No, not really. Just my self-aggrandizing way of introducing this Salon column I wrote about Trump and what he means within the long arc of conservatism. My frustration with much of the discussion about Trump is that it presumes he’s a complete outlier within the conservative tradition, that he simply crashed the party. Not so: in many ways, he’s a classic conservative. But there are some elements in his campaign that are new and that make him dangerous. But those elements have less to do with Trump, the man, than with the state of play of the conservative movement.
Here are some excerpts. My apologies in advance for all the paradoxes and dialectical twists; I went heavy on the Louis Hartz here:
If Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination and the general election in November, it will be a victory for the GOP—and a defeat for conservatism. Not because Trump isn’t a conservative but because he is.
