Stop Scolding, and Start Teaching
Between the Traditionalists and the Nationalists Lies a Generation That Was Never Taught.
OPINION: By Walter Curt
There’s a civil war happening on the American Right. Call it a schism, a fracturing, or a slow-motion implosion—it doesn’t matter what word you use. The fact is that two entirely different factions now occupy the same house and are trying to set each other on fire. They accuse one another of antisemitism, grifting, globalism, and cowardice, with cancel campaigns that mirror the very tactics of the Left they both claim to despise.
If you spend any time in conservative politics, you know exactly the fight I’m talking about. At first glance, it seems to revolve around Israel—those who support it as a vital ally versus those who insist America should disengage from foreign entanglements altogether. But that’s merely the visible spark. The deeper truth is that the Right is splitting between two moral and philosophical worldviews: the traditional conservative right, shaped by faith, virtue, and ordered liberty—and the new American nationalist right, driven by anger, alienation, and a hunger for solutions to problems they believe have been ignored for far too long.
The Tucker Carlson controversy was the latest flashpoint. Because he questions America’s foreign commitments, an entire wing of the conservative movement branded him antisemitic and sought to blacklist him. They pressured think tanks like the Heritage Foundation to disavow him—pressure so intense that Heritage felt compelled to publicly declare it would not condemn Tucker Carlson. That statement alone tells you how unhinged things have become. Heritage doesn’t issue press releases for sport. Something serious was happening behind closed doors.
But here’s the thing: the rage isn’t just about foreign policy. It’s about understanding—or rather, the lack of it. These two factions are not speaking the same moral language. They use the same slogans, “MAGA,” “America First,” “Conservative”, but the words no longer mean the same thing. One side still operates from the framework of Edmund Burke: faith, tradition, duty, prudence, and gratitude for the inheritance of Western civilization. The other operates from the impulse of revolution—burn it all down, start over, cleanse the rot.
The traditionalists see themselves as guardians of order; the nationalists see themselves as avengers of betrayal. They are not simply two wings of the same eagle, they are two different species of bird entirely.
And yet, both claim the same flag.
The tragedy of it all is that both sides have legitimate grievances. The nationalist critique is not wrong when it says our leaders have failed this country. They’ve shipped jobs overseas, ignored the heartland, spent blood and treasure defending foreign borders while leaving our own porous. The anger is earned. The failure is real. But anger, when left untutored, becomes suspicion, and suspicion quickly finds a scapegoat.
Instead of identifying moral failure in leadership, some on the new right point their fingers outward: it was this group, that nation, those people, those elites. The narrative is always that someone else corrupted America. And while that may feel empowering, it’s ultimately the oldest and laziest political trick in the book, blame someone else so you don’t have to fix yourself.
Meanwhile, the traditional right has made its own fatal mistake: they forgot how to teach.
Instead of engaging this new nationalist wave with patience and clarity, they resorted to condescension and scolding. They call these young men and women “uneducated,” “immature,” “radical.” But that misses the point. They are not uneducated—they are differently educated. They were raised in a school system that stripped them of history, drained them of reverence, and left them intellectually starving. They were told that America is evil, that their ancestors were villains, and that their faith is bigotry. So they turned to the only teachers left—the internet, podcasts, and influencers—many of whom are more angry than wise.
C.S. Lewis warned of this exact condition nearly a century ago when he wrote that “the task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.” The desert is precisely what our culture produced. A generation that rejected the lies of their teachers still hasn’t been taught the truth that replaces them.
The moral imagination has to be formed before it can be reasoned with. As Lewis said in The Abolition of Man, “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.” The “chest” was his word for the moral seat—the link between intellect and appetite. The American nationalist right is what happens when a people has been denied that moral chest. They feel the injustice of the age, but they’ve been given no noble vocabulary to express it.
Burke understood this too. He wrote that “example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.” The Right has failed to model the virtues it preaches. Instead of offering example, it offers lectures. Instead of mentorship, it offers mockery. The result is a generation of disillusioned young men and women who crave meaning but receive memes.
This is why the old guard of conservatism must stop wagging fingers and start extending hands. Scolding does not reform. Teaching does. The only way to bridge this divide is through what Burke called the “moral imagination”, the ability to see ourselves as heirs to a sacred trust. “Society,” he wrote, “is a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are dead and those who are to be born.” That partnership was broken when our schools stopped teaching the Western canon, when civics gave way to identity, and when history was rewritten as therapy.
If the Right wants to rebuild, it must re-teach. Not with slogans, but with substance. Give the next generation Burke, Tocqueville, Lewis, Madison, Twain. Give them the story of a civilization that wrestled with evil and produced liberty. Show them that self-government begins with self-restraint, and that personal responsibility—not perpetual grievance—is the foundation of a free society.
As Lewis put it, “The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments.” That’s the calling now. To replace outrage with order. To rebuild the moral grammar that binds a people to the truth.
The new nationalists aren’t the enemy, they are the students. The question is whether the old conservatives still remember how to teach.
Because if they don’t, this movement will devour itself. It will rot into populist demagoguery on one side and aristocratic snobbery on the other. The Right will fracture beyond repair, leaving the Left unopposed and the nation rudderless.
So yes, some of these young firebrands are wrong. Some are cruel. Some are dangerously misguided. But the proper response to a lost generation isn’t scolding—it’s mentorship. When you meet a young man ranting about the system, hand him Reflections on the Revolution in France. When you meet a young woman quoting nihilists online, hand her Mere Christianity. When you see confusion masquerading as confidence, answer it not with contempt, but with calm instruction.
The Right once prided itself on conserving wisdom. That means something. It means defending not just policy, but principle. Not just order, but the moral soil from which order grows.
Burke reminded us that to make men love their country, “their country ought to be lovely.” The same is true for our movement. If we want the next generation to love it, we must make it lovely again—honorable, intellectual, patient, rooted, and magnanimous.
The real fight isn’t between the traditionalists and the nationalists. It’s between those who build and those who burn. The builders teach. The burners scold. And if we want to keep the republic our forefathers gave us, we had better start building again.
Stop scolding, and start teaching.
