Source: Conservatism Won’t Survive Donald Trump
“Conservatism in this country long predated Trump; for now, it is tied up with Trump; soon, it will have survived Trump.”
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You can believe this only if you imagine that ideologies exist independently of the human beings who espouse them—and that they can continue unchanged and unchanging despite the flux of their adherents. … This is simply not true. Ideas are not artifacts, especially the kind of collective ideas we know as ideologies.
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Conservatism is what conservatives think, say, and do. As conservatives change—as much through the harsh fact of death and birth as by the fluctuations of opinion—so does what it means to be a conservative. … The word conservative will of course continue in use. But its meaning is being rewritten each day by the actions of those who lay claim to the word.