Gustave Dore: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita/ mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,/ ché la diritta via era smarrita.
Ross Douthat, an echt conservative intellectual, argues that conservative intellectuals should blame themselves for the Trumpkin peasant revolt. Firstly, by allying with George W. Bush’s failed presidency, and secondly, by relying on AM Talk Radio (Sean Hannity) and Internet bloggers (Matt Drudge, Breitbart) to do so much of the message communicating.
Every political movement in a democracy is shaped like a pyramid — elite actors on the top, the masses underneath. But the pyramid that is modern American conservatism has always been misshapen, with a wide, squat base that tapers far too quickly at its peak.
The broad base is right-wing populism, in all its post-World War II varietals: Orange County Cold Warriors, “Silent Majority†hard hats, Southern evangelicals, Reagan Democrats, the Tea Party, the Trumpistas. The too-small peak is the right’s intellectual cadres, its philosophers and legal theorists and foreign policy hands and wonks.
The peak is small because conservatives have always had a relatively weak presence within what James Burnham, one of modern conservatism’s intellectual godfathers, called the “managerial class†— the largely liberal meritocrats who staff our legal establishment, our bureaucracy, our culture industries, our universities. Whether as provincial critics of this class or dissidents within it, conservative intellectuals have long depended on populism to win the power that the managerial elite’s liberal tilt would otherwise deny them. …
But now, in the age of Donald Trump, the populists have seemingly decided that they can get along just fine without any elite direction whatsoever. …
History does not stand still; crises do not last forever. Eventually a path for conservative intellectuals will open.
But for now we find ourselves in a dark wood, with the straight way lost.
JKB
What “elite direction”?
As Charles Murray aptly showed, except for Reagan, whom the conservative elite hated before they jumped on his success, there has been no difference in electing Republican (Conservative) presidents.
All the Deplorables have done is to decide that to keep doing the same thing over and over is the very essence of insanity. And if things can’t stay the same, it’s time for a change.
What the “elite conservatives” should fear is that they never really had a following, except as not-the-Democrat. They truly feared under Bill Clinton as he swung to the middle. But now, with Trump, the “peasants” as you misuse the word, have seen they can make a third way. And the horror for the conservatives is that someone, less vulgar, is going to take up the banner of this Middle way, this more neoliberal way and run the board on both the ignorant parties.
http://www.aei.org/publication/a-reality-check-about-republican-presidents/
bob sykes
Douthat is one of the cuckservatives who never conserved anything. He would have no voice and no place in a reformed Republican Party.
GoneWithTheWind
He doesn’t understand the problem or the conservatives. We/they don’t listen to Am radio to be told what to do or believe. We listen to find out what the liberals have done to us and what the Republicans have done to to counter that threat. The MSM won’t tell us, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are not the problem. Where the so-called conservative elite went wrong was in not recognizing that AM radio and the internet was doint the job of a free press that our “free press” were not and we no longer were unaware of the symbiotic relationship of the cuckservatives and the Democrats. In other words the jig was up and it was time for them to either stand up as conservatives or convert to Democrats. But they thought they could continue to hide in the dark and stab us in the back.
I honestly cannot imagine how a Republican congress could allow Hillary to sell our Uranium mines to Russia and still be walking free. Where was their outrage? Why has Jeh Johnson not been impeached? Why is no one demanding Comey resign? Why wasn’t Eric Holder ever held accountable for his crimes? Why is Loretta Lynch still the AG? Where are the Republicans on this???
Hrefn
Some people say Trump will be the death of the Republican Party. I haven’t seen much evidence it is alive. When in power, it is difficult to distinguish from the Dems.
Small loss, I say.
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