Must-Read: Bret Stephens: 2016’s Big Reveal: "The awful election of 2016... was the Big Reveal... the guiding spirit of the modern conservative movement is neither Burke nor Lincoln...
...It’s Marx. “These are my principles,” Groucho once cracked, “and if you don’t like them, well, I have others.” Everything Republicans once claimed to advocate--entitlement reform, free trade, standing up to dictators, encouraging the march of freedom around the world--turns out to be negotiable and reversible, depending on Donald Trump’s whims and the furies of his base.
Revealed:... The same Republicans who pontificated throughout the 1990s about restoring honor and dignity to the Oval Office are now eager to rent that office to a man who boasts of his own sexual predations.... Revealed: That Mr. Trump’s unrelenting and apparently irrepressible bigotry, misogyny, bullying and conspiracy-mongering won’t keep Republican leaders from supporting him, provided he mouth pieties about appointing more Scalias.... A smarter response by the speaker [Paul Ryan] might have been: “You lost me at hello.”... Revealed: That conservatives who once took umbrage at being called racist or anti-Semitic are now happy to flirt with white nationalism. That a party of self-described strict constructionists sees nothing amiss in Mr. Trump’s call to rewrite the 14th Amendment. That the ability of Mr. Trump and his supporters to hurl insults at their critics is only exceeded by their exquisite sensitivity when they are insulted back. That a reset with Russia is a fiasco when executed by Hillary Clinton but evidence of fresh foreign-policy thinking when proposed by Mr. Trump....
It’s normal that elections make fierce partisans... that Mr. Trump would attract the usual right-wing buffoons... that many voters may not be troubled by Mr. Trump’s cruder statements when they hear him addressing their deepest economic and social anxieties. What isn’t normal is the ease with which so many conservative leaders, political and intellectual, have prostrated themselves before Mr. Trump simply because he won. In July, Dan Senor, a senior adviser to Mitt Romney in 2012, tweeted that he had once commiserated with a Midwestern governor about how unacceptable Mr. Trump was as the GOP nominee. That governor? Mike Pence.
As for conservative thought leaders, the book that comes to mind is Julien Benda’s 1927 classic... “The Treason of the Intellectuals”... thinkers... specializ[ing] in “the intellectual organization of political hatreds,” the “desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action,” and above all “the cult of success,” based on “the teaching that says that when a will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value....”
Benda used to be a favorite among conservative thinkers who saw him as a prophetic voice against multiculturalism, postmodernism and other left-wing academic fads rooted in 19th century German Romanticism. Where are those thinkers now?... They are busy devising ever-more elaborate excuses for the Republican nominee.... Most conservative intellectuals have proved incapable of self-examination or even simple observation. Donald Trump is a demagogue. Period.... George Orwell said that “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” The Big Reveal of 2016 is that most conservatives failed the Orwell test. [Last] Tuesday we... learned [that] American voters can[not] do better.
