I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong

NY Times ^ | Rick Perlstein

[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

[GOPJ]

Which poses a question: If Donald Trump is the latest chapter of conservatism’s story, might historians have been telling that story wrong?

Is it possible Liberal Elite Historians who are full fledged members of 'THE SWAMP' - men who hate and look down on Conservatives, could be 'wrong'? ROTFLMAO...