Movement Conservatism, Neoconservative orthodoxy, and Trump

...I think it is important to begin with a review of some essential history, a brief exploration of the evolution of what is now called “Movement Conservatism” and its symbiotic relationship to the modern Republican Party. Understanding this background is critical to comprehending what has happened and is happening, politically and culturally, to what remains of the American republic in 2016. The transformation of the intellectual brain trust for the Republican Party has fundamentally affected and influenced the successive evolution of the positions the Republican Party has taken over the past fifty years.

Before discussing this history, I think it is necessary that we recall that the GOP Establishment, in fact, never gave up its virtual control of the party structure, despite Ronald Reagan...

It was my mentor and friend, the late Dr. Russell Kirk, whose volume The Conservative Mind actually initiated what became the older, scholarly “conservatism” in the 1950s. “Conservatism,” as Kirk explained it, encompassed an inherent distrust of liberal democracy, staunch opposition to egalitarianism, and an extreme reluctance to commit the United States to global “crusades” to impose American “values” on “unenlightened” countries around the world. Conservatives should celebrate local traditions, customs, and the inherited legacies of other peoples, and not attempt to destroy them. America, Kirk insisted, was not founded on a democratic, hegemonic ideology, but as an expression and continuation of European traditions and strong localist, familial and religious belief...

Beginning in the 1970s into the 1980s there was an influx of former Leftist and ex-Trotskyite intellectuals and writers, who had become anti-Communists and who began to move to the right into the older conservative movement. These were denominated the Neoconservatives, or Neocons. At first the Neocons were welcomed as ex-Marxists “coming in from the cold.” The problem was, and still is, that the Neocons brought with them not only their welcomed and spirited anti-Communism, but also their intellectual template of across-the-board egalitarianism, internationalism, and an a priori liberal and global interventionist foreign policy, which has, as its underlying principle, an almost chiliastic belief in imposed “liberal democracy” as the “final stage” of human (and secular) progress. And it is that Idea of (irreversible) Progress, which means the destruction of older traditions, customs, and those things considered “reactionary” that stand in the way of Progress, that characterizes most of Neocon thinking. Such ideas, needless to say, run counter to traditional conservative principles.

With strong academic connections and financial sources, the Neocons soon took control of most of the older conservative foundations, think tanks, and publications, and they did so with an iron hand, reminiscent of older days, when their Marxism was readily visible. And, more significantly, through this control of most “conservative” institutions, especially those centered in Washington, D. C., they very soon began to provide experts and advisors to the national Republican Party and its candidates. Their dominance manifested itself in organs such as the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and in publications like Commentary, The Public Interest, and National Review (which shed its previous attachments to the older conservatism). The advent of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, with Fox News television, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and the New York Post as its notable voices, cemented this influence, which manifested itself abundantly in post-Reagan GOP policies and prescriptions...

Thus, in a very real sense, what is commonly termed “conservatism” today has not been truly conservative in the traditional sense for probably three or four decades, at least...

Trump, is not a “movement conservative,” that is, he is not a Republican candidate schooled in the narrative of Neoconservatism (while Marco Rubio wallows in it)...

Trump is the candidate who has been bold and farsighted enough to raise the real issues that are affecting every day Americans, not just “movement conservatives.” Most importantly, there is the supremely significant issue of illegal immigration. Consider, for example, what has happened to California, that up to the 1980s was considered a reliably “conservative” state, but after the 1986 Immigration Act, and three-to-four million new immigrants from Latin America, most illegal, will no longer ever vote for a Republican, much less any kind of conservative. The question is: do we want this to continue to happen? Who will be the candidate who will actually stop—and reverse—this?...

Then, there is the issue of Muslims coming to America. Trump’s plan to temporarily bar them coming in until a proper and secure screening system is put into place, is not only logical, it is completely constitutional and legal...

The case of Ted Cruz is mixed. He has on the Senate floor, opposed some of the measures pushed by the GOP Establishment, and he is not a member of the exclusive congressional “club,” but he is still part and parcel of the GOP/ Neocon “movement” fabric...

The essential question for me is this: as much as I might respect Ted Cruz’s senate career, I sincerely don’t think he would be able to withstand or take on the powerful Establishment in the same no-holds-barred and independent manner as the Donald. I don’t think Cruz would dislodge the Neocon intellectual stranglehold over the GOP policy; I think he would end up accepting and confirming it...

What is needed in this nation now is dramatic, even radical change. What is needed is not someone who will simply raise Hell, but someone who will be more like a bull loosed in a terrified china shop. Half measures and regular politicians, “mainstream conservatives” like Ted Cruz, I don’t think can pull it off. Trump, I believe, just maybe can...