#RealConservative
Trump is, in the decisive sense, more conservative than the entire
conservative establishment. Unlike them, he is actually trying to
conserve something bigger than his job and status: namely, the American
nation. Yet “Trumpism” needs something Trump himself cannot provide.
John Derbyshire praises Trump’s “gut conservatism” as a welcome relief
from the failures of the intellectual class. One can sympathize with
his point without finding it altogether satisfying. “Gut conservatism”
after all still depends on some definition of what conservatism is.
Which requires thinking and writing, i.e., intellectualism, and perhaps
even philosophy. The gut may be right more
Trump
seems to grasp intuitively something our elites have forgotten or
smugly deny: politics is by nature particular. ... Even the ancient
Greek philosophers—the greatest abstractionists of all time—understood
the necessity of borders and the permanence of national distinctions.
Socrates’ “city in speech”—the greatest political abstraction of all
time—is closed to outsiders.
often than a broken clock, but—as Trump’s contradictory pronouncements
over the years illustrate—it is unreliable and so must be ruled by the
brain, which nature generously provides for the purpose. Derbyshire is
thus too quick to dismiss conservative intellectualizing as irrelevant.
Forging a fresh definition of conservatism, or of reinterpreting the
old one to meet the necessities of the times, is not merely relevant
but necessary.
Yet it is unquestionably true that to this task, our current crop of
mainstream conservative intellectuals is not merely unsuited but wholly
useless.
National Review’s anti-Trump symposium reads as if it were written to
make the point undeniable. Trump supports ethanol! Burn the heretic!
At least listing the “conservative” boxes that Trump fails to check can
be considered substantive. The rest of the symposium—like nearly all
other conservative anti-Trump broadsides—consists merely of personal
attacks. Many of which, to be fair, Trump has coming. But all this
hardly amounts to a conservative refutation of, or counterproposal to,
Trump’s program. The most they could say on that score was to
paraphrase, probably subconsciously, Lionel Trilling’s dismissal of
20th century conservatism as “irritable mental gestures which seek to
resemble ideas” and apply it to Trump.
[The Full Monty]
