Shakezula: [Will the Circle Be Unbroken?][]: "Not only did commentorion Yastreblyansky warn everyone that Ross Douthat is wringing his beard over what the Intellectual Right did to deserve Trump... (Live from the Republicans' Self-Made Trump Hell)
...he wrote a blog post about it, and thank goodness for that. I got to the point where Douthat quotes Matthew Continetti (approvingly!?) and thought: "Do I really want to do this?" And then I started to skim and got to the point where he hypothesizes about what might have been if Bush the Younger had found WMD in Iraq and had not boned up the occupation and I thought No, I don’t.
Yastreblyansky: Monsignor in Dark Wood: "Shorter Ross Douthat.... 'Conservatives are badly underrepresented in the managerial class...
...and not represented at all outside the managerial class, where all the people who think they are conservative are actually right-wing populists.... That true conservatives are nearly nonexistent puts us at a terrible and unjust disadvantage in the struggle to make our ideas prevail.... Intellectually serious populism could be a winner. Somebody just has to figure out how to do it, which will no doubt happen sooner or later, though at the moment things look pretty grim.
That's really about it. I can't understand why he skips the obvious solution, which is monarchy. If you have a king then he can appoint all 30 or 40 of the nation's true conservatives to run the legal and governmental and cultural and intellectual establishments and the lack of votes isn't a problem, which completely eliminates the other problem, of meritocracy, in which liberals keep winning out just because they do better in their exams. Monarchy, and a judicious use of prison torture and capital punishment. And it's very alt-right, which is so fashionable just now.
He ends with a literary reference that many readers will recognize... "Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura/Chè la diritta via era smarrita...." I guess Ross's best hope is for some dead Latin poet to turn up and show him around the afterlife. Then he can write a big book.
