But in making that turn, so far, the American version of conservatism hasn’t solved a problem that’s also distilled in Ahmari vs. French — the problem of how a culturally conservative movement can expect to thrive under the leadership of a figure as distant from its official ideals, and as alienating to persuadable voters, as the figure of Donald Trump.
The problem is both moral and practical. Moral, because Trump implicates his supporters in policies and personal behavior, from birtherism to child separation to adultery with porn stars and sexual assault, that are un-Christian in a particularly naked way. Practical, because even if you argue that these compromises are politically necessary, there is no way for the Republican coalition to successfully re-fuse around some mix of cultural conservatism and economic populism without not only the white working-class voters Trump won in 2016, but substantially more minority and/or younger and/or female votes as well.
There are voters out there that a moralistic and populist conservative right might win but a flagrantly hypocritical and ethnonationalist conservatism cannot. And so far post-fusionist conservatism has devoted more energy to devising clever anti-anti-Trump arguments than to addressing head-on an obvious question like, How are you going to persuade more African-American Christians to support what seems like a white-chauvinist formation?
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