I respect @SethCotlar's work, but I think he's off-base here. (We can both start with a baseball nod. ;-)
Why? Because there's a meaningful distinction between conservative ideology and the conservative movement.
Why? Because there's a meaningful distinction between conservative ideology and the conservative movement.
One is a set of political preferences and policy ideas that coalesced in the mid-20th c. The other is a function of self-identification, calling oneself "conservative." It's hard to imagine someone having the views but not calling themself conservative, but not vice versa.
Picture a Venn diagram in which the larger circle is everyone who calls themselves 'conservative' and the smaller, interior circle is those who'd pass a fusionist conservative orthodoxy test administered by the grumpy ghost of William F. Buckley.
[The slippage b/t ideology and self-definition is familiar for historians of religion, eg, is evangelicalism a particular theology, a la the Bebbington Quadrilateral or variation thereof, or is it whoever calls themselves "evangelical" or "born again"? There's no simple answer.]
So when George Will uses the word 'conservatism', he's contemplating adherence to a half-century old ideological orthodoxy that scholars call fusionist conservatism. When Cotlar uses the term, he's speaking of people who self-describe as conservative. These are different things.
[Useful mental exercise: transpose 'socialist' for 'conservative' & imagine a not-impossible future when self-described socialists are a plurality in the DNC. *Actual* ideologically-committed socialists will be deeply annoyed by the policies from the Blair-ite faux-cialists.]
Yet fusionist conservatism, although it started in the ideological wilderness, conquered the GOP. So successful was the takeover, that 'conservative' became almost--but never quite completely--synonymous with 'Republican' or even 'one of the good, non-RINO Republicans.'
No fusionist conservative worth their salt would support trade wars, a state-defying federal border wall, or Trump's tepid isolationism. Buckley & Bricker are turning in their graves! But GOP base *commitment* to fusionist conservative ideology was always questionable.
And there have long been, of course, other ideological factions vying for control of the GOP, with the ethno-populist / paleo-conservative Buchanan-types jousting with the smaller-but-overrepresented-in-DC libertarians for 2nd place (or 3rd or 4th depending).
But ordinary voters from all factions--despite wildly different ideological inclinations & political priorities--commonly CALLED THEMSELVES CONSERVATIVES. Again, it was a way of saying, "I'm one of the good Republicans," not necessarily fidelity to conservatism as ideology.
So Cotlar's evidence that lots of people who voted for Trump in the general election called themselves conservative is 🤷♂️. Of course they did because political affiliation is the stickiest ideological power in the universe and conservatives are overwhelmingly Republican.
But the correlation breaks down when you look at the 2016 GOP primaries, when self-described conservatives (and white evangelicals for that matter) were less likely to vote for Trump & preferred Cruz, Rubio, Kasich, etc. because they didn't think the Orange One was conservative.
Also, Cotlar's argument assumes that ideology drives electoral outcomes. I think it plays a distinctly secondary role to structural factors. This is why the best performing election prediction models look at economic performance & political landscape while downplaying retail.
Which is to say, Trump won not b/c he was some idiot savant playing 4D chess nor b/c conservatives loved him. He won b/c 2016 was a Republican cycle to lose. The best poli sci models predicted GOP victory BEFORE knowing who had won the nomination.
Now, does this get George Will and other ideological conservatives off the hook entirely for putting the worst DJ to ever spin in the White House? No. You'd think 30+ years of dominating a political party would've left a more indelible ideological footprint than it did.
And conservatives have been all too willing to overlook the awfulness peddled by their frankly disgusting fellow-travelers--or even join in for sake of getting a shot at judges or tax policy or so on--a point that the late John McCain himself made in the final year of his life.
Still, it's not cognitive dissonance for George Will to distinguish b/t the ideological conservative movement he always hoped & worked for and the self-described conservative political movement that was actually produced in the '00s and '10s.
[FWIW, I don't self-describe as conservative or adhere to fusionist conservative ideology, but I think America was better off when ideological conservatives ran the GOP rather than today, when ethno-nationalist bigots are the controlling faction.]
