SENATOR JEFF FLAKE of Arizona has written a brave book. It states aloud a truth that other Republicans voice only behind closed doors: that the American conservative movement is in crisis. He regrets that a demagogue, President Donald Trump, has lured Republicans into a “Faustian bargain”, offering power if they forget everything they believe about free trade and individual freedom, about leading global alliances against tyranny, and even about personal honour. Republicans succumbed as rapidly as a “tranquilised elephant”, he writes in “Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle”. Now they languish in an “unconservative stew of celebrity and authoritarianism,” spiced with conspiracy theories.

Bang on cue, Mr Flake’s book has been denounced by Mr Trump’s enablers in the world of conservative celebrity. Strikingly, such critics as Laura Ingraham, an anti-immigrant tribune reportedly sounded out for the post of White House press secretary, or Mark Levin, a splenetic star of conservative radio, do not accuse the Arizonan of exaggeration, or of muddling his priorities.

Instead they call him a de facto Democrat and a “liberal” who must be purged. No matter that Mr Flake is a lifelong disciple of Barry Goldwater, the flinty Arizonan prophet of economic freedom, whose own call to arms against an overweening central government was entitled “The Conscience of a Conservative”. They do not care that Mr Flake spent years in Congress opposing abortion, supporting gun rights and voting for lower taxes, enraging party leaders by campaigning against “earmarks” that directed pork-barrel dollars to favoured districts. To the fist-shaking Red Guards of Trumpism, Mr Flake’s crime is to argue—perhaps even to remember—that their movement once held to an enduring set of ideas. In this version of a personality cult, conservatism is whatever their Great Helmsman’s most recent tweet says it is.

Mr Flake’s book may cost him his job. The senator is up for re-election in 2018 and will face challengers from the hardline right and from the left (Arizona is increasingly Hispanic). Mr Trump allegedly threatened to spend $10m of his own money to help oust Mr Flake (an empty boast, on past form), after the pair clashed over immigration, calls for a Muslim ban and other issues.

Given how much the senator has on the line, it seems churlish to argue that he is not brave enough. Alas, his new book, written in secret in case aides tried to dissuade him, stares only half the truth in the face. Mr Flake describes a conservative universe divided in two. One half is a realm of uplifting ideas. The other is a realm of political calculation and voter rage. Rather powerfully, his book accords each realm its own landscape: rugged, sun-baked Arizona for ideas, and swampy Washington for politics. A fifth-generation Arizonan, the senator grew up on the cattle ranch founded by his Mormon ancestors. One of 11 children, he describes a state “where conditions were Spartan and life was what you made of it.” He is not joking: aged five, he was swimming in the community pool when his finger—poorly reattached after an accident with farm machinery—floated away. His mother shushed his cry of “Mom! My finger fell off,” rather than alarm the neighbours. The ranch exposed him to Mexican labourers, who did not always have the right papers but who “usually worked harder than we did”. He brings the thought up-to-date, writing movingly about two Muslim immigrant doctors in Arizona who work tirelessly to save his father-in-law’s life.

Quoting such heroes as Goldwater or Ronald Reagan, Mr Flake makes a limited government sound a bit like parents removing training wheels from a child’s bicycle: a compassionate nudge towards freedom. He contrasts this with the nationalist, zero-sum visions of Trumpism, lamenting that: “Seemingly overnight, we became defined not by the limitless aspirations of a free people but by our grievances and resentments.”

The senator is brave enough to admit that Republicans were losing their way before Mr Trump. Any honest accounting will, he suggests, call Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, the modern progenitor of a conservative politics of personal destruction. Mr Flake notes how such congressional bosses as Tom DeLay shunned chances to pass bipartisan legislation, if a party-line vote would fire up the base. There are not-very-veiled swipes at the present Republican majority leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, for setting out to make Barack Obama a one-term president, rather than pondering how to advance conservative ideas. Mr Flake expresses horror at the moment when 47 Republican senators, led by Tom Cotton of Arkansas, wrote to Iran’s mullahs to tell them that President Obama’s nuclear negotiations were invalid.

Pitting “makers” against “takers”

Yet Mr Flake’s contrast between conservative ideas and partisan rage is too neat and tidy. When Goldwater, his hero, lost the election of 1964 in a landslide, Republicans concluded that his problem was too honest a platform. Americans believed that Goldwater might actually cut back federal safety nets for the old, the sick and the poor. From then on, the party has carefully buttressed calls to love freedom with appeals to resent redistribution, especially to the undeserving. Reagan’s speech about a high-living “welfare queen” mattered as much as sunny talk of individual liberty. Mitt Romney, a far better man than Mr Trump, told Republicans that 47% of the public were a lost cause, believing themselves “victims” entitled to government handouts. Mr Flake is correct to condemn Senator Cotton’s Iran letter. But he should also remember how Mr Cotton once told voters in Arkansas that they had all seen food stamps recipients with steak in their shopping baskets, “talking on a brand-new iPhone”, and heading to a brand-new four-wheel drive car. That was demagoguery, too, in defence of fiscally conservative ideas. Mr Trump is wrecking the Republican Party. But he did not invent conservative rage.