Radio Derb Is On The Air: If Trump Isn't A "Movement" Conservative, Neither Are Voters
01/22/2016
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Radio Derb is on the air—excerpt:
...National Review against Donald Trump. The venerable conservative magazine has published a special issue urging conservatives to not support Trump, on the grounds that he's not a conservative.

They have a point, but at the same time they're missing a more important point.

The point they have is that Trump has almost no track record as a movement conservative. Trump shows no acquaintance with the ideas that have shaped the post-WW2 conservative movement. I'm just flipping through George Nash's book The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945. Eric Voegelin, Whittaker Chambers, Ludwig von Mises, Russell Kirk, Willmoore Kendall, … Do any of these names mean anything to Trump? I doubt it.

The point they're missing is that, first — all right, I'm going to make two points out of it — first, there is such a thing as gut conservatism, as distinct from head conservatism. A great many Americans — tens of millions — are conservatives without ever having heard of Willmoore Kendall.

Playlist/MP3:

01m01s— Spinster power. (Campaigning in a cloud of ambiguity.)

10m04s— The Thucydides Trap. (A struggle for status and prestige.)

18m46s— Make America great for whom? (Fertility goddess meets alpha male.)

26m12s— Squirmishing with the GOP establishment. (The irrelevance of intellectual conservatism.)

30m02s— The end of tourism. (See the Pyramids along the Nile ... if you dare.)

37m20s— Vagabonds and strumpets. (Race fuss of the week.)

44m32s— Regularizing Easter. (Can't we just keep it lunar, Arch?)

47m11s— China leads the world. (In ice chess.)

48m50s— Signoff. (A glimpse of the old, weird America.)

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