John O'Sullivan seems to be catching on. He's getting warmer, anyway. He's figured out that Trump supporters might be conservatives, after all. Well, maybe not conservatives of the stature found at National Review, but they are conservatives nonetheless. The differences between the Trump conservatives and the National Review conservatives are not so much in their goals as they are in the means of realizing those goals. Policy wonks vs. working class.
What he doesn't seem to get is that supporting Trump is the only route to achieving conservative goals in our present political climate. He's close, though. [My emphasis below.]
"National conservatism has a domestic concern for the social fabric as well as an outward-looking one for the national interest. (Indeed, I once suggested “social-fabric conservatives” as an alternative to national conservatives.) But because it takes a critical or skeptical view of leftist positions on crime, multiculturalism, etc., it is likely to invite accusations of racism, xenophobia, and much else from the very same leftists. These accusations apparently paralyze thought. For very few conservative politicians have shown enough nous to reply that an accusation of white racism requires more evidence than that the person accused is white. Instead they remain more or less quiescent, avoiding controversy, in the face of mob violence to shut down political opponents and openly racist campaigns to delegitimize the police."
The replacement of the "national conservatives" by "defense conservatives" came about because of relentless attacks from the left that equate nationalism with racism and xenophobia. "Principled conservatives" react by accommodating the leftists, all but abandoning the notion of nationalism in order to appease the leftists and shield themselves from accusations of bigotry. They haven't figured out that finding ever new ways for branding conservatives as bigots is what the left does. If it's not nationalism it will be something else. The latest leftist innovation is to cry bigotry at the slightest misgivings over men using the ladies' restrooms.
Several of the principled conservatives at National Review remain committed to a strategy of appeasing leftists as their way of holding themselves above reproach. Maintaining that stature of moral purity seems to be their highest priority.
Meanwhile, Trump obliterates the PC attack strategy. He don't need no stinking moral purity. Who the hell is Hillary to call him sexist? Trump, racist? Bullsh*t! He didn't get to be a racist until he ran as a Republican. Trump has blunted the attack that principled conservatives have made their careers carefully evading. In short, Trump is crushing the politically correct.
Mr. O'Sullivan seems right on the verge of understanding, but not quite. What's to become of conservative influence in the Republican party, he wonders, as if that's the most important thing in this election. How about joining with Trump to thoroughly defeat and discredit the politically correct attacks and worry about conservative purity later? Losing the election to the criminally leftist Hillary and the bumbling leftist Sanders will cement political correctness and all of its excesses as national policy. Liberty will be the loser.
Still, there are the snowflakes at National Review, Goldberg and Williamson to name a couple, who seem to have no idea, whatever, where the danger to America lies. O'Sullivan, on the other hand, is catching on.
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