That is flagrant sophistry that should embarrass The Claremont Institute. What were they thinking? The author would have Claremont Institute readers believe that the only way to safeguard virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, and character is to be led by an erratic reality TV host best known for his greed and crassness!

They hosted Decius’ argument that the only way to proceed as if virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, and character really matter to conservatives is to energetically elevate a man who goes on Howard Stern to brag about his serial adultery; who swindles his creditors with strategic bankruptcies; who praises Vladimir Putin as a good leader; who fleeced working class Americans credulous enough to attend Trump University; who eagerly puts his name in big letters atop gambling dens; who displays his erratic temperament and historically narcissistic personality daily; who might take any position under the sun on any number of issues; who is as ignorant of religion and dismissive of Judeo-Christian ethics as they come.

Strip away the clever writing and this is idiocy. But Decius is not an idiot. He has ingeniously smuggled a radically anti-conservative agenda into a conservative think tank.

Wittingly or not, the Claremont Institute has published an essay that wants to persuade conservatives of a major alt-right premise. As a reader sympathetic to that movement put it, the alt-right “rejects the procedural fetishism of parliamentary and representative democracies.” It rejects “the ideas of blank slate human nature, proposition nationalism, the dominance of economic thinking, and a society built off Enlightenment-era social engineering. You might then refer to the Alt-Right as the Illiberal Right. It is essentially a rejection of the entire ideology of Liberalism, including the idea that ‘all men are created equal’ is self evident in any way.”

The Decius essay argues from the same premise: that conservatism grounded in the principles of the Founding, in the Declaration and the Constitution, should be abandoned. The essay would be more honest if it forthrightly declared its belief that conservatives are wrong and should wake up to their mistake––that the right must abandon cultural, economic, and political conservatism to rally around an authoritarian, because that’s the only way to stop what the essayist regards as what’s most important.

Can anyone guess what that is? Extra credit if you foresaw its grounding in fear of immigrants:

...most important, the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle. As does, of course, the U.S. population, which only serves to reinforce the two other causes outlined above. This is the core reason why the Left, the Democrats, and the bipartisan junta (categories distinct but very much overlapping) think they are on the cusp of a permanent victory that will forever obviate the need to pretend to respect democratic and constitutional niceties. Because they are. ...Do [conservatives] honestly believe that the right enterprise zone or charter school policy will arouse 50.01% of our newer voters to finally reveal their “natural conservatism” at the ballot box? It hasn’t happened anywhere yet and shows no signs that it ever will. But that doesn’t stop the Republican refrain: more, more, more! No matter how many elections they lose, how many districts tip forever blue, how rarely (if ever) their immigrant vote cracks 40%, the answer is always the same. Just like Angela Merkel after yet another rape, shooting, bombing, or machete attack. More, more, more! This is insane. This is the mark of a party, a society, a country, a people, a civilization that wants to die. Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live.

That passage is worth unpacking. Notice how it refers to much of the political spectrum as a bipartisan “junta,” as if the country has already been taken by force from immigration restrictionists to whom it for some reason belonged; as if the right would only be responding in kind if it were to install its own authoritarian. Notice the equally hysterical prediction that if Hillary Clinton wins it will spell “permanent victory” for Democrats and the left, who will no longer be bound by future elections or the Constitution. Notice how “my people” is defined: non-immigrants.