Wednesday, December 20, 2017

And yet

David Frum has been admirable throughout the Trump catastrophe. He is a person of principle and intellectual honesty, and has the moral decency to condemn the indecent. His latest piece in The Atlantic provides further evidence of all that.

And yet, he's still living in a bit of an illusion. "To be a conservative" hasn't had much actual meaning for 25 years. There has been nothing remotely "conservative" about the GOP or its fellow travelers. The right has become increasingly radical -- the polar opposite of conservatism. They want to rip things up from the root (the root word of "radical"). Grover Norquist's bathtub long predates Trump's descent on that escalator. From Gingrich & co forward, the Republican Party had devolved into an anti-Constitutional, anti-American rolling coup. Trump has taken that coup to terrifying and disgusting places, but he didn't start the fire.