This argument comes closer to convincing me than any so far, but still comes up ever-so-short

Georgetown political theory professor Joshua Mitchell sure puts forth a compelling case for Squirrel-Hair as an overall positive historical figure. Before I get into my problems with it, let's give him the floor and you'll see what I mean:

if he had been just a one-off, surely the Republican Party would have been able to contain him, even co-opt him for its own purposes. After all, doesn’t the party decide? The Republican Party is not a one, however, it is a many. William F. Buckley Jr. and others invented the cultural conservatism portion of the party in the 1950s, with the turn to the traditionalism of Edmund Burke; the other big portion of the party adheres to the free-market conservatism of Friedrich Hayek. The third leg of the Republican Party stool, added during the Reagan years, includes evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics of the sort who were still unsure of the implications of Vatican II. To Burke and Hayek, then, add the names John Calvin and Aristotle/Thomas Aquinas. Anyone who really reads these figures knows that the tension between them is palpable. For a time, the three GOP factions were able to form an alliance against Communism abroad and against Progressivism at home. But after the Cold War ended, Communism withered and the culture wars were lost, there has been very little to keep the partnership together. And if it hadn’t been Trump, sooner or later someone else was going to come along and reveal the Republican Party’s inner fault lines. Trump alone might have been the catalyst, but the different factions of the GOP who quickly split over him were more than happy to oblige.

There is another reason why the Republican Party could not contain Trump, a perhaps deeper reason. Michael Oakeshott, an under-read political thinker in the mid-20th century, remarked in his exquisite essay, “Rationalism in Politics,” that one of the more pathological notions of our age is that political life can be understood in terms of “principles” that must be applied to circumstances. Politics-as-engineering, if you will. Republicans themselves succumbed to this notion, and members of the rank and file have noticed. Republicans stood for “the principles of the constitution,” for “the principles of the free market,” etc. The problem with standing for principles is that it allows you to remain unsullied by the political fray, to stand back and wait until yet another presidential election cycle when “our principles” can perhaps be applied. And if we lose, it’s OK, because we still have “our principles.” What Trump has been able to seize upon is growing dissatisfaction with this endless deferral, the sociological arrangement for which looks like comfortable Inside-the-Beltway Republicans defending “principles” and rank-and-file Republicans far from Washington-Babylon watching in horror and disgust.

Any number of commentators (and prominent Republican Party members) have said that Trump is an anti-ideas candidate. If we are serious about understanding our political moment, we have to be very clear about what this can mean. It can mean Trump’s administration will involve the-politics-of-will, so to speak; that the only thing that will matter in government will be what Trump demands. Or, it can mean that Trump is not a candidate who believes in “principles” at all. This is probably the more accurate usage. This doesn’t necessarily mean that he is unprincipled; it means rather that he doesn’t believe that yet another policy paper based on conservative “principles” is going to save either America or the Republican Party. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville was clear that the spirit of democracy is not made possible by great ideas (and certainly not by policy papers), but rather by practical, hands-on experience with self-governance. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s mystical musings in his essay, “Experience,” corroborate this. American democracy will not be rejuvenated by yet another policy paper from the Inside-the-Beltway gang. What I am not saying here is that Trump has the wisdom of an Oakeshott, a Tocqueville or an Emerson. What I am saying is that Trump is that quintessentially American figure, hated by intellectuals on both sides of the aisle and on the other side of the Atlantic, who doesn’t start with a “plan,” but rather gets himself in the thick of things and then moves outward to a workable idea—not a “principled” one—that can address the problem at hand, but which goes no further. That’s what American businessmen and women do. (And, if popular culture is a reliable guide to America, it is what Han Solo always does in Star Wars movies.) We would do well not to forget that the only school of philosophy developed in America has been Pragmatism. This second meaning of being an anti-ideas candidate is consonant with it.

If, as some have said, Trump’s only idea is, “I can solve it,” then we are in real trouble. The difficulty, of course, is that in this new, Trumpean moment when politics is unabashed rhetoric, it is very difficult to discern the direction a Trump administration will take us. Will he be the tyrant some fear, or the pragmatist that is needed?

It’s not unreasonable to think the latter. This is because, against the backdrop of post-1989 ideas, the Trump campaign does indeed have a nascent coherence. “Globalization” and “identity politics” are a remarkable configuration of ideas, which have sustained America, and much of the rest of the world, since 1989. With a historical eye—dating back to the formal acceptance of the state-system with the treaty of Westphalia in 1648—we see what is so remarkable about this configuration: It presumes that sovereignty rests not with the state, but with supra-national organizations—NAFTA, WTO, the U.N., the EU, the IMF, etc.—and with subnational sovereign sites that we name with the term “identity.” So inscribed in our post-1989 vernacular is the idea of “identity” that we can scarcely imagine ourselves without reference to our racial, gender, ethnic, national, religious and/or tribal “identity.” Once, we aspired to be citizens who abided by the rule of law prescribed within a territory; now we have sovereign “identities,” and wander aimlessly in a world without borders, with our gadgets in hand to distract us, and our polemics in mind to repudiate the disbelievers.

Actually, we've seen aspects of this case argued before. Roger L. Simon at PJ Media has been putting forth the Trump-is-a-man-of-action-and-that-appeals-to-the-go-getterism-intrinsic-to-the-American-character argument for the better part of a year. A number of people - some savory, some not (think the despicable Laura Ingraham) - have focused on the undeniably real global elite and its erosion of the concept of the nation-state. Of course, the seething antipathy toward political correctness and identity politics that excites Trump fans (and perhaps most notably his black fans, such as Sheriff Clarke, Lloyd Marcus, Herman Cain, and Dr. Carson) has been front and center in his rise.

But, damn it, I've just about had my fill of this denigration of principles that have informed the conservative movement for over 60 years, whether such denigration is presented with attempted subtlety and objectivity, as it is here and in the monologues of Rush Limbaugh, or with flecks of spittle, as it is in the rantings of the aforementioned Ingraham or the all-caps exhortations of the comment threads around the Internet.

And, as Jonah Goldberg has pointed out, foremost among those principles is the cultivation of character and its evidence in a public figure's demeanor.

Every one of the "objective analysts," outright apologists, and slavish devotees has to look squarely, and publicly address, Trump's narcissism, as evidenced by the way he put on a show of reluctance about deciding to run because his "businesses were doing so fantastically," his pettiness as evidenced by his constant Twitter wars, his shallow understanding of matters of the spirit, as evidenced by the what he had to say about Easter when asked this spring, or his inherent hedonism, as evidenced by his  remark about Jeffrey Epstein, or his remark about how everything's okay "as long as you have a beautiful piece of ass beside you."

How have we fallen so far that those of obviously impeccable erudition are willing to overlook the matters enumerated in the previous paragraph?

No, Mitchell gets about a 93, but if 100 is the score necessary to get me to say I will definitely vote for Squirrel-Hair, he has come up short.