The conservative (as well as some of the leftist) intelligentsia has always been wary of populism. This is understandable. It's known to be perilous to put one's faith in a knowing and faithful rabble: peeps convinced of every variety of secular nonsense, from Horatio Alger fabulism to the singular splendor of American exceptionalism. Such ignorant verities are self-regarded as wholesome, but disillusionment can turn ugly. The rabble can turn ugly. It's pleasant to have them on one's side until it isn't.
And that's where modern conservatism's intelligentsia finds itself: in a very unpleasant predicament. Co-opting the rabble was a rather distasteful task for yesteryear's conservatism, since it knew of the perils. Yet, when silently pondered, the danger of reverse co-optation was always prospective, never imminent. The rabble would buy whatever the conservative elite was selling, because that's what the rabble does — it follows. If disillusionment comes, it'll come tomorrow. Today, all is well.
Oops.
Hence the conservative intelligentsia's metamorphosis from an instinctive anti-populism to a manifested anti-popularity. It positively despises its party's Trumps and Carsons, tribunes of rabblocratic ignorance. Their days may be numbered, but today they own the party; they and their herd have busted the fence and they're grazing on aristocratic land. For the conservative intelligentsia, this circumstance has been most unpleasant; and by now, it's downright intolerable.
So it is that we read David Brooks this morning, railing against the uncouth, unschooled, unwashed interlopers by name. Trumpism and Carsonism (ethnic and religious bigotry, respectively) are "ruinous to the long-term political prospects" of the GOP and "bad for the spirit of conservatism," rages Brooks; they are "a sour, overgeneralized and intellectually sloppy sense of alienation."
Though we lay down the Times and pick up the Post, we find Charles Krauthammer on the same page. The Republican Party, he writes with one hand while pointing the other's finger directly at Trump and Carson, "is flamboyantly shooting at itself and gratuitously alienating one significant electoral constituency after another."
Isn't that lovely? I am tempted, because of a recent visitor to our disheveled shores, to say divine. Brooks and Krauthammer's eyes have seen the ignominy of the coming of the Reckoning, in which Trump and Carson are liberating the vintage where the rabble's grapes of wrath are stored. Our conservative thinkers once fondled the asp and held it to their bosom, and now they're shocked by the lethal result. Or so they say, or so they pretend, or so they belatedly protest.
What must be most disconcerting to them is that the rabble is out of the tube and there is no way to get it back in. The Republican Party is now a party of two distinct, irreconcilable camps. It takes a load of herculean creativity to imagine Trumpeteers marching enthusiastically to the polls to vote for a Jeb Bush — or even dragging their sorry asses to the polls at all.
Unless, of course — what's this we can imagine? — a formal schism erupts from which an inglorious third party emerges. Such as been my faith for years, and because I'm one of the simple peeps of wholesome verities, I'm keeping that faith.