Mitt Romney announced this week he plans to retire from the Senate at the end of his current term, marking the end of one of the most wasted careers in modern political history. Wasted, but highly illustrative—his time on the national stage, and the reactions to him both positive and negative, previewed more than a few defects, miscalculations, and bad habits that would go on to plague us to this day.

Romney’s history of flipping from liberal positions to conservative ones meant he was never an ideal standard-bearer for the Right, but as hard as it might be for younger readers to believe, he was legitimately the best conservative option in the 2008 primary—the alternatives being pro-abortion Rudy Giuliani, nanny-statist Mike Huckabee, more-talk-and-zealous-fans-than-substance Fred Thompson (sound familiar?), and John McCain who was, well, John McCain. Major conservative personalities eventually came to the same conclusion, but not soon enough to deny McCain the nomination, and we all remember how that worked out.

The 2012 Republican field was a mess in which there was no clear conservative choice (no, despite the bleating of his fans, not even Rick Perry). The primary was largely a series of auditions for a suitable “Not Romney,” during which I temporarily backed Michelle Bachmann (yeah, I’m a little embarrassed about that, but like I said, it was a lousy field), withdrew the endorsement a month later, supported Rick Santorum when he caught momentum, soured as he stumbled, and ultimately settled for Romney just to help end that miserable primary and shift focus to beating Barack Obama.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen either—primarily because of Romney’s own weaknesses (letting Obama get away with too many outrages, campaign team incompetence, and a weak and tone-deaf running mate among them), but also due to a rabid “NeverRomney” sentiment that led some to say removing Obama wasn’t worth a Mitt vote. The pervasive meme that 3-4 million conservatives stayed home in 2012 (which I bought too in the immediate aftermath) might not have been true, but Romney’s actual popular vote—1.4 million fewer than George W. Bush in 2004, less than 700,000 more than McCain—did not indicate an especially motivated base.

After that, Romney was largely a non-factor until Donald Trump burst on the scene, prompting him to go public with a dramatic speech declaring, “Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University.” Which was absolutely true, but committed the same mistake that doomed all of 2016’s Stop Trump efforts: singling him out as the only major problem in the primary field, without recognizing the legitimate grievances with establishment Republicans that gave Trump his opening or offering a healthier alternative for channeling their discontent.

Fast-forward another few years, and Romney was in the Senate, where he turned out to be pretty much what you’d expect: a disappointment more interested in pandering to Beltway sensitivities than being of any genuine use to the nation or learning from his mistakes.

And now, with a departure announcement confirming that he will leave politics the same way he entered—as a moderate too beholden to “respectable” consensus to ever attain greatness—all that’s left is to review the lessons we can glean from his ultimately-wasted career. There are more than one might initially expect.

The first is the most obvious: squishes can’t go the distance. As the 2012 nominee, Romney simply didn’t have it in him to channel and maintain true outrage for Obama’s worst offenses, such as defending infanticide. He treated politics too much like a gentlemen’s contest, and paid the price. And by and large, the congressional GOP has the same problem in dealing with today’s Democrats.

The second: there are no substitutes for authentic conservatism. For all the hostility between Romney and Trump’s respective camps, it is an under-recognized irony that both men have far more in common than they would ever admit. Both are liberal-leaning businessmen who touted their mastery of the corporate world as political assets, who shifted rightward to help their presidential ambitions but never really understood or internalized conservatism, and who were ultimately chewed up and spat out by the systems they challenged. They simply picked opposite styles that played to their respective strengths, but at the end of the day neither men’s strengths were enough to make up for not truly, deeply understanding what America needs and why.

The third is yet another similarity, not in themselves but in their presidential primaries. Their debut contests were both defined by the Right’s failure to unite early around the most conservative viable option (Romney in 2008, Ted Cruz in 2016) enabling someone far worse to cruise to the nomination (McCain in 2008, Trump in 2016). For their second contests, each man had become the default to whom serious conservatives pined to find an alternative. In 2012 we didn’t really have one (though Santorum came closest); today that alternative is indisputably Ron DeSantis.

Unfortunately, the Right—at least its most influential members in the best position to actually influence things—has learned none of these lessons.

In Trump we have a candidate who isn’t stylistically squishy, but he’s also not what we need in its place: clear-eyed, forcefully-expressed moral candor focused on what matters most and proportionate to its severity. He’s just clumsy, juvenile belligerence tossed at whatever personally offends him. And on policy, it turned out he could be squished in all sorts of ways, because he’s not grounded in authentic conservative understanding or belief—which seems not to matter to the “conservative influencer” class, as long as his fans remain so tantalizingly marketable.

With his 2016 nomination, Trump secured the hostage grip on the Right he maintains today in large part because the Right forgot (or ignored) how McCain got nominated eight years before. Now the motives may be different, but the Right still isn’t uniting around the conservative. This primary is far from over—we’re still months away from casting the first primary votes—but if the trends so far hold once the voting starts, our failure to learn from any of this will land us in a new normal against which Mitt Romney or Donald Trump presidencies would seem like a dream.