Let Us Dispel with the Fictions That Trump Has Nothing to Do with Conservatism and That Trump's Republican Party Is Not an Existential Threat to America
Let us dispel with the fiction that today's Republican Party, with a primary-voting base that can nominate a Trump, and an establishment of office holders, donors, and apparatchiks that can fall in line behind him, is not an existential threat to America:
Brendan Nyhan: @BrendanNyhan: "Trump's pivot wasn't to the center...
...but to a new divide in American politics that would fundamentally change the party system if Republicans adopt it. Reminder: Not a word of this is conservative. Trying to shift axis of conflict to cosmopolitanism vs. race-inflected version of nationalism:
Note that, in Trumpland, Jews are a different "race", in Nyhan's terms, inasmuch as they are aways assumed to be the arch-cosmpolitans.
This has been coming for quite a while. Fox News's reporting of the "War on Christmas" is an attempt to contest the phrase "happy holidays", which is a linguistic marker of the post-WWII Eisenhower-era declaration that American civilization was a Judeo-Christian civilization.
Kenneth P. Vogel: @kenvogel: "Trump's 2-minute (!) closing spot...
...assails populist demons including Wall St., the UN, the Fed &, oh yeah, @georgesoros. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vST61W4bGm8&sns=em
And let us dispel with Nyhan's fiction that this has nothing to do with conservatism. Conservatism has always had a strong affinity with anti-semitism since at least the days when Edmund Burke denounced the French revolutionaries as:
Jew brokers contending with each other who could best remedy with fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the wretchedness and ruin brought on their country by their degenerate councils...
Conservatism has always had a strong affinity with racism since long before Thomas Carlyle wrote his Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question. And as for conservatism and misogyny...
Here I need to republish basically all of John Holbo:
John Holbo: Corey Robin’s Reactionary Mind In The New Yorker: "No doubt Corey is too modest to toot his own horn, so here you go....
...The New Yorker headline is too strong: The Book That Predicted Trump.... Robin advances an empirical hypothesis about the nature of conservatism.... Trump does not disconfirm Robin. Trump fits the Robin model to a T, but it goes too far to say the model predicts him.... You could have made money in the prediction markets, betting according to Robin’s model, because you would have snapped up Trump back when he was selling for fractions of pennies. Clearly he was an undervalued property, by Robin’s theoretical lights. But recognizing a long shot as not so long as people think is not the same as it being a lock....
But... it is not [so much] that Corey predicted Trump... [as that] nearly everyone else predicted Not-Trump and, therefore, their hypotheses are disconfirmed by Trump. ‘Since conservatism is X, Y and Z, conservatives won’t vote for a -X, – Y and -Z guy like Trump.’ Something like that....
Have philosophers and theorists and advertisers of the alleged virtues of the conservative mind, from Burke to Kirk, Buckley and beyond, really been advancing variations on an empirical hypothesis? The obvious objection is that conservative political philosophy is a normative claim.... So it isn’t refuted if people don’t follow its precepts in real political practice. In the New Yorker piece Feeney sketches ‘the ideal conservative’....
A dreamy quietist of peaceable disposition, who savors apolitical friendship, nurses a skeptical outlook, and looks to an anti-theoretical politics of homey tradition and humane, but chastened, sentiment to guide him.
Close enough... as a thumbnail summary of conservative political philosophy. But not nearly close enough for government work if Trump is elected.... But... if ‘conservatives’ substantially go Trump, it goes to show that they weren’t conservative.... But if conservatism is a normative position unmoored from real US politics, to the point where it has no bearing whatsoever on election results, and election results do not reflect on it, then... it’s just some abstract philosopher’s game. It’s a paper plan for some utopia. That’s nuts. Because the paper plan is to be smug about how other people--the liberals--are always making paper plans for utopia....
Putting it another way, terms like ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ have many uses, potentially. They are foci for theorizing about ideals.... [They] also... serve as socio-electoral shorthand... terms for tagging groups and movements and so forth. Deploying these terms is supposed to make politics less, rather than more, baffling.
Using one word to... limn the ideal, [and] track the real... depends on the real groups and movements being approximately ideal... for a theory of ideal conservatism to do reliable double-duty as a rough map of actually existing conservatism. Robin’s model has the distinction of not having conspicuously fallen to pieces, due to this potential gap. That’s a fairly rare distinction, I should think.
