After Trump | Praxis

The Politics of Tomorrow Isn’t Right vs. Left, It’s Managers vs. Verbalists

Since the Cold War ended, U.S. politics has seen a series of insurgent candidacies. Pat Buchanan prefigured Trump in the Republican contests of 1992 and 1996. Ralph Nader challenged the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party from the outside in 2000. Ron Paul vexed establishment Republicans John McCain and Mitt Romney in 2008 and 2012. And this year, Trump was not the only candidate to confound his party’s elite: Bernie Sanders harried Hillary Clinton right up to the Democratic convention. What do these insurgents have…

Post-Trump, Conservatives Need Conversation, Not Cocoons

As election day draws closer, tensions are increasing on the right about Donald Trump and (a distinct topic) the futures of conservatism and the Republican party. Many of Trump’s opponents, especially on the right, have offered numerous scapegoats for the rise of Trump: among them, talk radio, racism, and the American public’s supposed lack of virtue. However, one of the single most important structural forces that allowed Trump to win the Republican nomination was the combination of elite incompetence and extreme cultural cocooning. Incompetence and…

Donald Trump and the Twilight of Movement Conservatism

For all his many faults, Donald Trump displays one great virtue as a presidential candidate: he is a remarkably effective dispeller of illusions. Early in the campaign, Trump dispelled the illusion that his rivals were the strongest field of candidates in the party’s history. As the frontrunner, he dispelled the illusion that “the party decides” on the nomination. As the presumptive nominee, he dispelled the illusion that candidates inevitably try to broaden their appeal beyond their core supporters. Who knows what illusions The Donald will…

Evan McMullin’s Presidential Run Could Potentially Blow Up the Republican Party

Ever since this morning, political obsessives have been scrambling to find out any bit of information they can on Evan McMullin, a little-known former CIA officer who has decided to run for president on a platform vaguely similar to the one that Mitt Romney ran on in 2012. With no name recognition and no executive experience, there is no chance that McMullin could win. But that isn’t the point of the exercise. The McMullin candidacy, which is being pushed by the remnant of the NeverTrump…

After Trump: GOP Elites Haven’t Realized They Can’t Return to the Status Quo

Editor’s note: This is the first of several “After Trump” pieces we will be running about how the candidacy of Donald Trump has irrevocably changed the Republican Party and American conservatism. Three pieces this week intertwine to present a picture of the broader challenges facing the political right at the moment: Matthew Sheffield’s important study of the conservative media, Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal column about the Trump campaign, and this New York Times story on the future of reform conservatism. All three touch on the crisis of paralysis facing…

Donald Trump Took the American Right Into Parts Unknown Last Night

In Walt Whitman’s famous poem “Song of Myself,” the unnamed gestalt narrator boasts that he “contains multitudes.” There are few actual people about whom that can be said other than Donald Trump. The billionaire real estate developer has encouraged some of the worst racial and religious characteristics of the American Right but he is also the first truly 21st-century Republican presidential candidate. He made it official in the speech he delivered accepting the GOP’s nomination Thursday night in Cleveland. That dual identity was on display…

Understanding the present is the key to the future