Radio Derb Is On The Air: If Trump Isn’t A "Movement" Conservative, Neither Are Voters

By John Derbyshire

01/22/2016

Radio Derb is on the air — excerpt:
… National Review against Donald Trump. The venerable conservative magazine has published a special issue urging conservatives to not support Trump, on the grounds that he’s not a conservative.

They have a point, but at the same time they're missing a more important point.

The point they have is that Trump has almost no track record as a movement conservative. Trump shows no acquaintance with the ideas that have shaped the post-WW2 conservative movement. I’m just flipping through George Nash’s book The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945. Eric Voegelin, Whittaker Chambers, Ludwig von Mises, Russell Kirk, Willmoore Kendall, … Do any of these names mean anything to Trump? I doubt it.

The point they're missing is that, first — all right, I’m going to make two points out of it — first, there is such a thing as gut conservatism, as distinct from head conservatism. A great many Americans — tens of millions — are conservatives without ever having heard of Willmoore Kendall.

Playlist/MP3:

01m01s — Spinster power. (Campaigning in a cloud of ambiguity.)

10m04s — The Thucydides Trap. (A struggle for status and prestige.)

18m46s — Make America great for whom? (Fertility goddess meets alpha male.)

26m12s — Squirmishing with the GOP establishment. (The irrelevance of intellectual conservatism.)

30m02s — The end of tourism. (See the Pyramids along the Nile … if you dare.)

37m20s — Vagabonds and strumpets. (Race fuss of the week.)

44m32s — Regularizing Easter. (Can’t we just keep it lunar, Arch?)

47m11s — China leads the world. (In ice chess.)

48m50s — Signoff. (A glimpse of the old, weird America.)

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