‘They’re
screwed and know it’
The
conservative National Review, a longtime cornerstone of the
conservative movement’s intellectual wing, quickly fell in with President
Donald Trump after his election, and most recently has published a series of
pieces clashing with Never Trump conservative Max Boot over the
American right’s white supremacy problem — calling him and his
supporters “self-loathing whites … paralyzed by intersectional deference.”
As
another Never Trump conservative, Naval War College Professor Tom Nichols, put
it, this is a microcosm of the “Trump-compliant right’s” realization that there
is no way to divorce their supposed principles from Trumpism — and the future
of their place in conservative thought looks bleak.
Nichols wrote this series of interconnected Tweets:
From the attack on @MaxBoot in @NRO to the latest faux-Gibbon raving from Michael Anton pumped out by @ClaremontInst, the Trump-compliant right is having a nervous breakdown - as it should. Many conservatives once saw themselves as part of an intellectual movement. Now? No.
For years, intellectual conservatives thought: "Look, we're smart, we're conservative, the liberals are just wrong." (Hell, I still feel that way most days.) But the intellectual cons who have surrendered to Trumpist populism are screwed and know it.
These intellectuals tried to adopt the camouflage of
bib-overalls and Hee Haw straw hats; this was a very, very bad gamble. They now
know, without a doubt, that they're in a shrinking minority, dead-ended, and
stranded with no way back.
Sure, they figured they could tough it out, get their
judges, and then disavow Trump when he self-destructed. They partied with the
rubes in hopes no one would notice the college degrees and the cufflinks. But
Trump ate the movement before they could bail out.
When today's conservative writers signed up in the 1980s
and 1990s, they could imagine their core audience being well-off and educated
people politely having dinner at the Union Club while hearing a lecture on an
important subject from an intelligent person.
By the time this is over, all that'll be left is Gorka,
Anton, and the last few editors of NR at CPAC trying to clap along gamely while
someone explains how Q is going to swoop in and arrest the abortion-loving gays
during their attempts to make stem cells into omelettes.