May 24, 2026
What Does It Mean to Be a Conservative?
Republican, Libertarian, Conservative, MAGA, and America First — A Clarifying Guide In Light of Thomas Massie’s Primary Loss
By: Art da Rosa, PE, MPA, CFM | Rigby, ID
On May 19, 2026 — the same day Jefferson County held its commissioner primary — Thomas Massie lost his Kentucky congressional seat to Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL backed by President Donald Trump. Massie had represented Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District since 2012. He was defeated by nine percentage points in what has been described as the most expensive House primary in American history, with more than $32 million spent on advertising.
The Massie loss prompted a question worth answering carefully: what exactly did voters reject? Was it Libertarianism? Contrarianism? Independence from the party? Insufficient loyalty to MAGA? The answers require us to untangle several political philosophies that are frequently confused, conflated, or misrepresented in public discourse.
This article attempts to do that — drawing on W. Cleon Skousen’s 5000 Year Leap, John Fonte’s June/July 2024 Imprimis article on “National Conservatism, Freedom Conservatism, and Americanism”, and the historical record of the America First movement — to clarify what separates Republicans from Libertarians, Conservatism from MAGA, and America First from isolation.
The Libertarian Party: Liberty Without the Social Contract
Libertarianism is built on a single foundational premise: individual liberty is the highest political value, and government’s only legitimate function is to protect individuals from force and fraud. Everything else — social programs, drug laws, regulations, and most of what modern government does — is, in the libertarian view, an illegitimate coercion of free individuals.
The Libertarian Party, formally founded in 1971, takes this premise to its logical conclusions. It opposes the criminalization of drug use on the grounds that what an individual chooses to do with his own body is not the state’s business. It opposes mandatory military service. It favors open borders. It rejects any government intervention in the economy, including the social safety net.
The most important philosophical distinction between libertarians and conservatives is the Social Contract. Libertarians, in most of their conversations and writings, do not believe in a Social Contract. They reject the idea that individuals are born into obligations to the community, that citizenship carries responsibilities as well as rights, or that the common good can ever legitimately override individual preference.
This is a fundamental departure from the American founding. The Declaration of Independence affirms unalienable rights but also establishes that governments are instituted among men to secure those rights — implying that individuals have consented to be governed and that governance serves a legitimate communal purpose. The Founders were not libertarians. They were constitutionalists who understood that ordered liberty requires law, and that law requires a community willing to uphold it.
The libertarian vision of society is one of sovereign individuals with no inherent obligations to each other.
The conservative vision is one of citizens — people with both rights and responsibilities — embedded in families, communities, and a nation that depends on their participation.
The Republican Party: Between Tyranny and Anarchy
The Republican Party, at its philosophical foundation, is not a libertarian party. It believes in a Social Contract. It affirms that human beings are social creatures who live in communities, that those communities have legitimate interests, and that government exists to protect and serve those interests within constitutional boundaries.
Cleon Skousen, in The 5000 Year Leap, articulates the governing philosophy that underlies authentic Republicanism with unusual clarity. Skousen describes a spectrum of government that runs from tyranny (total government control, zero individual freedom) on one extreme, to anarchy (zero government control, total individual freedom) on the other. Both extremes are destructive. Tyranny destroys liberty by consuming it. Anarchy destroys liberty by making it impossible to exercise safely.
The Founders aimed for the middle — a government strong enough to protect rights and maintain order, but limited enough not to threaten the rights it was created to secure. That middle ground is what Skousen called the “perfect balance” — and it is the governing ideal of authentic Republicanism. Not no government. Not maximum government. Ordered liberty under constitutional law.
On social issues, the Republican Party has historically affirmed positions that libertarians reject: opposition to abortion, opposition to drug legalization, support for traditional family structures, and recognition that religious and moral values are not merely private preferences but foundations of a functioning republic. These are not impositions on individual freedom — they are recognitions that a free society depends on virtuous citizens, and that virtue is not produced in a vacuum.
The difference between a Republican and a Libertarian on law is not whether government should exist.
It is where on the spectrum — between tyranny and anarchy — the line should be drawn.
Republicans draw it at ordered liberty. Libertarians draw it as close to anarchy as possible.
Key Differences at a Glance
| Principle | Libertarian | Republican |
| Social Contract | Rejected — no inherent obligations to community | Affirmed — citizenship carries both rights and responsibilities |
| Drug Laws | Oppose criminalization — individual choice | Support reasonable laws — social consequences matter |
| Abortion | Pro-choice — bodily autonomy absolute | Pro-life — life of the unborn protected |
| Government Size | Minimal — approaching anarchy, end of the spectrum | Limited but sufficient — ordered liberty |
| Religion & Morality | Purely private — no role in governance | Foundation of republican virtue and civic life |
| Foreign Policy | Non-interventionist, anti-alliances | Varies — but national interest includes global responsibilities |
Conservatism: The Fonte Framework
John Fonte’s June/July 2024 Imprimis article — “National Conservatism, Freedom Conservatism, and Americanism” — provides one of the clearest recent maps of the conservative movement’s internal divisions and shared foundations.
Fonte identifies three waves of modern American conservatism, tracing from William F. Buckley Jr. through Ronald Reagan to the present day. He distinguishes between National Conservatives (who emphasize family, religion, national culture, property rights, and the working class) and Freedom Conservatives (who emphasize free markets, limited government, and individual liberty as primary values).
Fonte’s National Conservatism is what most people historically meant by conservatism before the libertarian influence of the Reagan era. It affirms:
Family as the fundamental unit of society — not the individual, not the state. Policy should strengthen families, not replace them or treat them as optional arrangements.
Religion as the moral foundation of a free republic — not theocracy, but the recognition that self-governance requires self-discipline, and self-discipline requires something beyond politics.
Property Rights as the foundation of individual freedom — without secure property, there is no genuine liberty. The Fifth Amendment’s just compensation guarantee is not an administrative technicality. It is a constitutional bulwark against government overreach.
America First — the nation’s interests, culture, and sovereignty come before international arrangements, multilateral commitments, or globalist ideology.
The Working Class — in its more recent evolution, National Conservatism has embraced the economic concerns of working Americans who felt abandoned by both parties’ embrace of globalism and free trade without regard for domestic employment and community stability.
Fonte’s concluding recommendation is significant: he suggests that conservatives — whether National or Freedom — should unite under the banner of Americanism, defining the fundamental conflict not as conservatism versus liberalism but as Americanism versus Transformationism. Those who affirm the historic American nation and its creed versus those who seek to transform it into something fundamentally different.
America First: Not Isolationism — A Correction of History
The term “America First” carries a stigma that was deliberately attached to it by Woodrow Wilson and his successors. Understanding the original meaning requires going back before Wilson.
Before Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, American foreign policy was guided by Washington’s Farewell Address: avoid entangling alliances, trade freely with all nations, and engage the world through commerce and diplomacy rather than military intervention. This was not isolationism — America was deeply engaged in world trade, exploration, and diplomacy. What it avoided was the European habit of maintaining permanent military alliances that dragged nations into wars for reasons unrelated to their own security.
When Wilson sought to bring America into World War I and then commit the nation to the League of Nations, he encountered significant opposition from senators and citizens who believed American sovereignty should not be subordinated to an international body. Wilson labeled this opposition “isolationism” — a deliberate mischaracterization designed to make America First sound like fearful withdrawal from the world rather than principled independence within it.
The America First Committee of 1940 — which opposed American entry into World War II before Pearl Harbor — included not just isolationists but serious constitutional thinkers who believed the decision for war belonged to Congress and the American people, not to the president acting under international pressure. Pearl Harbor ended that debate. But the underlying principle — that American foreign policy should serve American interests first — did not disappear.
America First, properly understood, is not withdrawal from the world. It is engagement on American terms, in service of American interests, with American sovereignty intact. It is the foreign policy equivalent of the 9th and 10th Amendments: the nation reserves to itself the powers not explicitly delegated to international arrangements.
MAGA: Between Conservatism and America First
Make America Great Again is not a fixed ideology. It is a political movement that has evolved with Donald Trump’s presidency and the circumstances that shaped it. Understanding MAGA requires understanding what it was reacting against.
The MAGA movement emerged from a Republican Party that had, in the view of its base, abandoned both conservatism and America First simultaneously. Free trade agreements had hollowed out manufacturing communities. Nation-building wars had cost trillions of dollars and produced little security. Immigration policy had changed the character of communities without the consent of their residents. The party of Reagan had become, in many voters’ experience, a vehicle for donor interests rather than citizen interests.
Trump’s 2016 campaign channeled all of those frustrations into a coherent, if unconventional, political identity. It was nationalist — America’s interests first in trade, immigration, and foreign policy. It was populist — the working class over the donor class. It was anti-establishment, challenging the permanent government in both parties.
In terms of Fonte’s framework, MAGA sits primarily within National Conservatism — emphasizing nation, family, religion, working class, and American sovereignty — while incorporating the pre-Wilson America First foreign policy tradition. It is less interested in Freedom Conservatism’s emphasis on free markets and individual liberty as primary values, and more interested in using government power, when necessary, to achieve national ends.
President Trump’s actions regarding Greenland, Venezuela, and Iran reflect this framework. These are not the actions of a libertarian who believes government should stay out of international affairs. They are the actions of a nationalist who believes America’s strength, security, and self-sufficiency must be actively built and defended — that a strong America requires a strong foundation, and that foundation includes strategic resources, regional stability, and the willingness to project power when American interests demand it.
MAGA is best understood as National Conservatism plus America First foreign policy, applied through a populist lens that prioritizes the working and middle class over elite consensus.
It is not libertarianism. It is not Freedom Conservatism. It is the oldest strain of American political thought — the nation, the family, the community, and the sovereignty — reasserted.
Thomas Massie: The Libertarian in Republican Clothing
Thomas Massie represented Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District for fourteen years. He built a reputation as one of Congress’s most consistent constitutional votes — opposing government spending, surveillance, foreign aid, and executive overreach regardless of which party was in power. He was, by any measure, a man of principle.
He was also, by political philosophy, a libertarian — not a conservative. The distinction matters.
Massie opposed the war with Iran. He opposed significant portions of Trump’s domestic agenda. He was one of the few Republicans willing to break publicly with the president on multiple high-profile issues. He believed, correctly within his own framework, that he was applying constitutional principles consistently. A libertarian sees no distinction between opposing a Democratic president’s overreach and opposing a Republican president’s overreach. Principle is principle.
But the Republican primary electorate in Kentucky — and increasingly across the country — is not libertarian. It is National Conservative and MAGA. It believes America has enemies. It believes those enemies require a response. It believes that principled non-intervention, while philosophically coherent, is a luxury that a nation facing real threats cannot afford.
Massie’s fundamental error was not that he voted his conscience. It was that he confused libertarian consistency with conservative statesmanship. A statesman understands that the nation has responsibilities to its allies and obligations in the world that cannot be discharged by simply declining to act. Washington’s warning against entangling alliances was not a command to be indifferent to the world’s affairs. It was a caution against commitments that serve other nations’ interests at America’s expense.
Massie forgot — or rejected — the principle that America First does not mean America Alone. A self-reliant nation is not an isolated nation. It is a nation strong enough to engage the world on its own terms, with its sovereignty intact and its interests clearly defined. That requires judgment about when to act and when to hold back — not a philosophical commitment to non-intervention regardless of circumstances.
Massie was not defeated because he was too principled.
He was defeated because his principles were libertarian rather than conservative — and because libertarian non-intervention, applied to a world that includes active enemies of American interests, is not statesmanship.
It is abdication.
Bringing It Together: A Map of the Right
The American right in 2026 contains at least four distinct political philosophies that are frequently confused with each other:
| Movement | Core Value | Social Contract | Foreign Policy | Economic View |
| Libertarian | Individual liberty above all | Rejected | Non-interventionist, anti-alliance | Free market absolutism |
| Freedom Conservative | Limited government, free markets | Weak — implied | Engagement, but skeptical of intervention | Free market, low taxes, deregulation |
| National Conservative | Nation, family, religion, working class | Strong — citizenship carries duties | America First, protective of sovereignty | Fair trade, domestic industry, workers |
| MAGA | American greatness, national sovereignty | Strong — populist and nationalist | America First with muscular deterrence | Reshoring, fair trade, tariffs |
| America First (historical) | National sovereignty, no entangling alliances | Strong | Engaged but sovereign, pre-Wilson model | Commercial engagement, domestic priority |
The Massie loss illustrates the tension between libertarian and conservative-nationalist visions of the right. Massie’s voters were looking for a consistent constitutional principle. Trump’s voters — who outnumbered them by nine points — were looking for American strength, national loyalty, and a willingness to act when America’s interests demand it.
Neither group is wrong about everything. But they are operating on fundamentally different premises about the right’s primary mission. Libertarians want to limit government. National Conservatives want to direct the government toward national ends. MAGA wants both — less government at home, more strength abroad — and is willing to accept the tension between those goals.
Conclusion: The Americanist Standard
John Fonte’s Imprimis article ends with a recommendation worth taking seriously. Rather than debating whether National Conservatives or Freedom Conservatives have the better conservative vision, Fonte suggests that all who affirm the historic American nation — its creed, its culture, its sovereignty — should unite under the banner of Americanism. The real divide in American politics is not among varieties of conservatives. It is between Americanists and Transformationists — those who affirm the American founding and those who seek to replace it.
By that standard, libertarians, National Conservatives, Freedom Conservatives, MAGA supporters, and America Firsters have far more in common with each other than any of them have with the progressive project of fundamental transformation. The question is not which conservative vision is correct. The question is whether those who share American founding principles can find enough common ground to act together when it matters.
Thomas Massie’s loss is a data point in that conversation — a signal that the Republican primary electorate has moved toward a muscular, nationalist, MAGA-inflected conservatism that has little patience for libertarian non-intervention. Whether that movement’s foreign policy instincts prove wise remains to be seen. What is clear is that the voters of Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District — on the same day Jefferson County held its own primary — made a choice about what kind of conservatism they want representing them.
That choice deserves to be understood — not dismissed, not celebrated uncritically, but understood. That is what political clarity requires. And political clarity, as the Founders knew, is the precondition for self-governance.
