Since the election, though, few, if any, blog posts or articles have appeared in the main conservative outlets straightforwardly arguing, conceding, or lamenting that the election of this unfit demagogue is a bad thing. This man they’d execrated and denounced had shocked the world—not just by being his shocking self but by winning; nobody expected him to win!—and yet from them this evoked no reaction. No articles about the Caesarist threat. No articles about a Trump-defiled common culture. No articles about how our ship of state will soon have at its helm the notorious Captain Id. With everyone else flung into various states of surprise and alarm, the conservative magazines went meta. They reacted to other people’s reactions, mainly those of “the left.” If you read National Review in the days after the election, you’d have thought that the big news of the week wasn’t the world-jolting victory of a candidate whom the magazine had itself denounced as “a menace,” a man so foul that it would not endorse him against Hillary freakin’ Clinton, but that liberals were upset enough about this outcome to do some post-election protesting.(...)
The communal solidarity of conservatives is felt as essential in a world where all the great cultural forces (the media, the universities, Hollywood, history itself) are arrayed against them, and so intracommunal conflict, when it happens, is elaborately ritualized. The more serious the dissent, the more it comes out as a sort of esoteric chumminess, with, when possible, reassuring gestures to the permanent terms of membership— which is to say the defining enemies, which is to say the left.
