It's odd to think that conservatives in the US are panicking about the future of the movement.  But this piece suggests that they are.  It's not the only piece, not by a longshot; David Brooks's recent musings have suggested something similar.  The key is that, for all the vitriol they express, these are thoughtful conservatives--conservatives who can see past the immediate noise and notice the deeper patterns happening in the culture.  They're not Putin bots, nor are they "American Greatness" trolls.  (Well, not all of them are.)  They may be wrong in their judgment of the perils their movement faces, but it seems intelligible to me that they would worry about these things.  (As Brooks points out, the perils have been predicted by people on the left for a long time, however, so there is also reason to think their fears are overblown.)  The worry is an interesting one.

What interests me in particular is the tension between a mode of public engagement that is predicated on a self-understanding expressive of decency, as the "David French" side of this fight suggests (if Alan Jacobs is any example of it), and a mode of public engagement that is predicated on a self-understanding expressive of moral urgency, as the "Sohrab Ahmari" side of this fight suggests.  It's interesting that a similar debate about the politics of decency and empathy has appeared from time to time on the progressive side of things as well--and is also funded there, at least in part, by a series of anxieties about the future.  I don't have a deep insight here; I just want to note that both left and right these days seem caught between competing imperatives, and neither side has settled on what to do just yet.