It’s amazing how many “legacy” conservatives — writers and old-school bloggers who came to prominence 20 years ago, during the Bush II era — simply don’t get it still. You could see it in their reactions to J.D. Vance getting selected as Donald Trump’s running mate, ranging from muted to disappointed to exasperated.
These are guys who support Trump and the New Right movement only incidentally and reluctantly, as the least bad option currently available to them. They’re not enthusiastic about having to do so, and they’re still hoping — yearning, even — for a return to the Republican Party of old, governed by Reagan’s tripartite coalition of Chamber of Commerce business conservatives, national security hawks, and Falwell-era Christian conservatives.
These people still — after nearly a decade — view Trump and his associated movement as a fad. An unruly teenage period that will one day pass, after which the adults in the party can lead the GOP back to its respectable roots, and modern-day conservatives will learn proper reverence for the ideology of Ronald Reagan (born 1911) and William F. Buckley (born 1925).
Here’s what they either don’t get or refuse to come to terms with: That conservative movement is dead. It died because it simply didn’t work, and it’s a death well deserved.
It died when George W. Bush, the spiritual — and biological — heir of the movement, launched an unnecessary war that left thousands of Americans, most of them from working-class backgrounds,
