As the state director of the recently formed Utah Reagan Caucus, I am often asked a simple but direct question: What is Reaganism? I usually offer my equally simple but direct answer: Being a happy warrior, fiscal responsibility, trust in the free market, and keeping faith with our friends and allies abroad.

After this brief exchange, I am usually asked one of two questions. From some of those I talk to, I am asked to explain why it is that I think the Republican Party in its current state no longer reflects the ideals and principles of Reaganism. Others, quite paradoxically, ask why the Republican Party should want to return to Reaganism.

That the two followup questions I receive are so fundamentally disjointed in how people view the Republican Party in its present iteration demonstrates that far too many of those of us who call ourselves Republican are simply unaware of the foundational questions our party faces. Worse, it betrays how many Republican activists and leaders are going about evolving the party into something very different than what most Republicans envision it to be without being fully honest with their aims and their countervision to the Reaganism that has long been the lodestar of the Republican brand. That this post-Reaganism was so clearly on display at the recent Republican National Convention brings this troubling reality even more into focus.

For those of us who are heavily engaged in politics, as activists, academics, pundits or influencers, it is difficult to grasp that the ideological civil war between Reaganites, classical liberals and traditional conservatives, and “freecons” on the one hand, and those who are variously referred to as nationalists, populists, the New Right, MAGA or “natcons” on the other flies under the radar of most American voters.

But it shouldn’t come as a surprise, and indeed it is not a bad thing at all, that the average American voter cares more about kitchen table issues than the ramblings of overly committed political nerds such as myself. One of the great assets of the democratic processes within our constitutional republic is the grounding influence that ordinary Americans can have on those of us who forget the difference between reality and our desire to build what Socrates would call a “city in speech.”

But where political thinkers such as myself can be of great service to the people are those moments, such as we find ourselves in, where the people face grave choices relative to the future of their political institutions. There are times when the people must be made to awaken to the awful situation they find themselves in.

Specific to my deep concerns, I feel it necessary to awaken my fellow Republicans to the situation where we are on the cusp of not having a major conservative party in this country, that the GOP in the last decade has slowly evolved into something else than a vessel for conservative governance, and that this has happened without the full knowledge of most Republican voters who, at the end of the day, remain committed to the values and principles that were once so well championed by Ronald Reagan, who, better than any Republican politician before or since, communicated and won over vast swathes of the American electorate to a conservative vision.

Increasingly, the Republican brand stands for something in stark contrast to that simple but straightforward explanation of Reaganism I offer.

We are not happy warriors, speaking forcefully in defense of our great nation from a position of gratitude and offering an optimistic view to the country as we boldly find conservative solutions to the problems that we face. Instead, far too many Republican voices are angry, pessimistic and histrionic, catastrophizing every political moment as the doom of a weak and stumbling country.

We have failed the test of being serious about fiscal responsibility, doing very little when in power to actually address runaway federal spending and only talking about fiscal sanity when we are feckless and out of power, using what used to be the foundational ideals of fiscal conservatism only as a weapon at hand to sabotage the other party’s agenda but never as a guiding star toward actual policy and reform when given the chance.

We have lost our trust in capitalism, both domestically and internationally. No longer do we confidently trust in the free market to bring us prosperity and to trigger the enterprising nature of American ingenuity and entrepreneurism. Instead, we want to wield the leviathan of central economic planning in our own favor, engage in trade wars, utilize emergency executive power to “protect” favored economic sectors, and wield the government as a tool to hammer the economy into what we think is the ideal economic reality. The power of centralized economic planning is, apparently, only socialism when we don’t like those who wield such power.

And, perhaps most starkly, we have lost our view of America as a city on a hill, a beacon of peace and prosperity able to lead the world in establishing the norms of freedom and peace. No longer do we speak of “peace through strength” or lay out a foreign policy vision committed to establishing effective deterrence that can keep the destabilizing powers at bay. Instead, we talk about avoiding “forever wars” and convince ourselves that we have no interest in what happens beyond our shores, ignoring the unavoidable reality that when the world’s only superpower attempts to retreat from the world, the vacuum that’s created gets filled with enemies of freedom and peace whose destabilizing actions and aggression creates a cause and effect that impacts a host of unforeseen consequences with serious deleterious effect both abroad and at home. In shocking ways, many voices in the Republican Party have come to echo the very ideas of détente that Ronald Reagan ran against as the nation reeled from its lost sense of purpose and confidence after the failures of the Nixon and Carter administrations. We have forgotten that ignoring America’s clear geopolitical foes does nothing but ensure their free movement as they plan and act against our interests.

And why does any of this matter? Many of the detractors of Reaganism who I speak to offer the view that Reagan is dead and gone and that the things he stood for were a platform for a bygone age. My answer to this is twofold. First, if we are to take the label of conservative seriously in any meaningful way, we must reject the idea of historical relativism. If something was right and true in 1984, we should assume it is right and true in all ages. We must confess that truth is not relative to time and place but believe certain ideas and certain principles stand the test of time. And second, I would argue that if there is a time that best reflects our current circumstances, both at home and abroad, in American history then it would be 1979. Like the evacuation of Saigon in 1975, the disastrous and humiliating retreat from Afghanistan has shattered America’s resolve and left us uncertain of our place in the international order. Like the first Cold War, we are increasingly observing a situation abroad that pits America against the unholy alliance of China, Iran and Russia. We are experiencing runaway inflation, a wave of criminality, increased instances of political violence and student protests wholly disjointed from basic commitments to American ideals. Our cultural cohesion is at a breaking point as various flavors of culture warrior seek to wield the government as a weapon in rebuilding the nation in their image. And we have not had a president with a true commitment to limited, constitutional governance in decades.

Many Americans are today casting about looking for answers, many of them experimenting with novel and exciting ideas that have never been tested and all too often prove to make matters worse. What we need is an organization to champion the tried and true, to rekindle commitment to the ideals and principles that have served us so well in the past. And the Republican Party can be that organization, if we can renew ourselves as the party of the values that led the party to its golden age under its greatest conservative champion: Ronald Reagan.

Justin Stapley is a political theorist and constitutional scholar. He is the state director of the Utah Reagan Caucus and Executive Director of The Freemen Foundation. He currently studies Constitutional Governance, Civics, and Law as a graduate student at Utah Valley University.