The National Review is supposed to be one of the intellectual pillars of American conservatism. Its big symposium against Donald Trump kicks off with a piece by Glenn Beck. To be sure, that’s an alphabetical issue, but still. Glenn Beck. The other weighty intellectuals in the symposium include noted plagiarist Ben Domenech and Erick “Justice Souter is a goat-fucking child molester” Erickson. It’s painful to expect anyone to read the whole thing (trust me on this), but let’s bounce around through some of its finer points.
Beck is something of a disappointment, sticking to comparing Trump to Barack Obama and saying he’d make it easy for Hillary Clinton to win the presidency. Ben Domenech—or whoever really wrote the piece attributed to him—writes that what Trump “advocates is a rejection of our Madisonian inheritance and an embrace of Barack Obama’s authoritarianism” and that he has “hollow, Euro-style identity politics.” Erick Erickson would vote for Trump over Clinton in the general but will not support Trump in the primary because “I take my conservatism seriously, and I also take Saint Paul seriously.” Isn’t he a holy man? Steven F. Hayward characterizes the current moment as coming “after three generations of liberalism only slightly interrupted by the Reagan years,” effectively sending George W. Bush down the memory hole.
Commentator and novelist Mark Helprin’s thoughts are especially special. He embraces the conspiracy theory that “at the suggestion of Bill Clinton, Trump has like a tapeworm invaded the schismatically weakened body of the Republican party,” and argues that “a [slur for Bernie Sanders]; a [slur for Hillary Clinton]; and an explosive, know-nothing demagogue — all are competing to see who can be even more like Mussolini than is Obama. But in the caudillo department, surpassing even our own Evita, the Donald wins.” Not to be outdone by the Mussolini comparison, the Hoover Institution’s Thomas Sowell brings Hitler into the picture:
No national leader ever aroused more fervent emotions than Adolf Hitler did in the 1930s. Watch some old newsreels of German crowds delirious with joy at the sight of him. The only things at all comparable in more recent times were the ecstatic crowds that greeted Barack Obama when he burst upon the political scene in 2008.
Elections, however, have far more lasting and far more serious—or even grim—consequences than emotional venting. The actual track record of crowd pleasers, whether Juan Perón in Argentina, Obama in America, or Hitler in Germany, is very sobering, if not painfully depressing.
In short, they really don’t like Donald Trump and they hope he loses the primary. What’s not clear is if all these, uh, eminent conservative thinker types have failed to notice or simply prefer to ignore how much of what they say they dislike about Trump—the authoritarianism, the insulting women, the ignorance of policy and current events, the “vulgarity,” the “shallow narcissism,” the “mean-spirited public persona,” the ignorance, the racism, the divisiveness, the ignorance—is exactly what the Republican base seems to like about Trump … and what that Republican base has been encouraged to seek out in its politicians by the Republican establishment, at least up until the moment the establishment started to lose control of the situation.