It has been a little over 10 years since Donald Trump, with characteristic flair, descended the escalators at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for the presidency of the United States.
Today, we can say in the words of Henry Olsen, the always astute political analyst, that “Trumpism is here to stay,” and that “there will be no conservative return to a pre-Trump consensus.” Advocates of such a return claim to represent republican rectitude and fidelity to constitutional norms now under threat from a supposedly reckless and demagogic populism.
In truth, however, whatever the virtues of the old consensus, its adherents were far from perfect or imitable in important respects. They were slow to resist “the culture of repudiation” (in Roger Scruton’s arresting phrase) that had colonized the educational and entertainment worlds, as well as the commanding heights of civil society, including large swaths of the business sector. In recent decades, these quarters hectored Americans and instructed them to hate themselves. Much of our elite class obsessed about race and gender in ways that undermined self-respect and propagandized groups based on accidents of birth to give themselves over to anger and despair.
Market fundamentalism and a one-sided affirmation of globalization and trade arrangements that were far from free or fair replaced a prudent and principled defense of an opportunity society. The needs of human beings struggling with the loss of manufacturing jobs and the hollowing out of social and moral norms in the decades after the 1960s were often casually dismissed. A blind and self-defeating economism led conservative elites to downplay the revolutionary import of same-sex marriage, which severed human sexuality from authoritative norms rooted in the nature of things, and the excessive valorization of autonomy, which made individual and collective self-government all but impossible.
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