Kevin Williamson of National Review Online considers the future relationship between American conservatism and the Republican Party.

As the political philosopher Neil Sedaka observed, “Breaking up is hard to do.”

Something you will no doubt have observed in your own life and in the lives of others is that the discord in a relationship — or the bitterness of its ending — is directly proportional to the intensity and closeness of the relationship itself: A romance consisting of three dates in six weeks might end without either party’s even quite noticing, but the dissolution of a 30-year marriage with children is always agonizing and potentially explosive; it is much more wrenching to leave a job you find personal meaning in than a job that is just a paycheck; with rare exceptions, you will never get as angry at your cousins as you do at your brother. Etc.

The thing conservatives need to keep in mind: The Republican Party is not your ex. Neither is the conservative movement. …

… There was a time when sensible conservatives could take a realistic, instrumental view of the GOP and find it reasonably useful for our ends. The job of the Republican Party was to serve conservative interests — not the other way around. That has become complicated in two equally significant ways: One, political tribalism has done its awful work on conservatives as much as it has on anybody else, and many on the right today see advancing the electoral prospects of the Republican Party as, in effect, the whole of the conservative agenda per se; second, the Republican Party is today a much less able and reliable vessel of conservative policy than it was ten or 20 years ago, because it has been deformed by vulgar populism and infantile nationalism, to such an extent that certain important factions within the GOP have discovered a strange new respect for everything from heavy-handed and politically tinged antitrust regulation to economic redistribution to Vladimir Putin. …