They’re all dead now. All the unofficial fathers of modern conservatism: William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk, Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan. All of the self-anointed torch bearers for Edmund Burke are dead, and you might be tempted to think that these men (always men) would be aghast at what the Republican party has become under Donald Trump. Trump is, after all, a graceless, ignorant sack of shit. Whereas the forebears of his party were men of principle. Good men. Strong men. The kind of men you could have a whiskey and civilized argument with! These were the mythical good conservatives.

And being a “good” conservative is a very marketable thing to be right now. It’s done wonders for Senators like John McCain and Jeff Flake, both of whom have earned lavish praise for offering the occasional STERN REBUKE to Trump and doing little more. And it’s made stars out of columnists such as Bret Stephens, who was hired off his #NeverTrump cred and who has since spent his tenure at the New York Times taunting college students and defending Woody Allen.

Because we live in a two-party system, there is an eternal need for legacy media outlets like the Times and CNN to be “balanced,” to give conservatism a platform to rebut all those dirty, screeching liberals. It’s as if the Times strives to recreate every hallway conversation on The West Wing by dishing out a healthy salary to any conservative writer who imitates a William F. Buckley fart from 1971 like it's a bird call. It’s a nice thought, this balance. And lord knows that liberals (like me) have a habit of shouting down those that they don’t particularly agree with.

But here’s why I do that from time to time: it’s because conservatism is a big fucking lie.

This take has already been issued, but Trump is hardly an anomaly among Republicans. He is not some hideous byproduct of conservatism gone astray. There are shades of Trump in every Republican president of my lifetime. In Reagan, there is Trump's vacuous celebrity. In George H.W. Bush, there is a touch of Trump’s signature horniness. In George W. Bush, there are Trump’s malapropisms, his disdain for intellectuals, and a rich Northern boy’s need to look and sound tough. In all three men, there is Trump’s steadfast belief that the USA is exceptional, a literal gift from God and a shining beacon to the world. And my lifetime doesn't even cover Nixon, who could claim Trump as his spiritual love child.

"It’s as if the Times strives to recreate every hallway conversation on The West Wing by dishing out a healthy salary to any conservative writer who imitates a William F. Buckley fart from 1971 like it's a bird call."

Trump is a blunter instrument of conservatism than those men, but he’s a conservative all the same. In fact, he’s such a useful instrument of the cause that legislators under him will forgive virtually ANY sin (and there are many!). Trump is a proven liar, but on a grander scale he’s the embodiment of a lie that conservatives have been peddling for decades.

That is because the entire philosophical foundation of conservatism is a template for exploitation. William F. Buckley was a rich asswipe with an affected accent who never had to worry about money a day in his life, and yet he remains a hero of the conservative movement for founding National Review and establishing the credo that the magazine, and the conservative movement as a whole, “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” It is the stupidest credo ever devised, but it makes perfect sense coming from a man whose life stood to benefit in every way from the preservation of the status quo. And boy, did Buckley benefit. He ran a magazine. He hosted a TV show. He went to fabulous parties. He died with an estate valued in the tens of millions of dollars (FUN FACT: he specifically omitted his illegitimate grandchild by name from that estate, saying in his will that the boy was “predeceased” to him).

There is no universally agreed-upon set of principles for modern conservativism, but you can make a rough list of them from both Buckley’s NR mission statement and from the ten principles of conservatism laid out by author Russell Kirk, whom Buckley revered. Now, like most conservative writings, these principles are written in the kind of highfalutin dipshit-ese designed specifically to impress any self-declared “enfant terrible” in your school’s debate club. It’s all insufferably pompous. But if you plow through all of Kirk’s bone dry copy, you will see the blueprint for the con laid out. There must be a moral order, although whose morals should be adhered to isn’t quite clear. You cannot create a Utopian society, so there’s no point in trying. Change is bad and dangerous. Inequality is not only inevitable but necessary. Men should only count on their fellow man for help, and not on any kind of state-created support system. And “the conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human Passions,” which makes it clear that Kirk doesn’t like too much of the sexy business going on.