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.

Frozen Hell: Senator Ugolino gnawing on the skull of Senator Ruggieri

The late Dorothy Parker reputedly answered her telephone with the phrase, “What fresh hell is this?”

In the Age of Obama, Americans in general can greet any news from Washington with the same alarmed interrogative.

Michael Goodwin celebrates Harry Reid’s purchase of his 60th vote (using our tax dollars) by repenting for his vote last year.

President Obama, for whom I voted because I believed he was the best choice available, is a profound disappointment. I now regard his campaign as a sly bait-and-switch operation, promising one thing and delivering another. Shame on me.

Equally surprising, he has become an insufferable bore. The grace notes and charm have vanished, with peevishness and petty spite his default emotions. His rhetorical gifts now serve his loathsome habit of fear-mongering.

“Time is running out,” he says, over and again. He said it on health care, on the stimulus, in Copenhagen, on Iran.

Instead of provoking thought and inspiring ideas, the man hailed for his Ivy League nuance insists we stop thinking and do what he says. Now.

His assertion we will go bankrupt unless Congress immediately adopts the health monstrosity marks a new low. …

It is a myth the fight is over health care at all. It is a vulgar power dispute between liberals and extreme liberals, with health care a convenient portal for command-and-control of 17 percent of the economy.

It’s definitely not reform.

Notice how little Obama talks about sick people or medicine or suffering or any of the realities of illness and death. There is almost no mention of the moral dimension that supposedly animates the demand for universal coverage.

The public intuitively understands the con, which is why it prefers the flawed status quo. Voters tell pollsters by as much as 3-to-1 they think a federal takeover will cost them and the country more money and will produce more red tape instead of better care.

Yet, because power corrupts, and one-party rule corrupts absolutely, dissenters are considered heretics. Until the next election.

Meanwhile, Mother Nature delivered her verdict with yesterday’s blizzard in Washington. I am cheered by the thought that finally, hell has frozen over.

Read the whole thing.