Far-right activist and perennial candidate Alan Keyes is fuming about conservatives’ embrace of Donald Trump. Writing in BarbWire, Keyes warns, “Trump stands for socialism, competently imposed.” Discussing Trump’s onetime support for single payer healthcare, he declares, “Trump doesn’t oppose socialism. He opposes what he sees as the incompetent administration of socialism.”

Keyes urges conservatives to pay more attention to Trump’s record than to his campaign rhetoric, calling Trump “a leftist Democrat” who “is not now nor has he ever been a conservative — in principle or in the policies of the candidates he has supported.” He says conservatives have been “mesmerized” by Trump’s rhetoric on immigration.

I’ve often told people that the only thing worse than the incompetent socialism we’ve seen around the world would be socialism, competently imposed. As someone like Solzhenitsyn well understood, the real objection to the socialist ideology isn’t just its failure to deliver “the goods.” It’s the fact that it invites people to understand those goods in strictly materialistic terms. By doing so socialism denies the spirit God shares with humanity, thereby endangering our living souls. But exactly what significance do spirit and soul have for someone like Donald Trump, who professes to be a Christian, yet frankly admits that he has never seriously sought God’s forgiveness. Instead, he says, if and when he has sinned, he just fixes it himself. This is precisely the delusion that lies at the heart of the socialist ideology– the delusion of God-denying self-sufficiency that obscures the intangible essence of human being, so that people may be regarded as nothing more than complex arrangements of soulless matter, no more intrinsically significant than the dust. The literally atrocious aspects of the socialist regimes of the 20th century were not a function of the incompetence with which they were administered. They were the inevitable result of the degraded view of human personality the socialist ideology entails and inculcates.

Even though Keyes ran for the U.S. Senate three times as the Republican Party nominee (twice in Maryland and once in Illinois), he left the GOP after his second failed bid for the presidential nomination in 2008. It seems clear that he has lost faith and patience with Republican leaders and voters: