I think part of the story (admittedly, probably a minor part) is the failure of the conservative intellectual movement (its heyday was the 1970s-1980s) to fashion anything like a coherent framework for understanding what "conservative" politics and policy mean in the contemporary era. Rightwing billionaires spent millions on that movement, but looking back from 2021, it's not clear what they got for their money. What's even left of that movement? A bunch of old guys? Charles Murray is 78. Harvey Mansfield is 89. Where is the Straussian thinker to replace him? Constitutional conservative Robert George at Princeton is 65, still very active, but after him? There are still conservative institutions (call them "think tanks" at your peril), but they're all rather pathetic at this point. When I was in grad school in the 1990s, you had to take conservative thinkers seriously, at least. My sense is that, like fusionism, it's a largely failed project.
This is really well said, especially your point about how Trump triggered a liberal backlash. What I find frustrating about conservative intellectuals is that even if you were to accept their characterizations of the political situation, they are completely incapable of being self-reflective on conservatism's role in creating that situation. It's always something the "Liberals/Left/Wokes" etc. are doing to them while the conservatives are just trying to get by. Obviously we can't expect them to agree with liberals, but they don't even seem to want to understand why they've reached such a "despairing" state. But as you say, maybe this is way they want it to be.
I’m in the middle of reading George Nash’s history of intellectual conservatism and have been struck by how much gravitational pull communism played in the post war right.
The collapse of the USSR was to conservatives like the sun disappearing causing the planets to go adrift.
I think part of the story (admittedly, probably a minor part) is the failure of the conservative intellectual movement (its heyday was the 1970s-1980s) to fashion anything like a coherent framework for understanding what "conservative" politics and policy mean in the contemporary era. Rightwing billionaires spent millions on that movement, but looking back from 2021, it's not clear what they got for their money. What's even left of that movement? A bunch of old guys? Charles Murray is 78. Harvey Mansfield is 89. Where is the Straussian thinker to replace him? Constitutional conservative Robert George at Princeton is 65, still very active, but after him? There are still conservative institutions (call them "think tanks" at your peril), but they're all rather pathetic at this point. When I was in grad school in the 1990s, you had to take conservative thinkers seriously, at least. My sense is that, like fusionism, it's a largely failed project.
This is really well said, especially your point about how Trump triggered a liberal backlash. What I find frustrating about conservative intellectuals is that even if you were to accept their characterizations of the political situation, they are completely incapable of being self-reflective on conservatism's role in creating that situation. It's always something the "Liberals/Left/Wokes" etc. are doing to them while the conservatives are just trying to get by. Obviously we can't expect them to agree with liberals, but they don't even seem to want to understand why they've reached such a "despairing" state. But as you say, maybe this is way they want it to be.
I’m in the middle of reading George Nash’s history of intellectual conservatism and have been struck by how much gravitational pull communism played in the post war right.
The collapse of the USSR was to conservatives like the sun disappearing causing the planets to go adrift.