With President-elect Donald Trump due back in the White House come January 20 — and with Republicans clinching majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives — the New Right is ascendant. This election proves that 2016 wasn’t just a flash in the pan but a spark of definitive realignment in the conservative movement. Now, as factions on the Right jostle for position in the governing coalition, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts puts social conservatives front and center.
Roberts’s newly released book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, distills the priorities of the populist Right for popular readership. If Project 2025 was Heritage’s encyclopedia of granular policy positions, Dawn’s Early Light is both an articulation of our need for radical policy innovation and a rallying cry to action.
Roberts doesn’t mince words. “It’s time to fight fire with fire,” he writes in the book’s opening paragraphs. Surveying the landscape — both literal and metaphorical — of modern America, he settles on fire as his framing metaphor. Just as controlled burns aid in forest renewal and preempt bigger, uncontrollable blazes, Roberts encourages conservatives to clear out the “deadwood” of institutions that have stopped serving the common interest of the American people.
Where conservatives have previously focused on the Right vs. Left divide in American politics, Roberts argues that a populist paradigm is more apt. After all, he explains, Democrats and Republicans alike hollowed out America’s industrial base under the auspices of free trade, erected obstacles to family formation, and basked in the glib glow of “Uniparty” globalism. Trump’s electoral victories are a repudiation of the elites and a vindication of earlier Uniparty critics like Pat Buchanan.
In the emerging populist coalition, Dawn’s Early Light heralds a new future for social conservatism. During the Cold War, social conservatives found common cause with economic libertarians and foreign policy hawks to defeat the Soviet Union. Roberts understands that this anti-communist fusionism was necessary, but it was also temporary. When that fusionism defined the Right, social conservatives were already the least popular members of the coalition. Over the last four decades, their concerns have been brushed aside or undercut by the right-of-center establishment. Today, however, social conservatism is the only leg of the proverbial three-legged stool to remain squarely outside the Uniparty.
Centering his vision for the new conservative coalition on a “family-first fusionism,” Roberts sees the opportunity for social conservatives to be a driving force in today’s populist realignment. To this end, Dawn’s Early Light surveys a range of topics — economic obstacles to family formation, education, big tech, trade, immigration, and foreign policy — that complement the existing legacy of social conservatism on hallmark issues like abortion or religious liberty.
By building a winning electoral coalition, Trump is giving the Right a chance to deliver policy wins with genuinely popular benefits. Social conservatives don’t stand to reap lopsided benefits from their political activism — everyone benefits when housing is affordable, when addiction rates are lower, and when America isn’t reliant on foreign countries for essential goods. (RELATED: Trump v. Washington)
In this new family-first fusionism, social conservatives are uniquely positioned to provide a coherent intellectual framework for the ascendant populist movement composed of traditionalists, tech bros, and disenchanted Democrats-gone-MAGA. Though social conservatism has been stuck taking one step and two steps back in recent decades, Roberts envisions a future of definitive change. That Sen. JD Vance wrote the book’s forward speaks to the central relevance of Roberts’s project in the coalition.
With a wink and a nod, Roberts acknowledges that his call is radical in the truest sense, acknowledging the word’s entomology: “radix” is Latin for “root.” And a return to the roots of American identity — the preeminence of family life, religious piety, and a frontier spirit of independence and self-government — is exactly what Dawn’s Early Light articulates for the future of conservatism. (RELATED: Saving the Country with Russ Vought)
Roberts also knows that his work will be characterized as radical (read: insane) by critics who are too invested in the reigning cultural hegemony to recognize common sense. Already, the usual suspects have produced pearl-clutching reviews warning of “weird vibes and pyromania,” “paranoid, Stalinist tactics,” and “conspiracy theories.” Understandably, the members of the Uniparty are disturbed by a brazen critique of the Uniparty.
But one progressive reviewer cuts through the hysteria to sound the alarm for the American Left:
What should worry the left is Roberts’ moral certainty. Gone are the flaccid paeans to the supremacy of the free market; in their place is a conviction to march through America’s institutions with a flamethrower. The right is intellectually insurgent while the Democratic Party is mired in a muddled post-mortem.
This moral certainty challenges right-of-center orthodoxy while breathing fresh air into stale promises to cut taxes and trim down bureaucratic bloat. And, as the New Right looks to the future, that moral certainty is a reminder of Cicero’s wisdom: what is right and what is in America’s interest are ultimately one and the same.
At several points throughout Dawn’s Early Light, Roberts quotes Gustav Mahler, who said, “Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire.” The flame needed to kindle the controlled burn of populism is none other than the fire of American tradition, passed down from one generation to the next.
Decades of Uniparty have dimmed that fire, but the pilot light is still on — and Roberts’ book is the oxygen needed to fan the flames of renewal.
Mary Frances (Myler) Devlin is a contributing editor at The American Spectator. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2022.
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