in the mud with the cheat. The trouble began when a personal sentence became a party’s code, because a code, as Kołakowski showed in “Ethics without a Code”, keeps the conscience safe and supplies moral comfort without changing the conditions that produce the conflict. “We go high”, adopted by a party, says little about the opponent but begins to build the group around a new criterion of hierarchy: position is set by moral superiority over those outside, and to stand high you need someone to keep down. The grim joke is that Europe had tested where that logic ends only a few weeks earlier, in June 2016, before the sentence was spoken. I am not claiming that one followed from the other; I am claiming that it is the same mechanism, shown twice in one summer. Voters who had been told for years that their fears were shameful voted for Brexit, and on the Continent voters began to vote for anyone who did not tell them to be ashamed. This is not an argument for relieving voters of moral responsibility for the decisions they make; that certain groups’ fears are justified does not by itself mean their political demands should be met. But persistent blindness to those fears ends with somebody else harvesting them. In 2026 the Democrats won on petrol, among other things, but also on a message about the cost of living, which Hakeem Jeffries had put at the centre of the campaign as early as July, and not on going high; and, unlike in 2024, voters trusted them more than the Republicans on the economy. If you are fighting someone brutal who reasons in the logic of violence, going high is not enough; you have to go highly focused.
The year 2016 also produced a second code without an ethics, though merely placing the two side by side is already too much symmetry. “The Flight 93 Election” appeared on 5 September in the Claremont Review of Books, written by Michael Anton under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus. Flight 93 was the hijacked plane of 11 September 2001 on which the passengers attacked the cockpit and all of them died, but the hijackers never reached their target; Anton wrote that the choice in 2016 was the same: charge the cockpit or die. Where Michelle Obama’s sentence tempted some with a sense of their own elite standing, this one released every moral brake. On one side, then, we got people with an irritating posture whose long-term effects will doubtless be harmful. On the other, an assault that does not intend to ask what happens after landing, because in an apocalypse there is no choice, there is necessity, there is decision, a word that in this context should send a shiver down the spine, until out of it is born a duty to act. To act outside all rules and procedures, because every action in this mode of thinking borders on the state of exception. That is why these people do not feel compromised: they were not choosing, they were saving the plane. And an apocalypse does not wear out. In Anton’s metaphor the assault succeeded: Trump won in November 2016 and took office in January 2017, so the state of exception should have ended. It did not: in 2020 the election was “stolen”, 2024 was “the final battle”, and four days after 3 November 2026 the new threat to the republic turned out to be announced impeachments, which had to be reported to the prosecutors.
A Coloniser without Ships
Here is the second sense of the title: for ten years the right of the first reflex did what the left regards as its own job. It served the part of the rural and small-town working class that the liberal left is repelled by and ashamed of: people with guns, with a church, with a flag on the porch, with a hierarchy in the family which they themselves regard as order. The liberal left either pretends they are not there, or is disgusted by them, or, finally, treats them with the empathy of a coloniser who is fond of the people under his care but knows better than they do what they need. Barack Obama said in 2008 of the inhabitants of small-town Pennsylvania that they get bitter and “cling to guns or religion”; the sentence was kindly meant, and that is exactly where the coloniser sits, because it explains away other people’s attachments as a symptom that will pass. The old mainstream right was honest in a different way: Mitt Romney spoke in 2012 of the forty-seven per cent whom he would “never convince that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives”. You cannot see the coloniser, because he arrives without ships: roughly the same culture, a similar language, and on top of that a civilising mission that goes by the name of civic education. The right of the first reflex was the only one that did not shame these people. But it did not represent them; it served them, as a tavern serves a thirst: it pours what the customer wants and does not ask what will become of him in the morning. I think the only honest attitude towards this part of the working class is open disagreement with their views, a refusal to accept that part of their hierarchy of values which rests on the logic of violence, physical exploitation and coercion. What we owe these communities is to hold them to ethical expectations, even demands, but also to create the conditions in which they can be met. If part of the left would like to describe a certain level of personal ethics as a class privilege, then as a liberal I reply: in that case it is time to hand that privilege out to everyone.
Sarmatism, the self-image of the old Polish nobility, is a notion I like to return to, because I know it very well from my own part of the world, and because I believe it can help explain a good many things in the United States. I wrote here in August and in September about the Golden Liberty of a single estate and about its partition from within; today I am interested in its mentality, the Sarmatian one: aggressive ignorance; one’s own privilege taken for freedom; a sense of exceptionalism mixed with an inferiority complex and a superiority complex at once; dissent that counts as an argument because it is mine; and the conviction that repairing the system is treason against the system. Donald Trump, seen from Poznań, looks like a Polish Sarmatian: a nobleman who has everything, believes everything is owed to him, and is convinced that the world has conspired to take it away. This Sarmatian mode does not belong to one side. The right speaks it in honour and apocalypse, the liberal centre in “going high” and contempt, but these are two dialects of one language, in which the first question is who I am in relation to you, and only the second is what there is to be done.
Examination of Conscience
I would not want this essay to sound like an ode to traditional Republicans and an indictment of those who came after them. The old mainstream right was not destroyed by the right of the first reflex; it made a deal with it. Lindsey Graham wrote in May 2016 that if the party nominated Trump it would be destroyed and would deserve it, and until his death in July 2026 he was Trump’s most faithful defender; Ted Cruz, whose wife Trump had publicly insulted, endorsed him in September; Marco Rubio called him a con artist and became his Secretary of State. In 1962 William F. Buckley Jr. broke with the leader of the John Birch Society and in 1965 with the Society itself, because a movement that cannot tame its lunatic flank ceases to deserve a hearing; in 2016 his successors handed the flank the whole tent in exchange for judges and tax cuts.
Even the best version of that good old mainstream right had a limit, visible from the credo’s other two terms, the socialist and the liberal. The best conservatism of McCain, whom I pointed to here in July as a model of a functional right, of Romney and of Pence stopped, on its left side, where inequality began, because it took inequality for nature, and Kołakowski was right to write that the pessimism from which it follows, by a curious reasoning, that a progressive income tax is an inhuman abomination is just as suspect as the optimism on which the Gulag Archipelago was based; on the liberal side it ended where institutions stopped serving it. And the limits of backbone can be measured: McCain gave his thumbs-down while already dying; in 2020 Romney was the only member of his party to vote to convict, and he did not run again; on 6 January Pence presided over the count and paid for it with his career; Cruz and Rubio gave way because they had careers ahead of them, and Graham gave way first and lasted longest. Brad Raffensperger, in charge of elections in Georgia, answered the request to find 11,780 votes by saying that the numbers were what they were; he still won re-election in 2022, but this year he finished third in the primary for governor, behind two Trump-backed candidates, so he too paid. Backbone turned out, as a rule, to be a function of the distance to the next election, and an institution that relies on retirees is not an institution.
Principles That Stopped Serving
The self-styled protectors of principles, who called them the foundation, betrayed them exactly when the principles stopped serving them. Fiscal discipline: the Tea Party movement grew in 2009 out of Obama’s deficits, and the same Republican Party passed tax cuts in 2017 that added nearly $1.5 trillion to the deficit, and a bill signed on 4 July 2025 which, by the Congressional Budget Office’s reckoning, adds some $3.4 trillion to deficits by 2034. Free trade: from Reagan to NAFTA, and then, on 2 April 2025, “Liberation Day”, tariffs on the whole world. Law and order: half a century as the party of the police, and on 20 January 2025 pardons for some 1,500 people convicted over 6 January, including for beating police officers. Character: in 1998 an impeachment for perjury about an affair, in 2024 a conviction on thirty-four counts, swallowed without indignation. The Democrats too abandoned principles when they stopped serving them; but with them these were exceptions that had to be explained, whereas on the right it is the pattern in the plaster that covers the monument to Donald Trump.
What this says about Republicans interests me less than what kind of system they were building. And here I put forward a hypothesis. A rule applied only to “the others” does not have the form of a principle in Kant’s sense, a measure to which the one proclaiming it is also subject; it is a rule of prudence, team colours. Motive cannot be read off an act, so I leave aside what these people understood and look only at how the rule worked, which was as an attribute of position rather than a bond: it bound the weaker and let the stronger say one thing today and another tomorrow. The counterexample comes from the same movement, because Buckley in the 1960s applied the rule to his own, and that is how we know it could be done differently. This also explains what the right of the first reflex cannot do: it does not know how to lose, because in such a use of rules a loss is a loss of position, not the outcome of a game. The seventh of November illustrates this mechanism rather than adding to it: four days after the defeat, the loss was to be reversed with an instrument of power instead of being accepted. I suspect, though I cannot prove it, that it absorbed the lesson the left taught in universities for forty years, that every rule is a mechanism of power, and drew the opposite conclusion from it: not “therefore no rule is legitimate”, but “so how do we learn to configure the rules so that the privileged group stays in power”.
What the Right Carries
I do not want to confine myself to the custodians of conservative ideas. I assume that the poor moral and intellectual condition of that milieu is a passing phenomenon. But given the right’s present dysfunction, I speak up for five principles that, as I see it, the right itself ought to be defending; the first three are Kołakowski’s, the fourth is Burke’s, the fifth is mine.
First: there never were, and never will be, improvements in human life that do not have to be paid for by a deterioration in some other respect; innumerable evils are compatible and can be suffered at once, while many goods exclude or limit one another. When men fear equal rights for women because they fear equal competition, they are right to be afraid: it will be harder for them. The reasons women should have equal rights are incomparably weightier than that fear, and to yield to it would be a crime; but the rightness of a change does not abolish its cost, somebody bears it, and if nobody tells him so at the very start, then one day he will hear it from someone who will turn it into a slogan and a tale of a left-liberal conspiracy.
Competition comes from scarcity, not from capitalism, and in the country where I was born the communist authorities, from the mid-1960s and more generously after 1968, awarded points at university entrance exams for working-class and peasant origin, because the competition for places was just as fierce, only the party chose its criteria; Kołakowski himself writes, in the liberal part of the credo, that a society in which all forms of competition have been done away with will not keep the incentives for creativity and progress. A conservative has a natural reflex to count that cost; in his mature form he counts it without questioning the change, and in his immature form he makes it a reason to reverse the change. The Republican custodians sold out this thesis in both directions. They denied that the cost exists: they declared tariffs pure gain, and when, after 28 February, petrol went from $2.98 to more than $4, the President wrote in March that higher oil prices were “a very small price to pay” for safety and peace, and in October said of the American oil industry: “we’re making a freaking fortune”; on the evening after the defeat he said in one interview that the election had been lost on petrol prices, not on the war, and in another, the same evening, that Iran had been a piece of it, as if the one were not the consequence of the other.
Second: we do not know to what extent inherited forms of life, family, nation, religious communities, rituals, are indispensable to the survival of societies and to the quality of that survival; there are arguments for fighting some religious practices where they do psychological or physical harm, but even then one has to ask what the form carried and what its removal will cost.
The conservative asks what will happen when a given form is gone. The liberal adds the question whether the form can be justified. The American republic stood on a few such forms, which had faded somewhat because they fell victim to their own success. For more than a century they worked, though for a long time not for everyone: the loser accepted the result, nobody prosecuted the other side for what it did with its victory, and votes were counted, not negotiated. On 6 January 2021 the first of these rules, the one about accepting the result, was broken, and only then did it become clear how much had rested on it. On 7 November 2026, four days after the defeat, the President called on the Department of Justice to deal with the winners, and broke the second, the one about not prosecuting the other side. The party that was supposed to guard the forms betrayed them.
Third: the belief that envy, the craving for distinction, greed and aggression are merely the result of faulty institutions and will disappear once those are changed is an Enlightenment superstition, contrary to experience and ruinous, because whoever expects that brotherhood can be institutionalised already has a reliable blueprint for despotism.
The fourth is Burke’s, from 1790: society is a contract between the living, the dead and the unborn, and the present generation is a tenant in it, not an owner. That contract reaches deeper than Burke supposed, because it begins below the level of generations, in a single body. Derek Parfit showed in 1984 that what connects me today with me in thirty years is a matter of degree and weakens; from this he drew the conclusion that great imprudence towards one’s future self is a harm done to someone else, and also an impersonal conclusion, that one’s own self deserves less weight. I carry this, on my own account now, from the scale of the body to the scale of the state, and the transfer is conservative not by way of Burke but by the form of the obligation. Liberal self-ownership turns here into tenancy, and tenancy assumes that there is something one may not use up, though it lies in one’s hands. If my future self is to that degree someone else, then caring for it is not prudence but altruism towards someone who will inherit my decisions and whom I shall not ask for consent; diet and public debt are thus the same relation on two scales, because in both the present decides what someone without a voice will receive. The Republicans, those of the old mainstream in 2017 and those of the first reflex in 2025, behaved like Burkean tenants who came to believe they were the owners. So they betrayed conservatism once again.
The fifth is mine, and it concerns closure. In a healthy society someone must perform the function of opening and someone the function of closing. The left opens: every form is negotiable, every question may be asked anew. The right closes: certain questions are settled, the dead have claims on the living, and a community has a right to set limits to its attention. Liberalism guards choice: whether a participant can refuse, challenge the rule and leave. These are functions, not definitions of the traditions; each of the three has, in its history, also done the work of the other two, and each, carried to the absolute, turns into its own opposite. Opening without limit becomes an absence of distinctions: when everything is negotiable, nothing differs from anything else and there is nothing left to decide, so the most open society is the one in which nothing can be resolved. Closure without a condition becomes a dogma that forbids the very question it grew out of, and so loses what it was meant to guard, because a form one is no longer allowed to understand ceases to be a form and becomes a habit. The protection of choice without content becomes a freedom with nowhere to exit to: the loser may refuse, but the refusal changes nothing, so the freest is the one with the least to choose. Any particular point of closure can be rejected, but the need for closure itself cannot, because whoever wants to go somewhere must have something from which to measure the distance. Conservatism adds to this the rule of the burden of proof: whoever dismantles an institution older than himself must justify doing so, not because the old is good, but because dismantling is easy and rebuilding often impossible, since together with the institution go the practical knowledge, the web of relationships and the trust that allowed it to work.
But for closure to differ from dogma it must meet one condition: it closes for now, not for ever, and it names what would require reopening.
The five theses are, in the end, five questions that someone in a society has to keep asking so that everyone else can safely get on with other questions: what does this cost and who will pay; what happens when this form is gone; what in a human being will stay the same after the best reform; to whom will we hand what we are using up today; and which matters may, for a time, be treated as settled. None of these questions is the property of the party that lost on 3 November, and none loses its validity because the people who were supposed to ask them stopped asking them of themselves. To throw them away because the custodians proved unworthy would be to concede that the truth about cost, about form, about the human being, about the successor and about the limit belonged to them, and not to all of us.
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