The 2024 Presidential Election showcased that a GOP platform of moderate, anti-woke common sense is a winning strategy. Remade in the image of MAGA, the Republican Party nixed its historic conservative stance on social issues and embraced a “Barstool conservatism” approach that scored an impressive victory.
What is “Barstool conservatism”? Associated with Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, Barstool conservatism waves the middle finger at elite progressive injunctions, from preferred gender pronoun usage to COVID lockdowns, but also celebrates a live-and-let-live notion of negative freedom.
Barstool conservatives despise Bud Light but love premarital sex. They want lower taxes and cheaper gas, but obscenity laws against pornography or restrictions on marijuana or abortion pills are, in their libertine view, backward and extreme. Those are essentials in the frat house.
Barstool conservatives just want to be left alone, and Donald Trump seemed like a champion of their cause. He recognized that the average swayable voter doesn’t care if a pregnant woman aborts her child, especially not in the first two trimesters, and certainly doesn’t lose any sleep over the existence of gay married couples. (READ MORE: Nationalism Has Conquered Conservatism)
Pro-life Catholics and evangelicals who strongly believe in the sanctity of human life and seek to uphold traditional Judeo-Christian values were left with a decision between two unsatisfactory candidates. Advising Catholic voters, Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke said, “We confront a situation in which both major political parties espouse certain agenda which are flagrantly contrary to the most fundamental tenets of the moral law.”
For those who value religious freedom, pre-born children, and world peace, Trump was the lesser of two evils — the candidate most likely to safeguard the First Amendment and the dignity of human life, not only in the womb but also in Ukraine and the Middle East, where he has vowed to end the current conflicts.
The Barstool conservatism strategy worked. Trump won a majority of the male electorate across every age group, perhaps aided by his appearance on “bro” podcasts such as “The Joe Rogan Experience,” the “Nelk Boys,” and Barstool Sports’ “Bussin With the Boys.”
Against the Harris campaign’s uninspiring, female-oriented message of “reproductive rights,” Trump and JD Vance each shrewdly marketed themselves as “one of the boys.”
Despite softening his stance on abortion, Trump retained his steadfast support among evangelicals and won the Catholic vote by a massive 18-point margin. The populist passion for the MAGA agenda — regardless of its increasingly liberal bent — has strangely not waned among many religious voters who often regard Trump as a messianic figure appointed by God to save America. Conservative Catholic Daily Wire commentator Michael Knowles said, “I will crawl over broken glass to vote for Trump in 2024.”
Public opinion has shifted leftward on social issues, especially abortion, and the GOP has demonstrated it is willing to adapt to the electorate’s views to win votes and build a broader coalition. It may be politically expedient and rewarding, even indispensable, but it raises important questions about the future of American conservatism.
Will the GOP simply become the party of yesterday’s progressive liberalism, opposed to “wokeness” but weak and conciliatory on social issues that animated and defined conservatism for generations? Will the GOP’s current amalgam of populism and Barstool conservatism remain far more enchanted by walls and tariffs than the sanctity of marriage and human life?
In 2016, under Trump’s leadership, the GOP surrendered the same-sex marriage debate and, eight years later, no longer views abortion as an infringement of the unalienable right to life, but rather subordinates and relativizes it as a states’ rights issue, consigning the fates of pre-born children to popular vote.
Conservatives, in 2024, rightly regard muscular men dunking over women in basketball as absurd and unjust, inimical to any basic standard of common sense and decency. But two men exchanging marital vows, in 2014, was also viewed by conservatives as preposterous and a radical violation of natural law.
Where will the Overton window reside in 10 more years?
On this current trajectory, will the GOP still oppose late-term abortion, “gender-affirming care” for minors or biological males competing in women’s sports if public opinion has liberalized on these issues as well? Perhaps that’s an unlikely scenario, but the vital question remains — is there a cut-off point where the GOP refuses to acquiesce any further?
The Democratic Party hastens its leftward advance, but often drags with it the GOP, which may be confident that it isn’t “woke,” but currently does not know what it stands for beyond populist indignation and patriotic star-spangled slogans championing America. Lackluster tropes about “God” and “Judeo-Christian values” persist, but in 2024, the GOP more closely resembles the values and outlook of Dave Portnoy than Jesus Christ.
Clearly, the Right can muster its forces to triumph in battle, but the Left marches onward in its never-ending progressive crusade — and they’re still winning the war.
Aidan Grogan is a history Ph.D. student at Liberty University. Follow him on X @AidanGrogan.
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