If you wanted to boil down conservatism to a single anodyne formula, it might be “reverence for the past.” But reverence, as opposed to respect or understanding, often requires a selective memory: Inspect an image too closely, and flaws that seemed accidental might appear pervasive, even essential. While we usually think of writers and intellectuals as transmitting knowledge, the role of conservative intellectuals is just as often to enable those selective forgettings that make the persistence of their movement possible. From this need comes the birth of something perhaps new in the history of human folly: a knowledge class whose very existence comes from its ability to not-know.

It’s to this kind of return to this haze or amnesia that Ross Douthat almost calls the nation in The New York Times. In one representative column published last fall, “Can the Right Escape Racism?,” Douthat fondly recalls that the conservatism of the second Bush managed to “partially suppress” the “racially polarizing controversies” of the early 1990s and hopes for a return to that better era.

The premise here is clearly flawed: What was suppressed, or forgotten, has returned with a fury. The combination of political legerdemain and the natural improvement of conditions that Douthat credits for a “less racialized” conservatism obviously did not do the trick: Trump happened. When Douthat writes that the “agenda” of the “younger Bush was consciously designed to win over at least some minority voters and leave the Lee Atwater era behind,” he declines to note that Lee Atwater, who ran the infamous race-mongering Willie Horton ad in 1988, did his bloodiest work for the elder Bush.

To be sure, among today’s intellectual defenders of the modern right, Douthat is on the more perspicacious end of the spectrum. Undaunted by their failure to affect any electoral outcomes, the coterie of thinkers and writers who have coalesced loosely around the “Never Trump” movement have staked their careers on the notion that Donald Trump is an aberration, a kind of eruption of atavistic “tribalism” from the prehistoric past, instead of the result of a historical narrative that’s hiding in plain sight for less blatantly self-interested interlocutors.

But as the novelist-cum-political candidate Upton Sinclair noted long ago, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” And so recent months have seen an efflorescence of publication launches on the American right devoted to the larger intellectual project lurking behind the Douthatist reflex: namely, to write Trumpism out of the recent history of the conservative movement. And true to that tacit mission, their fledgling publications dare to imagine a conservative movement primed to govern without the polarizing, vulgar, and bigoted figure of Donald Trump at its helm.