Sunday, January 24, 2016

"Attempts to Make Sense of All This"

"But two things make Trump's candidacy both more interesting and more worrying. The first is that he's more of an exclamation mark than an aberration. The Republican Party has been playing with fire for years: This is a political organization that, because of its intransigence, has closed down America’s government (and reduced its credit rating), and that has nominated the ridiculously unqualified Sarah Palin for the vice presidency. The second is that Trump is not always wrong. Establishment conservatives like Jeb Bush cast the civil war over the party's identity as a battle between responsible politicians like himself and irresponsible rabble rousers like Trump. But for all his carnival-barking persona, Trump has rightly condemned the establishment for supporting tax breaks for the rich and government handouts for corporate cronies."

Adrian Wooldridge in The New York Times reviews E. J. Dionne, Jr.'s Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism—From Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond and Matt K. Lewis's Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Betrayed the Reagan Revolution to Win Elections (and How It Can Reclaim Its Conservative Roots).

And in New York, Jonathan Chait writes that "[m]ovement conservatism rejects the conclusions of wide swaths of economists, social scientists, the entire field of climate science … of course it is liable to attract anti-intellectual candidates."

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