"[N]ow those small-government conservatives have no party and no country"

One of the great global questions is who, if anyone, gets to opt out of this binary struggle, and how its contours fit into unfamiliar contexts. Ideologues and diplomats have never gotten along, and it’s easy to see why. Do the anti-establishment stirrings among young Mexicans ally them with Trump, who they loathe? Would Trump prefer a Chinese leader who drew more on that country’s confrontational nationalism than the one who starred at Davos? And how does the anti-Muslim vitriol at the center of western nationalism line it with natural allies among nationalists and strongmen in the Muslim world? (The confusion on the right over whether Turkey’s Erdogan is a friendly strongman or a Muslim enemy is instructive.)

Here in the US, perhaps the most striking consequence of this globalization is whom it leaves out: conservatives. Small-government Reaganism was always a homespun American product, its fervor viewed with curiosity even by strategic allies from London to Tokyo to Jerusalem, none of whom seriously question socialized medicine and other “big government” features. Trump’s nationalism is an obvious European import, a blood and soil ethnic politics that the Republican Party’s corporate-minded elite had kept at bay ever since importing its adherents from the Democrats in the 1960s.

Trump did not even breathe in the direction of small government conservatism Friday. No conservative was allowed on stage at the women’s march a day later. And now those small-government conservatives have no party and no country. It’s hard see what becomes of them.