Pity the observer of contemporary conservative politics. Once it seemed easy to identify a conservative: an upholder of inherited tradition, of tried-and-true practices and institutions, of family values and conventional morals. These stances were often hypocritical — at odds with the free-market economics such people espoused — but it was, at least, an honest hypocrisy. Vice paid tribute to virtue. Conservatives concealed their transgressions, denied them, or sought forgiveness. While family scandals, sexual “deviance,” and unconventional lifestyles may have been common, they were concealed or cloaked in the name of modesty and conventionality.

Today such a vision of conservatism seems quaint to the point of absurdity. Divorce once disqualified a potential candidate for the American presidency. Now, we have seen the reelection of a man twice divorced, with a tabloid history of affairs including Playboy models and porn stars. His former supporter and chainsaw-wielding provocateur in chief, Elon Musk, sports a record that makes his boss’s look tame: three marriages to two women and has at least fourteen children with at least three women. Musk’s ex-business partner and one-time mentor of Vice President J. D. Vance, Peter Thiel, likewise defies easy categorization. Though he fits the label of a “libertarian conservative,” Thiel’s openly gay lifestyle would until recently have scandalized many self-declared conservatives, and likely still does in the more morally traditional precincts of the movement.

This catalogue of what once would have been considered anti-conservative behavior could go on. The point, however, is not to troll the personal lives of public figures looking for transgressions of a nostalgic conservatism. It is to ask, what kind of conservatism are we seeing today? Dismissing these people as “not really conservative” clearly doesn’t work — they support conservative objectives and play important roles in conservative politics. Yet their tastes and lifestyles hardly seem to fit traditional conservative standards. They look suspiciously, for lack of a better word, decadent. This resemblance is not lost on those who see parallels between our time and the Gilded Age of The Great Gatsby, with Mar-a-Lago standing in for West Egg, Long Island.