Why Havent Conservative Thinkers Denounced Trump?
Before the election, I wrote a piece describing why, despite his radical deviation from conservative orthodoxy on many policy issues, Donald Trump’s rise and triumph as a candidate of the right bore an uncanny sort of logic. The Tea Party movement, whose nominal candidate in the Republican primaries had been the upright Christian constitutionalist Ted Cruz, smoothly transferred its support to Trump, the sybaritic populist who said that Cruz’s dad was linked to John F. Kennedy’s killer, and this, somehow, seemed about right. Why not? What’s the difference? This fit with the scheme laid out in Corey Robin’s book “The Reactionary Mind”: the substance of conservative doctrine is secondary to a deeper, perennial force in conservative politics, which is the spirit of reaction itself.
But Robin’s book begins with Edmund Burke and conservative philosophy. Reaction, Robin argues, is typically high theory as much as demotic practice. The signal reactionaries are writers and intellectuals, but in Trump’s case the conservative intelligentsia strayed from the script. Yes, conservative pundits were eager to claim the Tea Party as their own, despite the statist heresies of its members and the populist urges it expressed, but most of those pundits opposed Trump, sometimes bitterly, even after he won the Republican nomination.
It’s important to note how remarkable this is: conservative pundits publicly declining to support the Presidential nominee of the Republican Party. They are a notably partisan bunch, partly by the nature of their political enterprise, and partly because the American electoral system does a decent job of meeting their ideological wants—as it doesn’t for progressive intellectuals, who can often be seen at election time casting wistful glances to the left horizon. But it’s even more remarkable still, because this Republican was running against a Clinton. Though some conservatives still define themselves as Reaganite, the conservative movement as it functions today was formed not in the eighties of Ronald Reagan but in the nineties of Bill Clinton—the nineties, that is, of Whitewater, the Gingrich revolution, the Fox News Channel (founded in 1996), the Starr Report, and the Clinton impeachment.
Why Haven’t Conservative Thinkers Denounced Trump?
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/why-havent-conservative-thinkers-denounced-trump
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Because conservatives stick together no matter how much shit smell is in the room...
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