Posted on 04/11/2017 10:54:03 PM PDT by BunnySlippers
A historian of conservatism looks back at how he and his peers failed to anticipate the rise of the president.
---
Until Nov. 8, 2016, historians of American politics shared a rough consensus about the rise of modern American conservatism. It told a respectable tale. By the end of World War II, the story goes, conservatives had become a scattered and obscure remnant, vanquished by the New Deal and the apparent reality that, as the critic Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950, liberalism was “not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.”
Year Zero was 1955, when William F. Buckley Jr. started National Review, the small-circulation magazine whose aim, Buckley explained, was to “articulate a position on world affairs which a conservative candidate can adhere to without fear of intellectual embarrassment or political surrealism.”
Buckley excommunicated the John Birch Society, anti-Semites and supporters of the hyperindividualist Ayn Rand, and his cohort fused the diverse schools of conservative thinking — traditionalist philosophers, militant anti-Communists, libertarian economists — into a coherent ideology, one that eventual
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Thanks.
... And the NYT apparently think so highly of this article. Notice it has a full page to itself, red. And it has a lead in, just under the mast, linking to this article.
Well, I suppose it’s the best the NY Times can do - and THAT is pathetic!
I think he is an aborted child of Lyndon LaRouche...
Just Jealous...
He is none of these. He is an American. And throughout the short but glorious history of our nation Americans have been known as people who try new shit and if it don't work try something else till they find what solves the problem. This basically comes from being born in a market economy where results are what got you the prize. Long story short Americans learned how to make mistakes and learn from them very fast and adapt.
Politicians are basically diametrically opposed to such a philosophy. If they do something that is a mistake they will deny it is such and double down on the stupid and get their minions to go forth and shout down the truth till the lie becomes the accepted truth.
Trump was not just elected by the rightwingers or conservatives etc. He was elected by Americans many of them had voted for Barrack Obama. They figured out it was a mistake and learned and adapted. This confuses the occupants of the ivory towers because they had worked so hard to deny the truth that liberals (Obama and Hitlery) were screwing things up. Now they sit around and write papers trying to explain the phenomenon and fail miserably when anyone with an IQ north of 70 can tell you...
Americans were just tired of the same old shit...
I can see little Rick now standing outside with all of his Liberal convictions and biases, his mental universe built around the perfectibility of mankind with government force, trying to understand conservatism.
The darkness he peers through is brought by the blinders of his mindset. Useless maundering.
Anyone not blinded by emotion could see Trump marketing to the rust belt states. Even in the debates he kept on marketing. It was a brilliant tactic.
Are there others besides me who believe many voters
turned to Trump because they thought the Democrats
were going too far left, too damned fast? I’m not
talking about myself because I am a lifelong conservative.
A large number of people don’t just vote FOR one side,
they also vote AGAINST the other. You wouldn’t know
it by all the water the media carried for the liberals
for years but throngs of people just are not willing to jump
on the Obama socialist bandwagon. And, Trump offered
enough conservative ideas to draw other voters away
from the get along RINO candidates.
Guys like Perlstein can’t and won’t understand that we
don’t reside in a vacuum.
Yeah, right...............
Hope his presidency doesn’t become George W. round 3 with pointless wars.>>> and pictures of killed babies staged by isis and our CIA triggers him to bomb -— oh not isis. the other bad guy. and we should remove this bad guy and replace him with isis?
terms like “the right” or “conservative” are ultimately just different ways of saying “big government”.
there are very few non-socialists in government today, as indicated by the response to some of Trumps proposals that actually contain a fair amount of conservative content.
despite the conventional wisdom Trump is the most conservative president we have had in many decades, perhaps longer, if you define it in terms of shrinking government scope, size, and power.
this will, no doubt, surprise some.
“conservative” has no meaning by itself anymore. its like a participation ribbon. nobody has to actually believe in anything to claim it.
Americans were just tired of the same old >>> there is truth in your words kemosabe. and when reagan said that government is part of the problem people understod that to be tru.
“He is widely [among the Left] regarded as someone who understands the Right”
if you believe in small government, constitutionalism, fiscal reason, abd other quaint notions, you do not have a home among “the right”.
that is what the last election proved.
Liberal historian claiming expertise on something for which he does not understand at all.
libertarian economists = ruinous policy.
The main thing is the wall and turning the tide on the immigration invasion. Nothing else really matters.
It's certainly true. But the reason why it's true is because it's chock-full of hypocritical, lying sinners, just like the church. And that goes for the rank-and-file as well as the amazingly corrupt leaders.
Romans 8:22 For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.
I remind myself of that old joke: If I ever find the perfect church, I had better not join it.
Fascist states are like that, stomp out the opposition.
The Left LOVES dictatorships when they hold the power.
As opposed to Stalinist apologists and Red Dupe traitors.
Stalinists lie. Always
How does he defend Pete Seeger, Woodie Gutherie, and other American Communists protesting AGAINST going to war against Hitler?
Woodie’s guitar didn’t “kill fascists” until AFTER the Pearl Harbor attack.
Pete even sang songs about how wrong it was to fight Du Pont’s war for corporatists.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.