The Conservatives at the Castle Walls
By Richard Fernandez October 26, 2016
Ross Douthat has a thoughtful and well-written article titled What the Right’s Intellectuals Did Wrong. In it he tries to explain why conservative intellectuals lost control of American populism and consequently why Donald Trump rose. The first problem, he argues, was that conservative intellectuals had no institutional base within "the 'managerial class' — the largely liberal meritocrats who staff our legal establishment, our bureaucracy, our culture industries, our universities."
To make up for this weakness conservatives had to fraternize with the great unwashed without being of it themselves. "Whether as provincial critics of this class or dissidents within it, conservative intellectuals have long depended on populism to win the power that the managerial elite’s liberal tilt would otherwise deny them." In this why they could impute a force behind them. Otherwise they would have nothing to counterbalance the enormous institutional power of their liberal rivals.
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https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2016/10/26/the-conservatives-at-the-castle-walls/http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/opinion/campaign-stops/what-the-rights-intellectuals-did-wrong.html?_r=0What the Right’s Intellectuals Did Wrong
Ross Douthat
