Conservatives face a choice in ’26: realignment or extinction
The elections of 2026 and 2028 will be “Flight 93 elections,” but not in the way Michael Anton envisioned in 2016. Anton famously compared supporting Donald Trump to charging the cockpit of a hijacked plane: reckless, dangerous, but preferable to certain death.
Nine years later, the metaphor has inverted. The forces that once stormed the cockpit now control it. They have locked the door, fortified the controls, and flown the Republican Party in widening circles toward disaster. No one inside can change course. The GOP plane is rapidly losing altitude, and everyone aboard can see it coming.
Continuing down this path does not preserve conservatism. It buries it inside an irredeemable party.
At this stage, the only rational move involves grabbing a parachute and jumping. Staying seated guarantees political death.
The gamble failed
Anton wrote his essay when the Republican Party had already revealed itself as corrupt, inert, and incapable of reform. That decay produced Trump. He appeared as something new: a transactional, deeply flawed outsider promising to smash the uniparty and deliver for workers and small businesses long ignored by corporate Republicanism.
Many voters tolerated Trump’s personal failings and erratic behavior because he represented a rupture. At least it was different.
Nine years on, Republicans carry all the liabilities of Trump’s image and record without securing the benefits that justified the gamble. His better policies stall in court. His worst instincts endure. Meanwhile, Republicans lose elections in territory that once leaned safely red.
Trump obsesses over his ballroom project, courts tech and crypto bros, cuts deals with China and Qatar, and waves away economic pain that millions feel daily. Consumers face rising prices. College graduates struggle to find work. Small businesses buckle under costs. The White House insists the economy is strong.
It is not.
History repeats
This failure did not begin with Trump. The Tea Party quickly collapsed because it tried to reform a party that could not be reformed. The GOP long ago ceased functioning as a conservative party. It exists to serve corporate donors while marketing fear of the left to a skeptical electorate.
History offers a warning. The Whig Party collapsed once it became obvious that it stood for nothing relevant to its era. The Republican Party replaced it. Today’s GOP has perfected the art of symbolic resistance paired with practical surrender. It’s fake opposition.
Trump’s rise looked like a break from that pattern. Sadly, it was not. He has spent five election cycles endorsing establishment Republicans, preserving the very faction that produced the crisis. His rhetoric attacks “RINOs,” but his endorsements entrench them.
His current agenda reflects the same contradiction: Big Tech, techno-feudal economics, Qatari pandering, Chinese student visas, and government-backed industrial schemes sold as innovation, paired with denial of inflation and hardship.
All the liabilities, none of the benefits
The result proves electorally poisonous. Republicans repel suburban voters and working-class voters simultaneously. They project the aloof corporatism of the pre-Trump era mixed with cultural coarseness and denial of obvious hardship.
Since 2017, Republicans have compiled a grim down-ballot record, interrupted only by Trump’s 2024 victory against a weak opponent in a terrible economy. Rather than consolidate that win, Trump chose to own the economy outright and burn political capital.
Conservatives now die on hills that are not their own. They inherit Trump’s liabilities without achieving the promised purge of the party’s corporate class. The GOP and Trump’s coalition increasingly merge into a single structure that offers spectacle instead of reform.
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The case for a clean break
As Republican candidates face double-digit swings toward Democrats even in light-red districts, the choice sharpens. Conservatives can continue propping up a failed party and risk discrediting their ideas permanently. We could embrace the “aristopopulism” of JD Vance and his circle. Or we could force a realignment.
A new party could channel distrust of techno-feudalism, mass surveillance, foreign labor exploitation, and a K-shaped economy engineered through government favoritism. It could ground itself in tangible productivity, property rights, sound money, privacy, small business, and national sovereignty.
Every decade or so, Republican dysfunction becomes obvious enough to provoke rebellion: Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, the Tea Party, MAGA. Each time, the insurgency gets absorbed and neutralized by the same structure.
We have reached that moment again.
Continuing down this path does not preserve conservatism. It buries it inside an irredeemable party. The Republican Party has reached the end of its rope. The only question is whether conservatives recognize it before the fall becomes irreversible.
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Michael Beck Photography. Used with permission.
Plexi Images/GHI/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
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