Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Wednesday, December 07, 2016

Why Haven’t Conservative Thinkers Denounced Trump?

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.