The time of death for the conservative movement was 10 a.m. ET on Wednesday morning. …
In every way, the man who demolished her is less fit for office now than he was eight years ago, when he was arguably already the most grotesquely unfit major party nominee in American history. Older, crazier, more vindictive, more fascist, more criminally exposed: He won in a waltz over a smart, likable, well-qualified, electable conservative despite having barely campaigned and never debating. …
No one, let alone a conservative, should serve as an accomplice to this horde of vicious, illiberal, obscurantist miscreants and freaks. If the swing voters of this country insist on remaining willfully blind to the nature of Trump’s movement in the foolish hope of bringing back grocery prices circa 2019, let them do so without the complicity of those who know better.
In 2016, I argued that conservatives had to choose whether theirs was going to be a movement of cranks and quacks and conspiracy-peddlers or a movement of meaningful conservatism. They made their choice, and I suppose they are learning to live with it—standing athwart history, barking at the moon with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and all the filth, waste, and imbecility for which he stands. Maybe they will choose to be something else, someday. Maybe not. The ’60s counterculture did not choose to reform itself—it was simply absorbed into the body politic, like a virus, hijacking the healthy organic processes of infected cells and organs.