country find its way. If some future version of reform conser-
vatism aims to apply conservative principles to contemporary
circumstances, then it must learn the lessons of the Trump era.
These include lessons about the Left and the Right, the country
and its culture, and the priorities of the electorate. They are
lessons about the significance of immigration politics, about the
degree of the public’s loss of trust in American elites and institu-
tions, and about much else besides. But lessons like these will
still need ultimately to inform a governing agenda and a political
disposition, in the fullest sense. And the general disposition of
reform conservatism likely does remain a plausible fit for what
appears to be the character of the American electorate and a better
way to think about what seem to be our country’s foremost chal-
lenges and the weaknesses of the Right’s pre-Trump agenda,
even in light of the last several years.A
CONSERVATIVEgoverning agenda needs to be rooted in
what voters want and in what the core ideals of the
American republic demand of both the public and its
government. Americans today are, on the whole, prosperous and
hopeful but frustrated and skeptical. And conservatives still
struggle to speak to this combination of attitudes.
At this point, the disposition of reform conservatism would
demand a much more profound transformation of conservative
politics than populism or national conservatism or an integral-
ist social conservatism would, even as it would demand a less
profound transformation of American society than any of those
would. But more important, it demands some realism about the
nature of political victory and defeat—and about the limited
application of the example of 2016 and the importance of
learning but not overlearning its lessons. The grievance and
anger of some of Trump’s supporters during the 2016 primaries
should not, for example, be taken as representative of all Trump
supporters, let alone of the electorate as a whole. Nor should
Bernie Sanders’s fan base in the Democratic Party, as conse-
quential as its dedication may turn out to be, delude us into
thinking that much of the country is in a genuinely revolution-
ary frame of mind.
For a political movement, and a political party, most elections
are followed either by wielding power (and the constraints that
involves) or by having one’s opponents wield it (and the dangers
that carries). The Trump era has not quite meant either one for
Republicans, so its lessons are more complex than usual, and its
by-products may be less useful.
The next effective Republican governing philosophy likely
won’t be called reform conservatism. But whatever name it
goes by, it will need to be serious about both using the power
of government and restraining it. It will need to apply enduring
American principles to a new American reality. It will need to
make the most of the strengths of the market economy while act-
ing to address its costs, risks, and dark sides. It will need to put
family, community, and country first, to consider where solidarity
comes from, and to recognize how freedom can serve it up to a
point. And it will need to unite the partisans of markets with the
partisans of tradition into a functional coalition—practically at
least, if not philosophically.
Whatever name it goes by, it will have to do these things—if,
that is, its goal is to see conservative reforms to the way our coun-
try is governed.I
NDecember 2019, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court upbraided the Federal Bureau of Investigation over
its serial deceits in persuading the tribunal to issue war-
rants to monitor Carter Page, who served in 2016 as a
Trump-campaign foreign-policy adviser. The FISC’s four-
page directive, issued by Rosemary Collyer, the FISC’s then-
presiding judge, came on the heels of a voluminous report
compiled by Justice Department inspector general Michael
Horowitz, after a multiyear inquiry into investigative irregu-
larities in the bureau’s Trump–Russia probe.
Horowitz lambasted the FBI, specifically identifying 17
instances of misrepresentations to the court. These included
the alteration by a bureau lawyer of a key document: a com-
munication in which the Central Intelligence Agency had
informed the FBI that Page, whom the bureau was depicting
to the court as a clandestine agent of Russia, was actually a
CIA informant. Seizing on the IG report, Judge Collyer scalded
the bureau for its shocking misconduct and demanded
answers about what remedial measures it was taking, and
why the court should have any confidence that the Page sur-
veillance applications were not part of a longstanding pattern
of deception.
The court’s public order was extraordinary in light of its
customary secrecy—FISC hearings and decisions are highly
classified. The startling rebuke was surely merited. Yet the
FISC’s tack of focusing on the cure rather than dwelling on
the pathogen deftly deflected attention away from the court’s
own performance.
So did the follow-up. Collyer, a Bush 43 appointee to the
federal district court in Washington, D.C., quietly resigned
at the end of December as the FISC’s chief judge, nine
weeks before her scheduled departure,citing health reasons
(though she planned to remain on the FISC and the district
court). By statute, FISC judges are appointed by the chief
justice of the Supreme Court, choosing from the pool of fed-
eral district judges. To replace Collyer as presiding judge,
Chief Justice John Roberts quickly named Judge James
Boasberg, an Obama appointee whom Roberts had placed on
the FISC in 2014.
Astoundingly, Boasberg appointed David Kris as an adviser
to the FISC in examining the FBI’s handling of the Page sur-
veillance. Until 2011, Kris had served as the Obama Justice
Department’s first chief of the National Security Division (the31End
The FISA
It’s an unconstitutional mess that
weakens national security and threatens
civil libertiesBY ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
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