This illustrates what happens when you try to bash out the brains of the right. The thing about a movement based on big ideas like individual rights, the rule of law, constitutional government, and so on, is that these big ideas are universal. If free markets are good for white people, they are good for black people, for Asians (as Pacific Rim countries have demonstrated definitively over the past few decades), and for everybody else. The big ideas that make up the intellectual canon of the right are universal ideas about human nature that apply to everyone.

But if you’ve decided that’s just for book nerds who like to ponder, what do you base a movement on other than ideas, reason, and evidence? You base it on blind appeal to emotion. In politics, this is also known as prejudice: the idea that political power should only be held by people “like me,” while people who aren’t like you are the cause of all problems and should be pushed down or kept out. In politics, the opposite of ideology is tribalism. Hence all the people using the #nrorevolt hashtag who proclaim themselves partisans of the cause of “blue-collar whites.”

No, I don’t think Trump intended to become the favorite candidate of the “white power” crowd, nor do I think he is directly responsible for his misfortune in being endorsed by David Duke, (which Trump has tepidly repudiated). I think he only intended to champion the cause to which he has devoted the rest of his life: the praise and public glorification of Donald Trump. But by fashioning a movement based on adulation of a strong leader, with few questions asked about what he knows and where he stands, and then basing his campaign on the most crudely populist anti-immigration rhetoric, he gave the tribalists an opening.

The only good news is that tribalism, while having a certain primeval appeal to the unthinking, is profoundly unpersuasive to those who don’t already embrace it.