The American right could use a lot fewer talk-radio shouters and a lot more policy intellectuals. But that doesn't mean intellectuals are especially good at grasping what's going on in the minds of Republican voters.
Intellectuals of all stripes have spent a lot of time since Donald Trump rose to the top of the Republican primary field during the fall of 2015 trying to figure out just what's going on in the GOP. Many conservative intellectuals, especially the so-called "reformocons" who spent the Obama years trying to persuade Republican politicians that the party should espouse a more economically populist policy agenda, have tended to assume that Trump succeeded in winning the Republican nomination and then the presidency at least in part by rudely and clumsily tapping into a latent desire among GOP voters for economically populist policies.
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