Real damage

Distinguishing Trumpism from other phenomena that have appeared on the right over the last 70 years is not just an exercise in abstraction. When National Review showed the door to the John Birch Society and Ayn Rand's Objectivists in the 1950s, those movements had not wreaked palpable destruction on the nation's cultural foundation and social fabric, nor were they in a position to do so. The paleoconservative impetus of the 1990s likewise had nowhere near enough appeal to be a source of real danger.

Trumpism is different. It was a cluster bomb placed in the house of conservatism and detonated. It blew the walls out and cast its damage over a much wider swath of the American landscape.

The record of thought that had been the architectural drawings for that house was buried beneath the rubble of the blast.

And if that's too abstract for you, more visceral examples abound.

It's shattered hearts of good human beings, such as Timothy J. Klausutis, who has had the wound of his wife's untimely death nineteen years ago ripped open afresh by Donald Trump's maniacal and  vicious conspiracy-theory tweets about that incident, and by the sycophantic defense of those tweets by the icy-hearted White House press secretary this afternoon. 

Trumpism bent backwards the knuckles, in quintessential playground-bully fashion, of previously principled conservative leaders, watching with bared-teeth glee as they dropped to their knees. Mind you, those former movement leaders are not bystanders to the obliteration of their self-respect, but the hey-get-a-clue-this-is-the-only-game-in-town-now-for-Republicans message is hard to resist when a frenzied mob is screaming it:

He didn’t just burn the village, he sowed salt in the ground, too. He emasculated and destroyed the reputations of a rising generation of Republican leaders, who, depending on their story, will now be viewed as weaklings, co-conspirators, appeasers, racists, phonies, losers, or apostates.

Consider 2016 conservative runner-up Ted Cruz, who briefly stood up to Trump, only to be tamed by him. Or Marco Rubio, who said he didn’t trust Trump with the nuclear codes, but now warns it would be “catastrophic” for the cause of freedom if Trump loses.

The most promising young-ish conservatives have been, to some degree, compromised by Trump. If you embrace him, you look weak and intellectually dishonest. If you stand up to him (see Jeff Flake and Justin Amash), you’re toast. And if you try to have it both ways (see Nikki Haley and Ben Sasse), you look calculating, ambitious, and wishy-washy. This might be the worst strategy of all, because you'll never be Trumpy enough for the Trumpists, but you’ll also end up alienating the rest of us. 

Do I respect the above-mentioned people less than I did in 2015? Absolutely. But none of them could have foreseen a character test like Trumpism before July of that year. And one - Ted Cruz - held out until May of the following year. In fact, so did Mike Pence, who, as Indiana governor, hosted Cruz at the governor's mansion for breakfast the morning of the dark day that culminated in Cruz's bowing out of the race.

There's political damage right now as well. Support is eroding in two demographics that Trump is absolutely dependent on  - older Americans and evangelicals . The leftism that conservatism emerged to engage in a twilight struggle with is poised to fill the vacuum.

America is a much different place than it was fifty, certainly sixty years ago. Our civic bonds have eroded. Family formation and church attendance are at historic lows. Education has been thoroughly infected by identity politics. We make no art worth speaking of. Still, the people who inhabit this country want to believe that a sense of community can be shored up on some level. And they see that Donald Trump and his grotesque movement are the antithesis of that possibility.

This is not to offer an etched-in-stone prognostication. The economy could recover quickly, quickening the heartbeats of the materialist masses, convincing them that we'd "transitioned to greatness." It's entirely possible that Trumpism could hold sway for another few years, maybe morph into something even more foul.

That's what a savage, cold place 2020 post-America is.