1. David Frum apparently still thinks conservative politics is all about ideas. If you have better ideas then you'll win. As a historian who writes about ideas, I'd like to live in such a world...but that is not the world the conservative movement has built.
2. Since the 1960s, the conservative movement has gained adherents in three ways--a) through emotionally-charged appeals to aggrieved but entitled identities (whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality, Christianity, etc.), b) through serving business interests, and c) through ideas.
3. This book has been required reading for any conservative intellectual since it came out in 1976. It frames the history of conservatism as the rise of a bundle of sophisticated ideas that ran counter to the New Deal orthodoxy of the post WWII era. amazon.com/Conservative-I…
4. Nash's book is about the clash of intellectual titans like Russell Kirk, the Southern Agrarians, William F. Buckley, Frank Meyer, Milton Friedman, Leo Strauss, and many many others. It's a bible of sorts for the David Brooks's, Ross Douthat's, David Frum's of the world.
5. Nash frames conservatism as a brave, dissenting intellectual tradition devoted to personal liberty in an era in which various forms of statism (Communist, socialist, and liberal) threatened to undermine liberty by fostering large scale forms of collective action.
6. But here's the thing that recent historians of conservatism have uncovered (and which Trump's rapid takeover of the @gop seems to confirm)--outside the rarefied world of conservative intellectuals, very few conservative voters actually knew or cared much about those ideals. 
7. The conservative movement was driven by a) business interests who had obvious, self-interested reasons to combat the power of a state that wanted to tax and regulate them in the public interest... amazon.com/Invisible-Hand…
8. ...and b) by grassroots activists who were appalled by the social transformations wrought by the 1960s. The backlash against the civil rights movement, against feminism, against the gay rights movement, etc. was THE fuel which powered white, conservative identity politics.
9. This is not to deny the importance or authenticity of the conservative ideas Nash analyzes in his excellent book. Many @gop leaders took those ideas seriously, and many did not regard them as being either a defense of the rich or a cover for racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.
10. But by this point it should be clear that Trumpism has succeeded because it is the perfect blend of white identity politics and cynical business interests (tax cuts and deregulation). There is no intellectual history of Trumpism that could be written.
11. I can understand why those drawn to conservatism because of the ideas are shocked and appalled by how easily their fellow conservatives have abandoned conservative ideals to support the authoritarianism, crass xenophobia, and corrupt kleptocracy of the Trump Administration.
12. But for those of us outside of that movement who suspected that the conservative movement was always primarily about identity and interests, Trumpism has not come as such a shock.
13. This brings me back to the Frum/Bannon debate. Bannon is 100% about identity and emotion, and 0% about ideas. Conservatism today is not some noble tussle between traditionalists and fusionists hashed out in the pages of the Nat'l Review, it's a knife fight on social media.
14. In that Toronto debate, David Frum brought a copy of The Federalist Papers to a right wing street fight. A well-reasoned argument about checks and balances will never defeat the angry identitarianism Bannon whips up through his powerful disinformation network.
15. Too many conservative intellectuals think their movement succeeded politically because people came to agree with their ideas. Sadly, it appears like that movement succeeded largely in spite of those ideas, not because of them.
16. What's left are the bitterly resentful, nostalgic identities the movement nurtured and built...and the economic self-interest of a business class that simply resents the idea that they should be held accountable to the wider public (apart from their shareholders & customers).
17. Re-upping this thread from August...which is when I first started thinking in earnest about the relationship between the Never Trump narrative and the history of conservatism as I experienced and learned about it.
