The old guard has run out of ideas.
Senator John Cornyn is in the fight of his life. In a throwback to the Tea Party primaries of the early 2010s, the senior senator from Texas (first elected in 2002) has been forced into a runoff for the first time in his career by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton, who was impeached by the Texas House of Representatives in 2023, managed to effectively tie Cornyn in the initial primary, with both receiving around 42% of the vote. While Cornyn is favored to win a runoff, particularly if President Donald Trump endorses him, it is by no means a sure thing.
Cornyn and his team may be wondering how they got to this point. They are not alone. Across the Western world, center-right individuals and parties are in deep trouble and seem unable to figure out why.
In Europe, the “respectable” center-right is a political dinosaur on its way to extinction. The German CDU is neck-and-neck (though more often than not, in second place) with the populist-right Alternative for Germany. Austria’s Freedom Party has been leading for the past three years, while Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy has led the country for over four. Poland’s right wing is dominated by two parties: a populist-right party and one that’s even further to the right. France and the United Kingdom have both seen their center-right parties decimated, replaced by the populist-right National Rally and Reform parties, respectively.
In the U.S., Donald Trump has been at war against the Republican Party’s establishment over the past ten years. President Trump’s change in vice presidents is the clearest example of how he has transformed the GOP. He picked Mike Pence in 2016 to satiate the establishment, but he selected JD Vance in 2024 as a successor who understands where the party is headed.
There have been many attempts to explain why this has happened across the West. Thousands of articles, books, and documentaries have been written on the subject by a variety of credentialed experts. But the answer does not require a degree to understand. Across the West, voters have rejected their establishments because they’re old and musty.
While reviewing last year’s controversial film, One Battle After Another, American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis said, “There’s a liberal mustiness to this movie that already feels very dated by October 2025. Very dated. And it just doesn’t read the room. You know, it reads a tiny corner of the room, but it does not read what is going on in America.” Ellis’s review was soon popularized, with conservative writers and cultural commentators applying the term “liberal mustiness” to a broad array of leftist writing, film, and thought.
But as yin has its yang, there is an opposite to liberal mustiness: conservative mustiness. And just as the practitioners of liberal mustiness do not yet realize that time has passed them by, those who preach conservative mustiness likewise do not understand our current political moment.
Take Senator Ted Cruz’s recent interview, in which he said, “My approach to immigration for a long time I have summed up in four words: Legal, good. Illegal, bad.” When he posted it on X, his summation quickly became one of his most-viewed posts of all time—but not for the reasons he likely hoped for. Responses were extremely negative.
Cornyn has also fallen victim to this. Just weeks ago, the senator tweeted, “Welcome to the Indian Century,” while sharing a New York Times discussion in which one participant argued that India would dominate the next hundred years. The senator quickly deleted the post amidst a barrage of criticism. Cornyn has also supported mass Indian migration to Texas, and has said he would pursue “immigration reform” if he wins another term.
Or take Republican Senator John Curtis, who recently scuttled the nomination of Jeremy Carl to be Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs over Carl’s views on migration and Israel.
Fifteen years ago, the sentiments expressed by Cruz, Cornyn, and Curtis would have been music to the ears of most Republicans. “Legal, good. Illegal, bad” would have gotten a standing ovation at a 2012 Iowa caucus campaign event. But in 2026, these sentiments are musty. The Tea Party’s failure to change the character of our political class gave way to a populist force that has ensured it will happen, one way or another.
The situation is the same in Europe. The center-right has been replaced because it is stuck in the 2000s, busy debating corporate tax cuts or banning the burka. Any effort they make to meet the moment, however, is half-hearted.
Take the aforementioned burka bans. The Austrian People’s Party (the country’s equivalent of center-right Republicans) wrestled with banning burkas in schools for years before finally endorsing one in 2025. But the ban only applies to those under 14. Considering that’s roughly the age (around puberty) when some girls start wearing the burka, the ban is essentially useless and will not have an actual impact. It is the sort of “bold” policymaking one might have suggested in 2015. But in 2026, Muslim students are the largest group in Vienna schools (over 40%)—and the demographic changes there don’t look to be slowing down.
The People’s Party has gotten no uptick in support for their useless ban. Instead, the populist-right Freedom Party—which is calling for reimmigration—is polling 15% higher. Britain’s Nigel Farage has already seen his own movement become fractured over his repeated hesitation to embrace mass deportations.
And John Cornyn’s support for “immigration reform”—a phrase from 2007 that’s a well-established code word for amnesty—has engendered fierce criticism from the Right, with conservative analyst Ryan James Girdusky writing that Texas Republicans had two choices: “vote for Jasmine Crocket[t] or against John Cornyn.”
This is not to say these failures have dissuaded the old guard. They continue to make the critical error of confusing eternal principle with policy, falsely believing that changing the latter is a betrayal of the former. As such, Mike Pence established a think tank in 2021 (and more recently somehow convinced donors to give up $15 million), and has a book coming out later in 2026 that will undoubtedly espouse mid-2000s policies.
The musty ideas promoted by Pence and other establishment voices will not stick, of course. They will sound impressive and will probably trick donors into handing over even more money. But they are simply dressed-up policies from the GOP’s 2004 platform. They will not have an impact on the direction of the larger party, whose voters have given Vance, Pence’s successor, a solid lead in literally every single primary poll.
And here lies the real danger for the old guard: they’ve fantasized that the Trump era is an aberration and that once the Orange Man is gone, things will finally go back to normal. But their ideas have gotten only more musty as time has gone on. They are the ones who have become the political aberration, not Trump.
