This turned out to be a good week for discussions about conservatism. First, David Roberts of Vox had a Twitter thread ruminating about the state of the American right, turned into a webpage below. He framed it in terms of the NYT's opinion pages' attempt to reflect American conservatism, but expanded to the bigger issue of American conservatism itself.

A section that jumped out to me:

"Here's the main point: the contemporary right-wing in the US has become, in Lionel Trilling's immortal words, a bundle of "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." It's just a tangle of resentments & bigotries, driven by the erosion of white privilege."

"There's always been that element, but for decades it was overlain by a class of DC conservatives who code switched, spoke the Very Serious language of ideas & policies. This is the conservatism that white moderate libs still imagine: an actual ideology, with arguments."

"Trump's rise has shown that purported principles of conservative ideology meant virtually NOTHING to the conservative masses. Trump abandoned the Very Serious script & the RW base didn't care, at all. He voiced their anger & resentments. That's all the RW base is any more."

Many of us have seen aspects of this happening and remarked upon it. But how did it get so bad? Is this the logical outcome of Nixon's Southern strategy? Reagan-Atwaterism? Gingrich? I think it's a combination of all of those.