To take power, May had to pretend that she, too, dreams these impossible dreams. And that led her to embrace a phony populism in which the narrow and ambiguous majority who voted for Brexit under false pretences are be reimagined…
#Conservatism
Fintan O’Toole: Britain: The End of a Fantasy – The New York Review of Books
Posted in Noted & Quoted, Political Philosophy, Politics Tagged with: Brexit, Conservatism, Populism
Bret Stephens: Don’t Dismiss Trump’s Attacks on the Media as Mere Stupidity – TIME
The most painful aspect of this has been to watch people I previously considered thoughtful and principled conservatives give themselves over to a species of illiberal politics from which I once thought they were immune. In his 1953 masterpiece, “The…
Jeet Heer: National Review’s Sad Surrender to Trump – New Republic
Forfeiting the ideals of Never Trump, National Review is starting to embrace, slowly and awkwardly, the Republican president out of fealty to the party. This was perhaps an inevitable development. The magazine was born in 1955 as a revolt against…
Posted in Noted & Quoted, Operation American Greatness, Politics Tagged with: Conservatism, NeverTrump
Ross Douthat: From Roe to Trump – The New York Times
[T]oday’s conservatism has far more to gain from the defeat of Donald Trump, and the chance to oppose Clintonian progressivism unencumbered by his authoritarianism, bigotry, misogyny and incompetence, than it does from answering the progressive drift toward Caesarism with a…
David Frum: The Conservative Case for Voting for Clinton – The Atlantic
[S]he is a patriot. She will uphold the sovereignty and independence of the United States. She will defend allies. She will execute the laws with reasonable impartiality. She may bend some rules for her own and her supporters’ advantage. She…
Jonathan Chait: The GOP’s Age of Authoritarianism Has Only Just Begun – New York
The likelihood that Hillary Clinton will win on November 8 reduces the possibility of total conservative control within the next four years. But Trump has revealed — and hastened — the Republican Party’s transformation. In June, Ed Conard, a former…
Ross Douthat: What the Right’s Intellectuals Did Wrong – NYTimes.com
[T]oday, three generations after Buckley and Burnham, the academy and the mass media are arguably more hostile to conservative ideas than ever, and the courts and the bureaucracy are trending in a similar direction. Reflecting on this harsh reality has…
Matthew Continetti: Crisis of the Conservative Intellectual – Free Beacon
The triumph of populism has left conservatism marooned, confused, uncertain, depressed, anxious, searching for a tradition, for a program, for viability. We might have to return to the beginning to understand where we have ended up. We might have to…
Will Wilkinson: What If We Can’t Make Government Smaller? – Niskanen Center
Folks on the right need to consider the possibility that we’ve been wrong to see demand for government as the sort of dependent variable that can be manipulated through education or propaganda or political organizing or too-clever-by-half fiscal policy gymnastics…
Re: @dscotto10’s GOPocalypse, Part 2: The Upstart – Ordinary Times
Rubio’s neoconservatism referenced bygone and imagined new eras of dominance, but Rubio’s campaign and relative to Trump and Christie Rubio himself expressed, embodied, and seemed even to undergo, or perhaps to re-enact, its emasculation.