Conquest's Second Law and Why America First Could Win
Any movement not explicitly pro-American will eventually become anti-American, even the Republican Party
Conquest’s Second Law, i.e. “Any organization not explicitly right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing,” works because the cultural gravity of bureaucratic society pulls perpetually leftward. Status, funding, media praise, academic respectability, and moral preening all ooze to the left over time. Explicitly resisting that gravity is socially costly, so unless resistance is built into the organization’s heart and soul, it drifts.
The same mechanism exists on a pro-American vs anti-American axis, only the relationship is even stronger.
Elite global culture’s default posture is now anti-American, usually at least critical of America. Criticizing the United States, whether its history, power, culture, or very authority, is the single fastest way to signal sophistication and moral purity in any institution of cultural significance. In one fell swoop, you lose academia, NGOs, international organizations, tech, media, and the arts.
Being explicitly pro-American, on the other hand, is implicitly low-status, provincial, Trumpy, possibly racist. The social or even cultural penalty for overt patriotism is therefore much higher than the penalty for being openly right-wing, which at least still has some contrarian appeal in certain circles.
As a result, the drift toward anti-Americanism happens faster and more completely than the drift toward leftism.
Some examples:
Environmentalism started with Teddy Roosevelt-style conservation and 1970s “save the planet” patriotism. Within a few decades, the dominant voices were calling the U.S. the “greatest threat to the planet,” demanding de-growth specifically targeted at American living standards, and celebrating population decline in the West while ignoring China and India.
Human-rights NGOs like Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, etc. were founded mostly by liberals who believed in universal rights and saw America as the main guarantor of them. Now they devote disproportionate energy to criticizing the U.S. while pulling punches on Venezuela, Iran, China, Qatar, Pakistan, and on and on. America is treated as uniquely guilty and its enemies are given endless “context.”
In academia, the Western-civ curriculum of the 1950s–60s has been replaced by a curriculum whose explicit message is that the United States is founded on genocide, slavery, and imperialism, that its ideals are hypocritical, and that loyalty to it is morally suspect—all labeled with a land acknowledgement.
Turn-of-the-century Silicon Valley was libertarian-leaning and generally American-exceptionalist. By 2025 the same companies proudly censor speech at the behest of the EU and the U.S. security state and treat American national security concerns as “populist” annoyances.
Even the U.S. military’s own professional class now produces papers and promotes officers who speak openly about “decolonizing” the military and worry that patriotism itself is a far-right tell.
There are almost no counter-examples of institutions that stayed durably pro-American without being explicitly conservative or nationalist.
The handful that have remained patriotic are all explicitly right-wing or at least culturally conservative. Everything else either went anti-American or had to build ever-higher walls to keep the infection out.
The mechanism is identical to Conquest’s law, just more intense:
Young ambitious people want status.
Status comes from signaling moral superiority.
In global elite culture, criticizing America is the highest-status signal available.
Therefore any organization that does not explicitly and repeatedly affirm “we are proudly pro-American” will have its culture captured by people who think being anti-American makes them better than the average American.
The only prevention is the organization must be explicitly, unapologetically, and permanently pro-American in its founding documents, its hiring, its public statements, and its internal culture. Anything less is suicide by elite cultural gravity.
This is all incredible relevant to the ongoing political infighting happening in American conservatism.
Establishment GOP figures like those orbiting the Bush or Romney eras operate from a place of genuine intellectual conservatism. They’re not villains. Many still champion capitalism, limited government, and traditional values in theory. But their drift toward globalism, endless foreign entanglements, and elite cosmopolitanism has eroded the explicit “America First” anchor that the principle demands. Absent this anchor, they have allowed genuine failures with serious implications in our politics, and are carrying a legacy of those failures.
Without that relentless commitment to pro-Americanism, they’ve allowed policies that prioritize big ideas over the sovereignty and prosperity of everyday Americans. This hypocrisy strips them of the moral high ground to gatekeep against upstarts who, flaws and all, are at least embracing the explicit pro-American ideology. They think that conservative principle is king, but they are being flanked on their commitment to America.
We are now seeing this play out in three separate but related flashpoints.
The first has been the Heritage Foundation’s meltdown over Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes. The rhetorical war over antisemitism is a proxy for deeper divides on Israel policy, where establishment pro-Israel hawks are opposed with isolationist America Firsters who view foreign commitments as fundamentally opposed to the principle of America First.
The old guard’s moral authority crumbles here because they’ve long tolerated or enabled anti-American drifts themselves, like Iraq War nation-building that cost trillions and thousands of American lives, or Ukraine aid packages without clear reciprocity or an understandable endgame. They gatekeep against Fuentes-style extremism but their selective blindness to how those globalist adventures hollowed out American communities dampens the weight of their lectures. MAGA nationalists, even the edgier ones, counter that explicit pro-Americanism means no more blank checks abroad as it’s a necessary loyalty to the pro-America shibboleth, even if it veers into isolationism.
A parallel fracture pits Tech Right figures like Elon Musk against nativist populists over H1B visas and immigration. Our California-based tech elite push for mass importation of cheaper-than-American-labor H1B’s, framing it as pro-growth. Populists lionize these visas as a betrayal of the working class.
Here, the old guard’s intellectual heirs in the tech-libertarian wing aren’t bad actors, they’re just businessmen (or worse, economists) fighting for access to cheaper labor. But without explicit pro-American firewalls this risks drifting into the same elite-favoring globalism. Their gatekeeping fails because it ignores how past compromises eroded trust. The populist side, raw as it is, holds the moral edge by demanding every policy pass an “Americans first” shibboleth, forcing the movement to reaffirm the principle or splinter. A country is more than a GDP, and if you ignore the bubbling anger from the populist movement they will pay nearly any price (looking at you, GDP) to return to their principles.
The final visible flare-up is Trump’s public feud with Marjorie Taylor Greene. MTG’s pushback resonates with purists who fear Trump’s orbit is co-opted by RINOs and donors, diluting the explicit anti-swamp mandate.
Trump himself embodies the tension as he’s explicitly pro-American in rhetoric and early actions, like border closures and tariffs, but his deal-making pragmatism invites old-guard influences. The old guard cheers this as maturity, but it smells like drift to the base. Here again, without ironclad explicitness, even winners creep away from pro-Americanism. MTG’s rebellion, flawed as she is, reasserts the principle by gatekeeping against the compromisers.
Each of these examples are just the modified Conquest’s second law in action. The right’s coalition is at war with itself because factions aren’t all explicitly pro-American in the same way. Tech globalists vs. immigration hardliners, pro-Israel interventionists vs. anti-interventionists.
The old guard’s good-faith gatekeeping on nearly any issue rings hollow when their playbook historically funneled American blood and treasure overseas while domestic manufacturing crumbled. The chaos stems from overcorrections, but conservative moral authority stems from never forgetting the explicit vow: America above all.
And because all of the moral authority lay with “America above all” the America First crowd could eventually win.