Government, as a public-spirited force for good, largely has lost its way. But the beneficiaries of the status quo won’t endanger it—they’ll tweak, but they’ll never seriously disrupt. They can’t prevail on substance. So they’re reduced to disqualifying Trump on style.
His recent inaccurate portrayal of Americans working more than one job is yet another example of the snobbish radicalism that has come to define “mainstream” conservatism.
The fusionists won their war—the Cold War—which is an outcome for which we should all be thankful. But their time has passed, and if we remain tied to them through political nostalgia in the face of mountains of evidence that their ideology isn’t up to the challenges of the present age, we’ll lose the cold civil war facing us today.