Source: Eyes on the Right
by Damon Linker
“Early on in the Trump era, I treated the Orange Man as an anomaly. Sure, I recognized some prefigurements of the MAGA movement — in George Wallace’s populist presidential campaign in 1968, in Pat Buchanan’s potent paleoconservative challenge to George H.W. Bush’s bid for re-election in 1992. Yet I still tended to view the form of conservatism that dominated the scene from Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 to Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016 as setting some kind of American standard from which Trump and his supporters diverged. I no longer look at it that way. … taking a longer view enables us to see that Trump marks a return to an older form of conservatism with deep roots in the American past from which Reaganite conservatism can be viewed as an anomaly — one inspired and made possible by the contingencies of the Cold War.” (12/05/25)
https://damonlinker.substack.com/p/stuck-in-the-populist-present