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I do not say this is a good thing or a bad thing. Some of these developments are welcome, some are not. I record it only as a fact. The energy, the impetus, the advantage today is all on the left.

Whether the intellectual incoherence on display in the Republican presidential race is a cause or consequence of this is hard to say. The extremity of the solutions offered by the “conservative” candidates is not a sign of the health of the movement, but of its increasing disconnect with reality. None has a fiscal plan that is remotely credible. Each would, if implemented, bankrupt the federal government in short order.

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The special obnoxiousness of Trumpism, while in some sense a reaction to the excesses of identity politics, is in fact its own form of it. Trump is not appealing, as his answer to “political correctness,” to a universalistic liberalism that transcends differences of race and sex: he is simply championing an identity politics for white males.

But the crude revanchism of his racial politics is a graduate seminar next to the rest of his platform, a nightmarish mix of big-government populism and authoritarian nationalism. Worse, he has dragged the other candidates in his direction. To see conservatives turning against free trade is the surest sign of their confusion.

But then, as others have noted, while Trumpism may be a repudiation of conservatism, it is also a creation of it: not as a philosophy, in the distinguished tradition of Burke and Hayek, but in the caricature form practiced by the Republican Party. The winking indulgence of racism and other forms of intolerance, the extreme ideological rigidity of the Tea Party, the anti-intellectualism and general goonishness of the party’s “entertainment wing” in talk radio: all helped prepare the way for Trump.