re: #2 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

He makes the point that the “respectful Conservatism” of William F. Buckley still included the elements that we find so troubling today.

That is, even after Buckley tried to throw out the kooks, what remained inevitably is tied to what Donald Trump has brought to the fore.

If conservatism is understood as the effort to preserve privileges of a in-group, then this is inevitable. “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition…” etc.

To flesh this out a bit more, as soon as conservatism evolves past a mindless resistance to change in all its forms, that evolution is actually a degeneration, since the resulting ideology is (in a modern setting) necessarily a fascist reaction vs. democracy.

An example of this was made clear in the marriage cases — the least offensive arguments the opponents of marriage equality made in court were mindless tradition arguments. All positive arguments for marriage inequality were more or less inherently offensive.

Gore Vidal was 100% correct when he referred to Buckley as a crypto-fascist. These days, of course, there is no crypto-fascism on the right, because there is no crypto- about it any more.

Buckley et. al “throwing out the kooks” was always much more about PR than about the substance. E.g., Birchers have been writing WSJ op-eds for decades.