The evil of the people is good

Every year in the USA, articles and books on a million/billion scale are published to whet the appetite of our funders. Only one in ten thousand of them can be published in Turkish if they attract the attention of our publishers.

Drawing parallels between the political styles of Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is not a new idea.

American politics in 2017, when Trump was elected president, turned towards a reckoning with itself. In our case, we were left with the saying "He cannot even become a headman".

For some reason, publishers in our country think of "How Did He Lose His Right Mind?" It was not possible to translate the book titled into Turkish. (How the Right Lost Its Mind, Charles J. Sykes. 2017)

This book is a conservative internal reckoning.

Trump is not only the cause of the deterioration in the American right, but the result of a long-prepared transformation. Sykes explains this under several headings:

- Principles were replaced by loyalty to the leader. Defenses of limited government, the constitution, free markets, and personal morality were bent according to the leader's need to justify his actions.

- The media has turned from giving news to generating anger. Competition for ratings and clicks fueled conspiracy theories and a constant sense of threat.

- Hostility towards political rivals turned into a common program. How much a policy angers the other party has become more important than its correctness.

-Those who objected from within were excluded. Criticism ceased to be a difference of opinion and began to be seen as betrayal.

- The main question of the book is a powerful one: Is a movement really considered to have won if it loses the values ​​it defends while winning elections?

The answer is clear: "Conservatism came to power; it left in opposition the principles it was to preserve."

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Our "People's Alliance" also renounced conservative right-wing principles for the sake of "preserving profits" (increasingly for the sake of it). This is why dozens of right-wing parties, large and small, have emerged inside and outside the parliament.

However, a distinction is needed: The Turkish right combines liberal, nationalist and religious conservative traditions; Not all of them have the same understanding of state and freedom. Therefore, when we say “abandoned principles”, we are talking about principles that were defended and promised, rather than a right-wing tradition that was perfectly implemented in the past.

1- Limiting the state and keeping the law superior.

AKP 2021 Human Rights Action Plan; He openly advocated legal security, freedom of contract, and not being deprived of liberty due to criticism. On the other hand, the Constitutional Court's determination of non-implementation of the Can Atalay decision as a violation of rights further embodies the distance between promise and implementation.

2- Free enterprise, predictable rules and trust in institutions.

In AKP's own vision document, the state is defined as the regulator and controller of the economy, not the main actor. While the IMF's February 2026 assessment acknowledges the progress in the economic program, it calls for the strengthening of Central Bank independence and institutional predictability. The paradox is this: defending the market also requires protecting economic decisions from the day-to-day preference of political will.

3- Ethics of trust: Beytülmal, competence and accountability.

In the moral language of conservatism, public money is a matter of "trust" and duty is a matter of "competence". If this criterion is accepted, the opposition's demand for merit and transparency cannot be considered a foreign demand for conservative voters.

A principle is a principle if it is defended even when it limits our own side's power. If it binds the opponent but not its own leader, it ceases to be a measure of management and turns into a tool of struggle.

Therefore, "leaving it to the opposition" does not mean transferring ownership of these values; It is a fitting irony in the sense that we leave the duty of defending them to the other party. Law, merit and accountability are not the registered property of the right or the left.

For the sake of "preserving profit and power", conservatism left the task of preserving the principles of the right to the opposition.