1. A few quick thoughts on Stormy Daniels,Donald Trump, Edmund Burke, Hugh Hefner, National Review, Guy Davenport, Theodore Sturgeon, chivalry & patriarchy.
2. Donald Trump is the most X-rate president ever. Weeks before election he paid off porn actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about affair (including attempted threesome with another adult cinema thespian.
3. "How can Trump be the Ron Jeremy of presidents & still have the support of evangelical Christians & social conservatives," liberals marvel. "Isn't that hypocritical." No, not really.
4. It's true that during the great Porn Wars that raged from 1960s to 1990s, religious right (Falwell & co.) made censoring smut one of their big issues.
5. But even during the Porn Wars, there was a minority position among conservatives, inflected by libertarianism & 18th century aristocratic libertinism, that was open to smut.
6. In 1966, William F. Buckley lamented that Hugh Hefner's had a hedonistic ethic “to which such modern ‘conservatives’ as Ayn Rand seem fully to subscribe.” But it wasn't just Rand, but also many National Review writers.
7. National Review had a strong contingent of writers who welcomed the breakdown of censorship & wrote literary erotica: D. Keith Mano, Guy Davenport, Theodore Sturgeon (NR's main reviewer of sci-fi in 1960s).
8. Here is National Review senior editor Jeffrey Hart, in a 1985 Partisan Review essay, extolling Playboy. 
9. Pro-porn conservatives won the day in part through technology (hard to roll back the internet) but also because patriarchy & porn work well together.
10. With the rise of feminism & LGBT activism, conservatives started to look at Hefner & other smut merchants as upholder of traditional heteronormativity and gender norming.
11. The Federalist: Hugh Hefner's "work celebrates the sexual complementarity that has bound men and women together since the dawn of time" Translation: porn is better than accepting trans people.
12. As patriarchy is under fresh challenge, conservatives, including evangelical christians, are looking for allies where they can find them, including Trump's overt piggishness.
13. The older conservatism was Patriarchy With the Mask of Chivalry. Women were promised protection in exchange for submission. Now the mask has come off.
14. As I keep saying, Trump turns subtext into text. As against chivalry's mask he gives us raw male id: banging porn starts & boasting about size of his nuclear button.
15. Unlike National Review libertines, evangelical Christians haven't explicitly made their peace with porn. But they talk about it less than in 1980s & their revealed preference shows in their love of Trump.
16. Edmund Burke, 17900: "The age of chivalry is gone." Brother, you don't know the half of it. Trump is post-chivalric conservatism.
20. For more reflections on Trump & the rise of Porno-Conservatism, see here: newrepublic.com/article/146631…
