Despite the rise of Trump, conservatism isn’t dead yet

Sell your Adam Smith ties, everybody, and smash your busts of Ronald Reagan. It’s all over.

Why? Because we have entered a new era of “nationalism,” or “patriotism,” or simply “Trumpism,” and the GOP will never be a traditionally and ideologically conservative party ever again.

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That seems to be the conclusion of a vast and growing number of prominent conservative commentators who are sure that Donald Trump has changed, or destroyed, conservatism forever. Type “The Republican Party is Dead” or “GOP R.I.P.” into a search engine and you’ll get a sense of how far and wide this notion has spread.

Consider the inestimable Peggy Noonan, writing from the Olympian heights of the Wall Street Journal. She is increasingly adamant that Trump has ushered in a grand new era, a kind of Year Zero for the American Right. The once-conservative masses no longer want to hear about liberty or freedom — they want to be “protected” by government, Noonan wrote in February.

As Trump solidified his power, Noonan set about to shoot the wounded. “Those conservative writers and thinkers who have for nine months warned the base that Mr. Trump is not a conservative should consider the idea that a large portion of the Republican base no longer sees itself as conservative,” she wrote last month.

A week later, Noonan again castigated anti-Trump forces in Washington. She insinuated that the Beltway elitists opposed to Trump seek to rebuild a post-Trump GOP as “a neoconservative, functionally open-borders, slash-the-entitlements party.”

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That won’t happen, she insists, because “centers of gravity are shifting. The new Republican Party will not be rebuilt and re-formed in [the tony D.C. suburb] McLean, it will be rebuilt or re-formed in Massapequa [the Long Island suburb made famous by Joey Buttafuoco].”

Looking past the uncharacteristically weak and unfair snipes, this is somewhat amusing, given where Noonan works. The Wall Street Journal — arguably America’s best newspaper, by the way — is editorially closer to “open borders” than any other mainstream outlet. Its position on entitlements is even more stridently — and more correctly — in favor of major reform, as was Noonan not long ago. The term “slash” is beneath her, given that this is the sort of irresponsible left-wing rhetoric she once decried.

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