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This makes me wonder how much sunlight there'd be between two books named
a. The History of American Conservatism and
b. The History of Illiberalism in America
a. The History of American Conservatism and
b. The History of Illiberalism in America
BTW, that's not a rhetorical question, it's a heuristic one. I would propose, for example, that many of the Bush-era conservatives who are now Never Trumpers would classify as (Lockean or Millian) liberals repulsed by the illiberalism of Trumpism.
Whereas virtually all of the longtime self-described "conservatives" who have come to embrace Trump have done so because Trump speaks aloud various illiberal things they've long thought but had, to varying degrees, kept to themselves.
I don't know how else to make sense of the bizarre return of "anti-PC" rhetoric to the mainstream RNC. It was central in the 90's when they were trying to win elections by gay bashing, but then when then stopped working in the mid-2000s the "anti-PC" stuff kind of faded.
When Trump first started bringing "not going to be so PC anymore" back into his speeches it seemed so archaic, like a weird Pat Buchanan throwback. Well, it turns out that's exactly what it was...an illiberal language that depicted certain swathes of the country as a threat.
Many liberals (both progressive liberals and conservative liberals) thought that such explicitly illiberal talk--talk that deemed Muslims or LGBTQ folks or immigrants as second class citizens--had been banished to the irrelevant fringes of American politics. Guess what? NOPE.
That anti-PC, hateful illiberalism was lurking there all along just waiting to be activated by a politician like Trump who knew how to push the right buttons. Like Wallace did in '68, like Nixon learned to do in '72. Like McCarthy and Father Coughlin had done before them.
