What if It’s All Burned Down Already? – The Bulwark

The unspoken premise behind the current Burn It All Down debate is that this coalition will come back together. Many NeverTrump conservatives want to burn the party down, but only so the old Reagan-era ideological coalition can be magically reborn from the ashes. I m not so sure that s going to happen.

The old coalition was the product of conservative fusionism, which tried to draw together the religious right, free marketers, and anti-communist foreign policy hawks all of them held together, particularly in later years, by a kind of cultural populism. One of the things that united all three wings was that they were looked down upon by people in highbrow cultural institutions. So a contempt for coastal elites did a lot of work papering over genuine ideological divides within the coalition.

But the ideological rifts remained, and the Trump era has blown them wide open. I don t think they re going to be glued back together.

via thebulwark.com