From NYRB, Donald Trump’s brains: Jacob Heilbrunn reviews The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom by Thomas G. West; American Greatness: How Conservatism Inc. Missed the 2016 Election and What the D.C. Establishment Needs to Learn by Chris Buskirk and Seth Leibsohn; Billionaire at the Barricades: The Populist Revolution from Reagan to Trump by Laura Ingraham; How the Right Lost Its Mind by Charles J. Sykes; and The Spirit of Liberty: At Home, In the World by Thomas O. Melia and Peter Wehner.
Jeet Heer on Art Laffer and the intellectual rot of the Republican Party. Can conservative journalism survive? The Right’s old guard faces an existential threat in populism — but it isn’t yet clear that they understand the stakes or possess the confidence to fight back. Conservatism can’t survive Donald Trump intact: As reflexive support for the president redefines their movement, most conservative commentators have caved to pressure, following along. Divorce conservatism from the Republican Party: In the Trump era, many commentators on the Right have subsumed intellectual principles to partisan politics (and more and more).
In 2016, a group of Republicans broke ranks with their party to try to stop Donald Trump from winning the presidency; now they’re rallying once more to keep him from destroying the country — Sam Tanenhaus reports on the Never Trumpers. We can’t wait around for the GOP to implode. Facts have a well-known liberal bias: Trying to pretend that the parties are the same is deeply destructive.
