On the face of it, Christopher DeMuth's extraordinary essay offers a characteristically brilliant synthesis. Pulling together the threads of our peculiar situation, he helps us draw some conceptual order out of political chaos. But in the depths of his argument, DeMuth does more than that: He offers what may be the virtue that is now in shortest supply of all in our politics. He offers genuine hope for a way forward.
The essay frankly recognizes a set of circumstances that, in its totality, has proven awfully difficult for most of us conservatives to acknowledge together. But then it proceeds to reason from these toward an agenda that is both plausible and promising, and without getting caught up in a dispute over Donald Trump. By so doing, DeMuth raises the possibility of a future in which conservatives could work together despite continuing deep differences over Trump, even though these differences matter and are not likely to be resolved. “Post-Trump,” his essay suggests, need be neither “pro-Trump” nor “anti-Trump,” provided that conservatives can agree that it also must not be a return to “pre-Trump.”
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