1. Another historian weighs in on that @politico article that criticized liberal historians who write about conservatism. s-usih.org/2018/09/academ…
2. "The conservatives who want to rehabilitate their movement by decrying Trump ignore the historical complexity of their own side of the political spectrum by denying him a place on it."
3. We shouldn't have to choose between liberal histories of conservatism that are attentive to racism, and conservative histories of conservatism that do not discuss it at all. 
4. Likewise with conspiracy thinking and conservatism. To reduce all conservatives to conspiracy obsessed nuts is obviously wrong (and I can't think of a historian who does that)...but to act like the Birchers had no connection to mainstream conservatism is also incorrect.
5. Good history is written neither to condemn or defend, but rather to understand. We all have a stake in understanding how the GOP (and the conservative movement with which it's been closely aligned) have evolved over time, as a way to understand where it might be headed.
6. A Never Trump variety of conservative history that doesn't reckon with how their own, conservative movement could produce someone like Trump is a history that, IMHO, will not offer the sorts of insights they'll need as they figure out how to take conservatism back.
7. This is why the tic of "liberals are what brought us Trump" bugs the heck out of me. Transgender people, college students, BLM activists, climate hawks...none of those people brought us Trump. Conservative populism (i.e. white identity politics) brought us Trump.
8. A history of conservatism that can help us navigate into a better future must honestly come to terms with how that tradition came unmoored from its roots in classical liberalism and came to embrace racial and religious illiberalism.
9. Pointing out the connection between conservatism and dangerous illiberalism (i.e., ethnic and religious nationalism) is not to reduce all conservatism to illiberalism, but merely to ask for critical, retrospecitve self-reflection on the part of those who lived that history.
