If Trump’s success in the primaries has demonstrated anything, it is that the conservative movement is electorally weak and fading (at least at the presidential level). More than a dozen Republicans ran for the White House this year, each of them seeking to demonstrate his or her conservative bona fides — and yet it was Trump who prevailed, all the while making a mockery of movement conservatism and its failures in both economic and foreign policy.

How can that movement’s leading intellectuals seriously think their ideas will be more popular with voters after those intellectuals torpedo the voters’ preferred candidate?

By encouraging a kamikaze mission against the party’s nominee for president, these movement conservatives will only end up hastening their own demise. Instead of accepting their perhaps temporary status as junior partners in the party (limiting themselves to writing critically about the 2016 election while personally sitting it out), or seeking to carve out a new home and place of influence in the Democratic Party, they would instantaneously transform themselves into martyrs for the conservative movement and outright exiles from (and traitors to) the GOP.