Patrolling the Frontier

Abstract

This chapter assesses how public intellectuals responded with such virulence to Donald Trump. Despite overwhelming opposition to Trump among the conservative intellectual elite, Republican voters had their own ideas of what the party should be about. That is not the outcome one might have expected at the start of the 2016 electoral cycle, given the outsized role that public intellectuals have played in the GOP over the last half-century. Whatever outsiders may believe, the modern Republican Party has often told its own story as the merger of a conservative intellectual project with a range of grassroots social movements. The idea of “fusionism”—the linkage of social conservatism with economic libertarianism—was thought by the party's intellectuals to be the glue that held together the GOP's various constituencies and activists. It is that perception of the Republican Party as a conservative party—one defined by its connection to a set of ideas and the intellectuals who generated them—that made the rise of Donald Trump so traumatic for conservative public intellectuals. Among the things that were especially striking about Trump was his dismissal and general ignorance of the history of conservative thought. The chapter then looks at the role played by public intellectuals in the conservative movement, including the historical role of its flagship magazine, National Review, as a policeman of ideological purity.