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You might love someone for an infinite number of bad reasons, but among the worst and most common of these, surely, is that she’s there. You never chose to identify those qualities you can’t live happily without, or chose to find someone who, say, has them, or chose to make whatever sacrifices are necessary for it all. You chose to go along. If there’s a decision-maker in such a relationship, it is circumstance, not you.

Conservative-leaning parties in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada have allowed circumstance to rule their relationships with voters, and now they’re stuck in a dead-end marriage with people they pursued largely because they are around and they will do. These voters are the belligerents, ever ready and willing to feel resentful toward legacy media, academia, democratic institutions themselves and other imaginary enemies of the nation state.

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They hate, in other words, much of what conservatives ought to love. And conservative parties go on and try to impress them anyway, stoking many of the sentiments they ought to protest. The anti-establishment screechers may never have been the typical conservative politician’s dream demographic, of course, but they were there, and it was easy, and now the parties can’t get out.