I never expected to feel hopeful about the moral health of the American right again. For a decade I’ve watched with sadness and consternation as the Republican Party I once belonged to — the party of Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Barry Goldwater, and my Massachusetts friend Ray Shamie — was transformed by the MAGA movement into something coarse, resentful, and conspiratorial. The decay of conservatism in the Trump era left me politically homeless and I had come to assume the corrosion was irreversible.

It has been dispiriting to watch as people calling themselves conservative embraced positions that, to my mind, were anything but — nativism, isolationism, protectionism, expanded government power, and blind loyalty to the whims and obsessions of one narcissistic political leader.

Bad as all that was, however, even worse was the reappearance of a toxin that was supposed to have been purged from mainstream conservatism: antisemitism. Right-wing influencers such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and others have been fanning the flames of the oldest of hatreds, galvanizing self-styled “groypers,” Christian nationalists, and white identitarians with a stream of malignant taunts about Jews and the Jewish state.

The old conservative resolve that Jew-haters were to be excommunicated from the American right — the resolve William F. Buckley Jr. famously enforced — had dissolved.

Twice Buckley had acted to expel antisemites from the conservative tent. When he founded National Review in the 1950s, he enforced, as he later recounted, an “absolute exclusion of anything antisemitic or kooky.” He distanced himself and his increasingly influential magazine from the conspiratorial John Birch Society, for example, and decreed that no one who wrote for the American Mercury — a publication growing progressively antisemitic — would be allowed to appear in National Review.

Decades later, Buckley fired Joseph Sobran, one of National Review’s most gifted writers, when his hostility toward Jews became clear. Even more dramatically, he publicly broke with Pat Buchanan in 1991, labeling the prominent paleoconservative an antisemite just as Buchanan was revving up a campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Buckley made his case publicly and dramatically, devoting an entire issue of his magazine to a 40,000-word essay titled “In Search of Antisemitism,” which was later published in book form.

For most American conservatives, this was a point of pride. The right’s capacity to cleanse itself of hatred and extremism was proof that conservatism possessed not only principles but a conscience. To young Republicans like me who came of age in that era, it was a reassurance that the movement was morally serious — and morally safe.

So when Carlson recently welcomed Fuentes, a self-avowed racist and Holocaust-denier, onto his hugely popular podcast for a softball interview, it felt like one more appalling milestone in the moral collapse of the right. Nothing Fuentes said during the show — that “organized Jewry” is ruining America, that “these Zionist Jews” need to be taken down, that Americans “need to be Christian [and] need to be pro-white” — was challenged by Carlson. Nor did the former Fox News host ask his guest about vile comments he has made elsewhere, from extolling Adolf Hitler as “really f***ing cool” to declaring that if his movement gains power, American Jews “must be absolutely annihilated.”

Then Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation — a one-time citadel of Reaganite conservatism that has changed into a MAGA stronghold — rushed to defend Carlson rather than condemn him. Attacking “the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda,” Roberts vowed that Heritage would never turn against Carlson. And while he might abhor some of Fuentes’s opinions, “canceling him is not the answer either. When we disagree with someone’s thoughts and opinions we challenge those ideas and debate.”

Above all, Roberts emphasized, Heritage’s highest priority is “focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right.”

At the same time came smaller but no less chilling signals of what was happening on the American right: A conservative student magazine at Harvard published Nazi-like rhetoric, and leaked messages from a private Telegram chat in which officials from Young Republican chapters casually engaged in racist, antisemitic, and violent rhetoric.

Then something unexpected happened. The antibodies kicked in.

Senator Ted Cruz delivered a speech decrying the rise of “antisemitism on the right” and warning Republicans that it is “a poison” and “an existential crisis in our party.” House Speaker Mike Johnson repudiated Fuentes’s views as “blatantly antisemitic, racist, and anti-American” and said conservatives have an obligation to “call out antisemitism wherever it is.”

In an editorial headlined “A Time for Choosing on Antisemitism,” National Review, upholding the standard of its founder, poured scorn on the effort by Carlson, Fuentes, Owens, and other influencers to “remake the Republican Party and the conservative movement into one that is hostile toward Israel and the Jewish people.” Their obsession is “not only a moral abomination; it makes no sense.”

Rod Dreher, a longtime friend of Carlson’s, nonetheless excoriated his interview as “a two-man Unite the Right rally” — an allusion to the 2017 march in Charlottesville, Va., by torch-wielding white supremacists chanting “Jews will not replace us.” Dreher implored the right to stop shirking their moral duty: “The time to find your courage, fellow conservatives and Christians, and speak out against this stuff, is NOW.”

Writing in The Free Press, conservative activist and commentator Eric Erickson condemned the “moral rot” being spread through the conservative movement by antisemites and those who would protect them. The Daily Wire’s Andrew Klavan called Carlson’s embrace of Fuentes “despicable” and warned that it would doom the right.

The blowback has begun to have an effect. The Heritage Foundation fired its chief of staff, and at a staff meeting on Wednesday, Roberts apologized for rushing to defend Carlson — and for using the term “venomous coalition” to describe Carlson’s critics.

It’s only a start. But this has been the most encouraging development in right-wing politics since Trump first came down that escalator. For the first time in years, a moral line was drawn — and enforced — not by liberals or the media but by conservatives themselves. It was a reminder that there still exists on the American right a vast constituency that despises antisemitism, supports Israel, and is horrified by the resurgence of the old right-wing bigotry against Jews.

But the infection runs deep. It has not been cured. When news surfaced of the Young Republican chat group with its “I love Hitler” gibes, Vice President JD Vance waved it off as “a stupid joke” and said he would not “join the pearl clutching.” Not surprisingly, Vance has not issued any clear denunciation of Carlson’s two-hour broadcast with a racist Jew-hater. Nor has Trump made it his business to unequivocally disavow Fuentes and his legion of “groyper” fans. (Indeed, Trump in 2022 hosted Fuentes for dinner at Mar-a-Lago along with Kanye West, another prominent antisemite.) And the institutional right remains divided: The Heritage Foundation’s initial instinct was to circle the wagons, not cleanse the wound.

So does the backlash of recent days mark the beginning of a moral recovery and a full-fledged return to the Buckley tradition? Or was it just the last gasp of a flickering moral tradition of a better conservatism? It’s impossible to know. I can only say that I want to believe that the antibodies are still working — and that, against all odds in these dark times, there might still be reason to keep hope alive.