The anti-Trump right is becoming a breed of its own - By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Most of the conservative Republicans opposed to President Trump are writers and policy specialists. Few are politicians — or, perhaps more precisely, few of the conservative politicians who see Trump as a danger to the nation are prepared to say so in public.
So does this mean that the writerly anti-Trump right is ineffectual? Not at all. But we may be approaching a time when the gutlessness of the GOP’s leadership moves these restive conservatives to abandon their traditional loyalties altogether. It would not be the first time that a group of thinkers opened the way for political realignment.
History, it’s said, sometimes rhymes. The anti-Trump distemper on the right has some of the rhythms and sounds of an earlier intellectual rebellion in the mid-1960s involving an uneasy group of liberals. They remained staunch supporters of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal but worried about what they saw as liberal excesses and the overreach of some Great Society policies.
Over time, this collection of magazine- and university-based rebels — among them Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Daniel Bell and Norman Podhoretz — came to be known as “neoconservatives.” They were not party bosses, but they sure knew how to write essays.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-anti-trump-right-is-becoming-a-breed-of-its-own/2017/05/31/7f3832ac-4635-11e7-bcde-624ad94170ab_story.html
