Before the election, I wrote a piece describing why, despite his radical deviation from conservative orthodoxy on many policy issues, Donald Trump’s rise and triumph as a candidate of the right bore an uncanny sort of logic. The Tea Party movement, whose nominal candidate in the Republican primaries had been the upright Christian constitutionalist Ted Cruz, smoothly transferred its support to Trump, the sybaritic populist who said that Cruz’s dad was linked to John F. Kennedy’s killer, and this, somehow, seemed about right. Why not? What’s the difference? This fit with the scheme laid out in Corey Robin’s book “The Reactionary Mind”: the substance of conservative doctrine is secondary to a deeper, perennial force in conservative politics, which is the spirit of reaction itself.
