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. “Pod Save America,” by contrast, isn’t afraid to, as Ben Wikler of MoveOn puts it, “actually touch Excalibur.” At the theater in Richmond this month, shortly before bringing Northam and the rest of Virginia’s Democratic ticket onstage, Favreau asked the crowd: “Is everyone registered to vote? Is everyone going to be doing phone-banking and canvassing? Because if not, you have to leave.”

he sees some parallels between the conservative cable channel and Crooked Media. “This was true of Roger: It’s not just a business for these Crooked Media guys, it’s a calling,” he told me. “The real execution challenge is about authenticity. Does it feel authentic to the audience? They certainly have that going for them.”

Then Vietor and Lovett spotted Bill Kristol, the founding editor of The Weekly Standard and a neoconservative boogeyman to liberals during the George W. Bush presidency, who emerged as one of the most forthright conservative critics of Trump in 2016. They introduced themselves and fell into conversation about the 2008 election. “You guys had a good team,” Kristol said. “It seems like another era: Hillary and Obama debating the intricacies of whether you could do health care reform without a mandate or with a mandate.”

Soon, their discussion turned to the Trump administration. “It’s so unbelievable that these guys are trying to run anything,” Kristol lamented. “This level of total insanity is terrible.” 33 Comments “You know what?” Lovett told Kristol. “I like you better lately. It’s like we’re together to fight the aliens.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story “It’s like we’re all defending the Earth!” Kristol said.“But at some point the aliens will leave,” Lovett reminded him. “And then we’ll just be sitting at the same table being like, ‘Oh, right, we hate each other.’ ”

assuming standard industry rates, Crooked Media is most likely bringing in at least $50,000 in advertising revenue for each episode of “Pod Save America” — which at two episodes a week is about $5 million a year.

The kind of conservatism that Irving Kristol embodied was cheerful and at peace with modern America. The political heroes for this kind of conservatism, Kristol wrote, “tend to be T.R., F.D.R. and Ronald Reagan. Such Republican and conservative worthies as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower and Barry Goldwater are politely overlooked.”

These conservatives, Kristol continued, reject the idea that the United States is on the road to serfdom. They “do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable. ... People have always preferred strong government to weak government, though they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of intrusive government.”

The crucial issue for the health of the nation, in this view, is not the size of government; it is the character of the people. Neocons opposed government programs that undermined personal responsibility and community cohesion, but they supported those programs that reinforced them or which had no effect.

neoconservatism was primarily a domestic policy movement. Conservatism was at its peak when the neocons were dominant

Kristol and others argued that the G.O.P. floundered because it never accepted the welfare state. “The idea of a welfare state is in itself perfectly consistent with conservative political philosophy,”

In a capitalist society, people need government aid. “They need such assistance; they demand it; they will get it. The only interesting political question is: How will they get it.”

nearly every problem with the Republican Party today could be cured by a neocon revival.

their social policy was neither morally laissez-faire like the libertarians nor explicitly religious like some social conservatives. Neocons mostly sought policies that would encourage self-discipline

How would they know if programs induced virtue? Empirically.

The Republican Party is drifting back to a place where it appears hostile to the basic pillars of the welfare state: to food stamps, for example. This will make the party what it was before the neocon infusion, a 43 percent party in national elections, rejected by minorities and the economically insecure.

Joe Peyronnin, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., was an early president of Fox News, in the mid-nineties. “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” he says of Fox. “It’s as if the President had his own press organization. It’s not healthy.”

Kristol contends that Shine’s White House appointment is a scandal. “It’s been wildly under-covered,” he said. “It’s astounding that Shine—the guy who covered up Ailes’s horrible behavior—is the deputy chief of staff!”

Jennifer Rubin, another conservative Never Trumper, used to appear on the network, but wouldn’t do so now. “Fox was begun as a good-faith effort to counter bias, but it’s morphed into something that is not even news,” she says. “It’s simply a mouthpiece for the President, repeating what the President says, no matter how false or contradictory.

Sean Hannity has told colleagues that he speaks to the President virtually every night, after his show ends, at 10 P.M. According to the Washington Post, White House advisers have taken to calling Hannity the Shadow Chief of Staff. A Republican political expert who has a paid contract with Fox News told me that Hannity has essentially become a “West Wing adviser,” attributing this development, in part, to the “utter breakdown of any normal decision-making in the White House.” The expert added, “The place has gone off the rails. There is no ordinary policy-development system.” As a result, he said, Fox’s on-air personalities “are filling the vacuum.”

Trump has told confidants that he has ranked the loyalty of many reporters, on a scale of 1 to 10. Bret Baier, Fox News’ chief political anchor, is a 6; Hannity a solid 10. Steve Doocy, the co-host of “Fox & Friends,” is so adoring that Trump gives him a 12.

Kushner now has an almost filial status with Murdoch, who turns eighty-eight this month, and numerous sources told me that they communicate frequently. “Like, every day,” one said.

Ailes told Murdoch, “Trump gets great ratings, but if you’re not careful he’s going to end up totally controlling Fox News.”

In private, Murdoch regarded Trump with disdain, seeing him as a real-estate huckster and a shady casino operator. But, for all their differences, the two men had key traits in common. They both inherited and expanded family enterprises—an Australian newspaper; an outer-borough New York City real-estate firm—but felt looked down upon by people who were richer and closer to the centers of power.

both men have tapped into anti-élitist resentment to connect with the public and to increase their fortunes. Trump and Murdoch also share a transactional approach to politics, devoid of almost any ideology besides self-interest.

In 1994, Murdoch laid out an audacious plan to Reed Hundt, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under President Bill Clinton

Murdoch led him outside to take in the glittering view of the Los Angeles Basin, and confided that he planned to launch a radical new television network. Unlike the three established networks, which vied for the same centrist viewers, his creation would follow the unapologetically lowbrow model of the tabloids that he published in Australia and England, and appeal to a narrow audience that would be entirely his. His core viewers, he said, would be football fans; with this aim in mind, he had just bought the rights to broadcast N.F.L. games. Hundt told me, “What he was really saying was that he was going after a working-class audience. He was going to carve out a base—what would become the Trump base.

he had entered our country and was saying, ‘I’m going to break up the three-party oligopoly that has governed the most important medium of communication for politics and policy in this country since the Second World War.’ It was like a scene from ‘Faust.’ What came to mind was Mephistopheles.”

“Fox’s great insight wasn’t necessarily that there was a great desire for a conservative point of view.” More erudite conservatives, he says, such as William F. Buckley, Jr., and Bill Kristol, couldn’t have succeeded as Fox has. Levin observes, “The genius was seeing that there’s an attraction to fear-based, anger-based politics that has to do with class and race.”

In 1996, Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to create a conservative TV news outlet. Ailes, who died in 2017, was a master of attack politics and wedge issues, having been a media consultant on several of America’s dirtiest and most divisive campaigns, including those of Richard Nixon. Ailes invented programming, Levin argues, “that confirmed all your worst instincts—Fox News’ fundamental business model is driving fear.

As Hundt sees it, “Murdoch didn’t invent Trump, but he invented the audience. Murdoch was going to make a Trump exist. Then Trump comes along, sees all these people, and says, ‘I’ll be the ringmaster in your circus!’ ”

Until then, the network had largely mocked birtherism as a conspiracy theory. O’Reilly called its promoters “unhinged,” and Glenn Beck, who at the time also hosted a Fox show, called them “idiots.” But Trump gave birtherism national exposure, and, in a sign of things to come, Hannity fanned the flames. Hannity began saying that, although he thought that Obama had been born in the United States, the circumstances surrounding his birth certificate were “odd.”

In certain instances, however, Fox executives enforced journalistic limits.

Such niceties no longer apply. In November, Hannity joined Trump onstage at a climactic rally for the midterm elections. Afterward, Fox issued a limp statement saying that it didn’t “condone any talent participating in campaign events” and that the “unfortunate distraction” had “been addressed.”

For all of Ailes’s faults, Van Susteren argues, he exerted a modicum of restraint. She believes that he would have insisted on at least some distance from President Trump, if only to preserve the appearance of journalistic respectability embodied in the motto Ailes devised for Fox: “Fair and Balanced.

Fox News was hardly fair and balanced under his leadership. Gabriel Sherman, in his biography, “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” reports that Ailes was so obsessed with bringing down Obama in 2012 that he declared to colleagues, “I want to elect the next President.”

Don’t kid yourself about his support for immigration,” she said of Murdoch. “Rupert is first about the bottom line. They’re all going out to play to their crowd, whether it’s Fox or MSNBC.” (After leaving Fox, Van Susteren was for a short time a host on MSNBC.) Fox’s mile-by-mile coverage of the so-called “migrant caravan” was an enormous hit: ratings in October, 2018, exceeded those of October, 2016—the height of the Presidential campaign.

Ailes and Trump were friendly. “They spoke all the time,” a former Fox executive says. They had lunch shortly before Trump announced his candidacy, and Ailes gave Trump political tips during the primaries. Ken LaCorte contends that Ailes took note of “Trump’s crazy behavior”; but Trump’s growing political strength was also obvious. According to the former Fox executive, Trump made Ailes “nervous”: “He thought Trump was a wild card. Someone Ailes could not bully or intimidate.”

in 2016 that the network’s executives “made a business decision” to give on-air stars “slack” to choose their candidates. Hannity was an early Trump supporter; O’Reilly was neutral; Megyn Kelly remained skeptical

Kelly kept pressing Trump: “You once told a contestant on ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect President?” But he’d already won over Republican viewers. (Fox received a flood of e-mails, almost all of them anti-Kelly.) The showdown helped shape Trump’s image as shamelessly unsinkable.

Fox, however, may have given Trump a little help. A pair of Fox insiders and a source close to Trump believe that Ailes informed the Trump campaign about Kelly’s question. Two of those sources say that they know of the tipoff from a purported eyewitness. In addition, a former Trump campaign aide says that a Fox contact gave him advance notice of a different debate question, which asked the candidates whether they would support the Republican nominee, regardless of who won. The former aide says that the heads-up was passed on to Trump, who was the only candidate who said that he wouldn’t automatically support the Party’s nominee—a position that burnished his image as an outsider.

Ailes, meanwhile, joined Trump’s debate team, further erasing the line between Fox and conservative politicians. Ailes also began developing a plan to go into business with Trump. The Sunday before the election, Ailes called Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign chairman, and said that he’d been talking with Trump about launching Trump TV, a nationalist competitor to Fox. Ailes was so excited that he was willing to forfeit his severance payment from Fox, which was attached to a non-compete agreement. He asked Bannon to join the venture and to start planning it as soon as Trump lost the election.

Any hopes that Fox would clean house after Ailes’s departure vanished on August 12, 2016, when Fox named two Ailes loyalists as co-presidents: Jack Abernethy, an executive who managed Fox’s local stations, and Bill Shine. The opinion side of Fox News, which Shine had run, had won out, as had his friend Sean Hannity.

For years, Ailes had been the focus of liberal complaints, and so when Fox pushed him out many people thought that the channel would change. They were right. The problem, Fox’s critics say, is that it’s become a platform for Trump’s authoritarianism. “I know Roger Ailes was reviled,” Charlie Black, the lobbyist, said. “But he did produce debates of both sides. Now Fox is just Trump, Trump, Trump.” Murdoch may find this development untroubling: in 1995, he told this magazine, “The truth is—and we Americans don’t like to admit it—that authoritarian societies can work.

News of Trump’s payoffs to silence Daniels, and Cohen’s criminal attempts to conceal them as legal fees, remained unknown to the public until the Wall Street Journal broke the story, a year after Trump became President.

Murdoch “was gone a lot,” adding, “He’s old. He likes the idea that he’s running it, but the lunatics took over the asylum.”

Falzone’s story didn’t run—it kept being passed off from one editor to the next. After getting one noncommittal answer after another from her editors, Falzone at last heard from LaCorte, who was then the head of FoxNews.com. Falzone told colleagues that LaCorte said to her, “Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go.” LaCorte denies telling Falzone this, but one of Falzone’s colleagues confirms having heard her account at the time.

” The celebrity opinion-show hosts who drive the ratings became unbridled and unopposed. Hannity, as the network’s highest-rated and highest-paid star, was especially empowered—and, with him, so was Trump.

Richie told me, “Fox News was culpable. I voted for Trump, and I like Fox, but they did their own ‘catch and kill’ on the story to protect him.” He said that he’d worked closely with Falzone on the article, and that “she did her homework—she had it.” He says he warned her that Fox would never run it, but “when they killed it she was devastated.” Richie believes that the story “would have swayed the election.

Shine became “an expert in collecting and enforcing soft power,” adding, “He was responsible for on-air contributors to programs, so ultimately you were auditioning for Bill Shine. He was the one who would give you the lucrative contract. He controlled the narrative that way.

some people at Fox called him Bill the Butler, because he was so subservient to Ailes. A former Fox co-host says, “He’s perfect for the White House job. He’s a yes-man.” Another Fox alumnus said, “His only talent was following orders, sucking up to power, and covering up for people.”

Ailes and a small group kept a close eye on internal talent. “We had a file on pretty much everyone,” the former Fox executive said, adding that Ailes talked about “putting hits” in the media on anyone who “got out of line.”

If a woman complained about being sexually harassed, he said, Shine or other supervisors intimidated her into silence, reduced her air time, or discontinued her contract. The former executive recalls, “Shine would talk to the woman with a velvet glove, saying, ‘Don’t worry about it’—and, if that didn’t work, he’d warn her it would ruin her career.”

Judd Burstein, an attorney whose client was interviewed by prosecutors, told me, “I don’t think someone can be a serial sexual abuser in a large organization without enablers like Shine.”

Two months after Shine left Fox, Hannity became a matchmaker, arranging a dinner with the President at the White House, attended by himself, Shine, and Scaramucci, at that time Trump’s communications director. Hannity proposed Shine as a top communications official, or even as a deputy chief of staff. A year later, Shine was both.

Murdoch appears to have been wise in securing a rapprochement. Telecommunications is a highly regulated industry, and under Trump the government has consistently furthered Murdoch’s business interests, to the detriment of his rivals. Hundt, the former F.C.C. chairman, told me that “there have been three moves that have taken place in the regulatory and antitrust world” involving telecommunications “that are extremely unusual, and the only way to explain them is that they’re pro-Fox, pro-Fox, and pro-Fox.”

Last June, after only six months of deliberation, the Trump Administration approved Fox’s bid to sell most of its entertainment assets to Disney, for seventy-one billion dollars. The Murdoch family will receive more than two billion dollars in the deal, and will become a major stockholder in the combined company

In July, the F.C.C. blocked Sinclair Broadcast Group, a conservative rival to Fox, from combining with the Tribune Media Company. The F.C.C. argued that the deal would violate limits on the number of TV stations one entity can own, upending Sinclair’s hope of becoming the next Fox.

The Justice Department, meanwhile, went to court in an effort to stop A. T. & T.’s acquisition of Time Warner, which owns CNN

“There may be innocent explanations.” But, he adds, “Trump famously said you’re going to get sick and tired of winning, and that may not be true for the rest of America, but it sure is true of Murdoch.” He says of Murdoch, “He’s an incredibly cunning political player. He leaves no fingerprints. He’s been in the game of influencing government behavior to his benefit longer than most of us have been alive.”

Ann Coulter, who has been feuding with Trump over his immigration policy, said that the President told her that “Murdoch calls me every day.” She recalled that, “back when Trump was still speaking to me,” she complained to him that Fox was no longer inviting her to appear. She said that Trump told her, “Do you want me to call Murdoch and tell him to put you on?” Coulter accepted Trump’s offer. He may have called Hannity, not Murdoch, she says, but in any case she was invited back on Fox “within twelve hours.”

“Fox’s most important role since the election has been to keep Trump supporters in line.” The network has provided a non-stop counternarrative in which the only collusion is between Hillary Clinton and Russia; Robert Mueller, the special counsel, is perpetrating a “coup” by the “deep state”; Trump and his associates aren’t corrupt, but America’s law-enforcement officials and courts are; illegal immigration isn’t at a fifteen-year low, it’s “an invasion”; and news organizations that offer different perspectives are “enemies of the American people.”

Benkler’s assessment is based on an analysis of millions of American news stories that he and two co-authors, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts, undertook for their 2018 book, “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation and Radicalization in American Politics.” Benkler told me that he and his co-authors had expected to find “symmetric polarization” in the left-leaning and the right-leaning media outlets. Instead, they discovered that the two poles of America’s media ecosystem function very differently. “It’s not the right versus the left,” Benkler says. “It’s the right versus the rest.”

Most American news outlets try to adhere to facts. When something proves erroneous, they run corrections, or, as Benkler and his co-authors write, “they check each other.” Far-left Web sites post as many bogus stories as far-right ones do, but mainstream and liberal news organizations tend to ignore suspiciously extreme material.

Conservative media outlets, however, focus more intently on confirming their audience’s biases, and are much more susceptible to disinformation, propaganda, and outright falsehoods (as judged by neutral fact-checking organizations such as PolitiFact). Case studies conducted by the authors show that lies and distortions on the right spread easily from extremist Web sites to mass-media outlets such as Fox, and only occasionally get corrected

Sometimes such pushback has a salutary effect. Recently, Chris Wallace told Sarah Sanders that her claim that “nearly four thousand known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally” every year was wildly inaccurate. Showing Fox’s clout, the White House has dropped the talking point.

Unlike Glenn Beck, Hannity has been allowed to spew baseless conspiracy theories with impunity. For more than a year, Hannity and other hosts spread the lie that the hacking of Democratic Party e-mails during the 2016 campaign was an inside job. Hannity claimed that the hacking had been committed not by Russian cyber-warfare agents, as the U.S. intelligence community concluded, but by a Democratic staffer named Seth Rich, who had been murdered by unknown assailants on a D.C. street. Benkler and his co-authors studied Fox’s coverage, and found that not only did the channel give the Seth Rich lie a national platform; it also used the conspiracy story as a distraction, deploying it as a competing narrative when developments in Mueller’s investigation showed Trump in a bad light. In 2017, after Rich’s parents demanded an apology and advertisers began shunning the network, Fox finally ran a retraction, and Hannity dropped the story.

By then, Fox hosts had begun pushing a different conspiracy: the “Uranium One” story, which Hannity called “the biggest scandal ever involving Russia.” On an October, 2017, broadcast, Hannity claimed that Hillary Clinton, when she was Secretary of State, had given “to Vladimir Putin and Russia twenty per cent of America’s uranium, which is the foundational material to make nuclear weapons.” Ostensibly, the deal was in exchange for giant payments to the Clinton Foundation. Hannity also claimed that “the corrupt, lying mainstream media” was withholding this “bombshell” from Americans, because it was “complicit” in a “huge coverup.”

other reporting had poked holes in it, revealing that multiple government agencies had approved the deal, and that the quantity of uranium was insignificant. Yet Fox kept flogging it as the real national-security scandal involving Russia.

Alisyn Camerota was a co-host on “Fox & Friends” for years before joining CNN, in 2014

 ‘Fox & Friends’ was a fun show, but it was not a news show,” she says. “It regularly broke the rules of journalism. It was basically Roger’s id on TV. He’d wake up in the morning with some bee in his bonnet, spout it off to Bill Shine, and Shine would tell us to put it on TV.” She says that the show’s producers would “cull far-right, crackpot Web sites” for content, and adds, “Never did I hear anyone worry about getting a second source. The single phrase I heard over and over was ‘This is going to outrage the audience!’ You inflame the viewers so that no one will turn away. Those were the standards.”

Fox co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle often prepared for “The Five” by relying on information provided to her by an avid fan: a viewer from Georgia named David Townsend, who had no affiliation either with Fox News or with journalism.

Aki Peritz, a former C.I.A. analyst who is an adjunct professor at American University, has written that Fox News has become an inviting target for foreign spy agencies, because “it’s what the President sees.

a source who spoke to me about Guilfoyle and Townsend says, “It’s even worse than a conspiracy of the dark Web, or something trying to manipulate Fox. It was just a guy in his underwear in Georgia who had influence over Fox News! And Fox News influences the President!”

Judging from the timing of Trump’s tweets, Gertz believes that the President records “Fox & Friends” and views it from the beginning, often with a slight delay. As Trump watches, he frequently posts about points that he agrees with. Since August, 2018, Media Matters has tallied more than two hundred instances of Trump disseminating Fox News items to his fifty-eight million Twitter followers. “Trump serves as a carnival barker for Fox,” Levin says, giving invaluable promotional help to the channel.

Fox hosts sometimes reverse their opinions in order to toe the Trump line: Hannity, who in the Obama era called negotiations with North Korea “disturbing,” now calls such efforts a “huge foreign-policy win.” But Gertz has come to believe that Fox drives Trump more than Trump drives Fo

White House aides confirm that Trump has repeatedly walked away from compromises at the last moment because Fox hosts and guests opposed the deals.

According to a Senate staffer, one high-profile Republican senator claims that his preferred way of getting the President’s ear is by going on Fox. He calls a friendly host and offers to appear on the air; usually, before he’s taken his makeup off in the greenroom Trump is calling him

Fox hosts played a key part in driving Trump’s recent shutdown of the government and his declaration of a national emergency on the southern border. Hannity and Dobbs urged Trump nightly on their shows to make these moves; according to press reports, they also advised Trump personally to do so.

For the next thirty-five days, Hannity and the other Fox hosts kept cheering Trump on, even as polls showed that the American public was increasingly opposed to the shutdown. Oliver Darcy, of CNN, says that Democrats, rather than negotiating with Trump, “might as well call Sean Hannity and get him on the phone,” adding, “It seems we sort of elected Sean Hannity when we elected Trump.”

“The President’s world view is being specifically shaped by what he sees on Fox News, but Fox’s goals are ratings and money, which they get by maximizing rage. It’s not a message that is going to serve the rest of the country.

Trump and Fox are employing the same risky model: inflaming the base and intensifying its support, rather than building a broader coalition. Narrowcasting may generate billions of dollars for a cable channel, but as a governing strategy it inevitably alienates the majority. The problem for Trump, as one former Fox host puts it, is that “he can’t afford to lose Fox, because it’s all he’s got.”

Similarly, Fox has a financial incentive to make Trump look good. Cable ratings at both Fox and MSNBC dip when the news is bad for their audience’s side. Van Susteren likens the phenomenon to audiences turning away when their sports team is losing

A source close to Trump says that the President has been complaining that Shine hasn’t been aggressive enough. Late last year, Trump told the source, “Shine promised me my press coverage would get better, but it’s gotten worse.” The source says, “Trump thought he was getting Roger Ailes but instead he got Roger Ailes’s gofer.”

Shine has practically ended White House press briefings. Trump prefers to be his own spokesman. “He always thought he did it the best,” a former senior White House official says. “But the problem is that you lose deniability. It’s become a trapeze act with no net, 24/7. The shutdown messaging was a crisis. There was no exit strategy.”

“It was always clear that this wasn’t just another news organization,” Rosenberg told me. “But when Ailes departed, and Trump was elected, the network changed. They became more combative, and started treating me like an enemy, not an opponent.” With Shine joining Trump at the White House, he said, “it’s as if the on-air talent at Fox now have two masters—the White House and the audience.” In his view, the network has grown so allied with the White House in the demonization of Trump’s critics that “Fox is no longer conservative—it’s anti-democratic.”

For two years, the network has been priming its viewers to respond with extraordinary anger should the country’s law-enforcement authorities close in on the President. According to Media Matters, in the first year after Mueller was appointed Hannity alone aired four hundred and eighty-six segments attacking the federal criminal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election; thirty-eight per cent of those segments claimed that law-enforcement officials had broken the law.

Hannity has spoken of “a coup,” and a guest on Laura Ingraham’s program, the lawyer Joseph diGenova, declared, “It’s going to be total war. And, as I say to my friends, I do two things—I vote and I buy guns.”

“In a hypothetical world without Fox News, if President Trump were to be hit hard by the Mueller report, it would be the end of him. But, with Fox News covering his back with the Republican base, he has a fighting chance, because he has something no other President in American history has ever had at his disposal—a servile propaganda operation.”

So what are young conservatives—or liberals or political agnostics—who read this book going to get out of it? What they will learn, and it is a terrible thing, is that the questions that we ask in our youth—in our twenties—may be the only ones we ever really ask. Kristol, from the very beginning, is asking himself only a handful of questions. Stalinism having been rejected as abhorrent, is there a coherent left? How can a democratic society be made virtuous? (He seems from the beginning to be more interested in this question than in how it may be made prosperous, or free, or equal.) And what did being Jewish mean to a man in the modern age—given that it clearly did mean something to him, from the first, and given that fidelity either to Jewish tradition or to Jewish nationalism was not what it meant? That is terrible enough: that we will spend the rest of our lives asking the same few questions from our twenties over and over. But if the bulk of the book is any indication, the greater risk is that we will think we have answered them.

The efforts to recruit an independent conservative candidate come as Republican establishment figures increasingly coalesce around Trump's bid. Since effectively securing the nomination on May 3 with his Indiana primary win, more members of Congress have voiced support for Trump, as have former Republican rivals like Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.

But logistical hurdles to an independent bid are increasing. Ballot deadlines for independent candidates have either passed or soon will.

Sources familiar with efforts by Kristol and other Never-Trump Republicans say they have done extensive polling and gathered other private data, and talked to potential candidates and financial backers.

I think that was something the right had failed to wrestle with. They hadn’t had those conversations.”

right-of-center magazines have been debating and reassessing the soul of their political philosophy. Trumpism has torn down the conservative house and broken it up for parts. Conservative magazines are working to bring a plausible intellectual order to this new reality — and figure out what comes next.

“I’ve been a big critic of mainstream-media ideological blinders and biases, and I still am,” he said. “But we also have a president who lies aggressively, who lies casually, who lies about things that matter in huge ways and about things that don’t matter at all.”

Goldberg and writers Jay Nordlinger and Kevin D. Williamson are perhaps the most conspicuous members of National Review’s anti-Trump camp.

Hayes hopes that when a reader of the liberal magazine the Nation or a watcher of MSNBC seeks out an “intellectually honest conservative take,” that person will go to the Weekly Standard.

Kristol said he was reluctant to assess the present-day magazine as a whole, but he agreed that such a change was possible. “I feel now like I was unconsciously constraining the ways I was thinking,” he said. “You had friends. You had allies. You didn’t want to look too closely at the less savory parts of them.”

While the Weekly Standard has generally reflected a conventionally hawkish Republican worldview, it has also been willing to entertain varying political outlooks, with its writers landing in different places on Trump and many other matters. Labash, for instance, never hid his opposition to the war in Iraq. “It’s a magazine, not a cult,” he says. “You’re free to think freely.”

Goldberg told me that he had been spared any pressure from his employers to line up with the White House — “not a peep from a soul” at AEI or National Review — but that other employers were less tolerant. “One of the things I have much less respect for is Conservatism Inc.,” he said. “When the real histories of this period are done, one of the more important points is that institutions, both in the media and the think- tank universe, that are dependent on really large donor bases, they were among the first to give way.”

In response, Hayes has increased the magazine’s focus on reporting, he said, less for the purpose of winning debates than to rescue a sense of shared premises. “We thought it was important to focus on reporting and facts and try to determine what the facts are, so that we can have a big debate about policies we should pursue as a country based on a common understanding of those facts,”

Other contributors, like Dennis Prager and Victor Davis Hanson, reliably line up behind Trump, arguing he’s the only defense against an overpowering left.

Most of the magazine’s writers are somewhere in between. “We have a number of writers who are vehemently anti-Trump; I’m one of them,” says National Review Online editor Charles C.W. Cooke. “That doesn’t mean he can’t do anything right. That would be to throw my brain away.”

“One of the giant ironies of this whole phenomenon for us is that Trump represents a cartoonish, often exaggerated, version of the direction we wanted to see the party go in,” Lowry said. “Trump was in a very different place on regulation and trade, but we had been widening the lens of mainstream conservatism and arguing that the party needed to be more populist.”

“National Review has absolutely become more interesting,” says Helen Andrews, an essayist who has written for nearly all of the publications mentioned in this article. “When Trump won, I thought that’s it. National Review is done. There’s no way they can bounce back. But it turns out that all the folks over there that I thought were peacetime consiglieres were actually ready to seize the moment.”

Krein seemed more sanguine than most conservative intellectuals I met, viewing the changed policy discourse as a good in itself. “We have an honest question — what the role of the nation-state is,” Krein said. “This is a world of nation-states, but we no longer have any positive rationale for them. Those questions need to be worked out.”

Merry’s hope, in the face of what he feels are increasingly unfavorable odds, is that Trump will fulfill some of his promises. Assessing that will be one of the main goals of the magazine in the coming years. “We’re interested in the Trump constituency,” Merry says. “The question for us is whether Trump is proving worthy of his voters.”

One curse of the American Conservative, starting with Iraq, has been to serve as an unheeded voice in the face of indifferent or hostile elite opinion. In 2011, Larison was sounding repeated warnings against intervening in Libya, and for several years, before more famous names took notice, he was a lonely voice against the Saudi war in Yemen.

Back in June 2016, the magazine ran a cover story by McConnell, “Why Trump Wins,” which argued that globalism vs. nationalism was the new defining issue in our politics and that GOP elites would be unable to “put the lid on the aspirations Trump has unleashed.”

Many of the smallest conservative journals are unadorned and low in circulation. But, in keeping with the rule that what’s in the wilderness today can be most influential tomorrow, they too are awash in fresh ideas. “There’s still a pretty substantial community that relies on these publications as a channel of communications within the conservative neural network,” observes Daniel McCarthy, editor of one such journal, Modern Age. “They’re even more relevant today than they were in 2012.”

Each of them is playing a distinct role on the right.

Modern Age, founded by conservative luminary Russell Kirk in 1957 and operated by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, takes what may be the most high-toned approach to politics, with many academic contributors, and McCarthy hopes to see its pages synthesizing ideas from different strains of conservatism.

The National Interest, co-founded in 1985 by the late Irving Kristol, father of Bill, remains devoted to foreign-policy realism, offering thoughtful articles on what role the United States should play on a changed world stage.

National Affairs, founded by former George W. Bush policy staffer Yuval Levin in 2009 as a venue in which conservative policy could be considered more deeply, spent the Obama years offering broad philosophical articles along with wonkier explorations of policymaking, from housing to public broadcasting. This continues, but after the rise of Trump, the journal has become even more introspective, running articles with titles like “Redeeming Ourselves” and “Is the Party Over?”

These publications are highly unlikely to affect the course of Trump, but, by making plausible sense of this moment sooner rather than later, they may affect the course of his successors.

Two surprising stars of the Trump era have been the Claremont Review of Books and the religious journal First Things. It was in the normally restrained Claremont Review of Books that someone going by the name “Publius Decius Mus” (later revealed to be Michael Anton) published “The Flight 93 Election,” an influential essay arguing that the election of Trump, however extreme the risks, was the only hope of preventing a complete surrender to the cultural left.

The trajectory of First Things, a journal of religion and public life founded in 1990, has been even more striking. Its editor, R.R. Reno, contributed to the “Against Trump” issue of National Review but became increasingly frustrated by what he felt was the failure of his fellow conservatives to understand the nature of the rebellion taking place. Eventually, Reno wound up signing on to a “Statement of Unity” in support of Trump by a group called Scholars & Writers for America. First Things is now devoting itself to understanding the altered political and cultural landscape. “The conservative intellectual infrastructure is like a city after the neutron bomb goes off,” says Reno. “There’s a whole network of ideas, and it turns out there are no voters for those ideas.”

The monthly conservative magazine the New Criterion, edited by Roger Kimball, may devote the bulk of its pages to reviews of things like symphonies or art exhibits, but it was also among the first journals to take Trump seriously and understand, as contributor James Bowman put it in October 2015, that Trump spoke for “those whom the progressives have sought to shut out of decent society, which encompasses a much larger universe than that of the movement conservatives.”

Commentary, founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee — from which it separated in 2007, becoming a stand-alone nonprofit — has always balanced its forays into politics with grander musings on Western civilization, Judaism and high culture. This seems to be a successful combination in the Trump era, because the circulation, according to Podhoretz, has risen by over 20 percent since the 2016 election. Podhoretz, who has edited the magazine since 2009 (his father, Norman Podhoretz, edited it from 1960 to 1995), is known for a prickly and combative approach to public life

“It may be that Commentary is uniquely suited to the weirdness of this position because it has been a countercultural publication for close to 50 years. It is a Jewish publication on the right. It is a conservative publication in a liberal Jewish community. It remains a journal with literary, cultural and intellectual interests, which makes it a minority in the world of conservative opinion, which tends not to focus on the life of the cultural mind.”

Commentary has had several high-profile articles in the past year. In February 2017, it published “Our Miserable 21st Century,” by Nicholas N. Eberstadt, who argued that the economic insecurity of Americans spiked after 2000 and never recovered.

A sense of the political power of cultural conversations likewise inspired former Senate staffer Ben Domenech, now 36, to launch the Federalist in the fall of 2013

Domenech told me he started to envision a new kind of conservative opinion site after observing that more and more areas of our culture — movies, talk shows, sports — were becoming politicized.

The staff of the Federalist is majority female, half millennial, and a quarter minority, according to Domenech, and youthfulness was reflected in the publication’s design

By engaging in pop-culture debates, going on television, and focusing on engagement with writers and voices outside the conservative sphere, the Federalist hopes to reach audiences that might normally be dismissive

Conservative magazines, Domenech said, had been mistaken to think they spoke for voters on the right. “This battle was not over whether we’re going to have a Chamber of Commerce agenda or a constitutionalist agenda,” Domenech said. “It left out this huge swath of people who weren’t interested in either of those things.”

As much as their contributors may differ in opinion or even dislike one another, what unites these magazines — and distinguishes them from right-wing outlets like Breitbart — is an almost quaint belief in debate as an instrument of enlightenment rather than as a mere tool of political warfare.

“There’s an argument on part of the right that the left is utterly remorseless and we need to be like that,” says Lowry. “That’s the way you lose your soul and you have no standards.”

“You want to be a revolutionary on the right?” asks Labash. “Tell the truth. Call honest balls and strikes. That’s become pretty revolutionary behavior in these hopelessly tribal times.”

With so many Americans today engaged in partisan war, any publication with a commitment to honesty in argument becomes a potential peacemaker. It also becomes an indispensable forum for working out which ideas merit a fight in the first place. This is what, in their best moments, the conservative magazines are now doing.

In some circles, Never Trump is looked at as little more than the pitiful last gasp of a decadent, exhausted, and now vanquished elite.

Kristol has nurtured several organizations committed to traditional conservative values, including Republicans for the Rule of Law and Defending Democracy Together. McMullin and Finn launched Stand Up Republic, an organization dedicated to strengthening American democracy that now has chapters in 18 states

Nonetheless, a dedicated remnant has kept the candle burning

New publications have also sprouted up, including The Bulwark, the go-to source for anti-Trump commentary on the center-right, and The Dispatch, founded by two leading conservative journalists, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes. These stalwarts have kept up rearguard efforts to expose the perfidy of the current administration and to wrest their former allies away from Trumpian populism.

More likely, however, Never Trumpers will play a different but still vital role in American politics. It could fall to them to prevent Trumpism from dominating the Republican Party—and the country—for years to come.

If Trump wins a second term and can maintain his vindictive cult of personality, successful challenges to his style of politics do seem improbable. The conversion of onetime Never Trump favorites like Graham and Representative Elise Stefanik into shameless sycophants bears this out, as does the demonizing of critics such as former Senator Jeff Flake, former Representative Mark Sanford, and Representative Justin Amash, who left the party and now identifies as an independent

Others cling to the view that if the president is repudiated at the ballot box this fall, the Trumpist fever will break and the party will be restored to something like its former self. This outcome seems unlikely. Deep sociological factors—in particular, a GOP base that is overwhelmingly white and is becoming more working-class, less formally educated, and older—will lead the party to go where its voters are, even in the absence of Trump.

For the foreseeable future, the dominant faction of the GOP may be populist and nationalist. But the populists will not have the party all to themselves

They will be forced to share it with what we will call a liberal-conservative faction, in recognition of their grounding in classical liberal principles of pluralism, constitutionalism, and free trade. That faction, in other words, is the Never Trumpers and their fellow travelers: the educated middle class, business interests, and the more upwardly mobile parts of minority groups.

Because it will be especially attractive to the kinds of experts and thinkers who played such a key role in the Never Trump movement, it will not lack for well-developed policies and philosophies. In the midst of a pandemic, expertise might even regain some of its appeal.

Demagogues found popular support for their demand to keep Jewish refugees out of the country. Mr. Dinnerstein describes an anti-Semitic speaker warning of “200,000 Communist Jews at the Mexican border waiting to get into this country,” adding that “if they are admitted they will rape every woman and child that is left unprotected.

Today, these tropes feel familiar but in a new context. Mr. Trump started his political career by amplifying rumors that President Barack Obama was secretly Muslim. He resurrected the disgraced slogan “America First.” In October, he warned that Hillary Clinton was meeting “in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers.” Mr. Trump called for refugees to be kept out of the country, smearing them as agents of a sinister foreign ideology. Breitbart, the website formerly run by Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, has run a stream of alarmist articles about refugee rapists

In the Trump administration’s conspiratorial nationalism, avowed anti-Semites hear their overarching narratives reflected back to them, their prejudices tacitly approved.

During the presidential campaign, Michael T. Flynn, who would briefly serve as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, retweeted someone attacking CNN with the words, “Not anymore, Jews, not anymore.” (Mr. Flynn later apologized.)

Under Mr. Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart defended online anti-Semitism as subversive good fun and published a column attacking the conservative writer Bill Kristol as a “renegade Jew.”

When the National Cathedral hosted a Muslim prayer service in a gesture of ecumenical good will, Mr. Gorka published a Breitbart column headlined: “Muslim Brotherhood Overruns National Cathedral in D.C.”

At an inauguration ball, Sebastian Gorka, a Breitbart editor who was soon to become a White House adviser, wore a medal associated with a Nazi-collaborationist Hungarian group, the Vitezi Rend. The Forward, a Jewish newspaper, reported that Mr. Gorka was a sworn member of the group. (Mr. Gorka claimed he wore the medal to honor his father, from whom he “inherited” Vitezi Rend membership.)

This is where we are now: A senior administration official dons fascist paraphernalia, defends himself by saying he did so out of filial loyalty, and suffers no political repercussions

Naturally, many Jews find this chilling, but we should not lose sight of the real import of Mr. Gorka’s appointment. He may flirt with anti-Semitic iconography for sentimental reasons, but he owes his career to his apocalyptic view of America’s war with radical Islam. The Islamic State, he claimed last year, “is already well entrenched on the shores of the United States.

In power, the new administration, too, seemed to be trolling the Jewish community. In January, the White House released a statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day that failed to mention Jews. A spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, told CNN the omission was intentional, because the administration “took into account all of those who suffered” — echoing the position of neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers who seek to play down the genocide of Jews.

Last year, Michael Anton, now a White House national security staffer, wrote a pseudonymous essay arguing that “mass immigration has overwhelmed, eroded, and de-Americanized formerly American communities.” He was particularly contemptuous of Muslim immigration. Yes, he allowed, “not all Muslims are terrorists, blah, blah, blah, etc. Even so, what good has Muslim immigration done for the United States and the American people?”

To be an American Muslim or a brown-skinned immigrant and know that people like this are in power must be terrifying. Mr. Trump and his appointees have consistently denigrated and dehumanized these minorities in ways we’d never tolerate if they were talking about Jews.

The president and his cronies talk a lot about representing “the people,” but they don’t mean all Americans. “The only important thing is the unification of the people,” Mr. Trump said at Eugene, Ore., campaign rally last year, “because the other people don’t mean anything.”

Naturally, a government that decides certain groups of people “don’t mean anything” shakes many Jews to the core. But the horror of the president’s vision isn’t that “the other people” might include Jews. It includes people. Even in this brutally tribal moment, that should be enough.

The same day that Cooke launched himself into Jennifer Rubin, another contributor to the National Review special issue, Erick W. Erickson, announced that he had lost his Fox News contract. Erickson had precisely followed Cooke’s advice, conscientiously seeking opportunities to praise Trump where he could. That halfway support did not suffice for his producers.

Researchers at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center have quantified how dramatically far-right media sources such as Breitbart News have overtaken and displaced traditional conservative outlets such as National Review. By tallying links, citations, and other indicators of influence, they found:

The center-left and the far right are the principal poles of the media landscape. The center of gravity of the overall landscape is the center-left. Partisan media sources on the left are integrated into this landscape and are of lesser importance than the major media outlets of the center-left. The center of attention and influence for conservative media is on the far right. The center-right is of minor importance and is the least represented portion of the media spectrum.

Rubin stands on that embattled center-right. She is not quite alone. Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations stands there, as does the true-hearted remainder of the National Review 21: Mona Charen, Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz.

You’ll find others at the Niskanen Center (Jerry Taylor, Brink Lindsey), and holding the faith from the Evan McMullin–Mindy Finn independent presidential ticket. A few brave the adverse comments on social media: Tom Nichols from the academic world; Seth Mandel at the New York Post’s editorial page. Joe Scarborough keeps the faith on morning TV.

The urgency to defend Trump will accelerate should Republicans lose one or both chambers of Congress in November 2018. At that point, Trump’s veto and executive orders will become the chief political resource that conservatives have. They would not dare risk losing it.

Charles Cooke arraigned Jennifer Rubin for being dragged to new political positions by her resistance to Trump. She is not alone. Bill Kristol quipped on Twitter: “The GOP tax bill's bringing out my inner socialist. The sex scandals are bringing out my inner feminist. Donald Trump and Roy Moore are bringing out my inner liberal. WHAT IS HAPPENING?”

The most revealing thought in Cooke’s essay is his explanation for why he feels it is safe to go with the Trumpian flow: “Conservatism in this country long predated Trump; for now, it is tied up with Trump; soon, it will have survived Trump.”

Good question, and here’s the answer: What is happening is the revelation that politics is dynamic, that new facts call forth new responses.

This is something many conservatives tell themselves, but it’s not even slightly true. Trump is changing conservatism into something different. We can all observe that. Will it snap back afterward?

Just as many anti-Trump conservatives find themselves pulled in new directions by their revulsion against Trump’s corruption and abuse of power, so too is the conservative mainstream being altered by its determination to remain on terms with Trump and his supporters.

You can believe this only if you imagine that ideologies exist independently of the human beings who espouse them—and that they can continue unchanged and unchanging despite fluctuations in their adherents.

This is simply not true. Ideas are not artifacts, especially the kind of collective ideas we know as ideologies. Conservatives in 1964 opposed civil-rights laws. Conservatives in 1974 opposed tax cuts unless paid for by spending cuts. Conservatives in 1984 opposed same-sex marriage. Conservatives in 1994 opposed trade protectionism. Conservatives in 2004 opposed people who equated the FBI and Soviet Union’s KGB. All those statements of conservative ideology have gone by the boards, and one could easily write a similar list of amended views for liberals.

Conservatism is what conservatives think, say, and do. As conservatives change—as much through the harsh fact of death and birth as by the fluctuations of opinion—so does what it means to be a conservative.

The Trump presidency is a huge political fact. He may not be the leader of American conservatism, but he is its most spectacular and vulnerable asset. The project of defending him against his coming political travails—or at least of assailing those who doubt and oppose him—is already changing what it means to be a conservative.

The word conservative will of course continue in use. But its meaning is being rewritten each day by the actions of those who lay claim to the word. It is their commitment to Trump that etches Trumpism into them. And while Trump may indeed pass, that self-etching will not soon be effaced.

The surge has turned The Bulwark from an anti-Trump refuge into a promising media business. In an interview, Longwell told Semafor that subscriptions are on track to generate more than $5 million a year, which represents the main source of revenue for the publication.

The Bulwark is riding two converging trends in politics and media.

The publication has capitalized on the tectonic realignment that’s been happening in US politics, and serves as a kind of media escort from former Republicans on their way to support for Democratic candidates. (Weiss, in a neighboring ideological lane, offers a safe space for Democrats who can’t stomach Trump but feel their party and their flagship newspaper, The New York Times, have abandoned them, especially on campus-culture issues and Israel.)

This sometimes produces surreal scenes: Last week, a room full of 400 liberal and center-left Atlantic Festival guests erupted in applause for remarks by Kristol, once best known as the most committed media promoter of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

The Bulwark’s YouTube explosion also offers a glimpse into what a post-cable future might look like for political news. The Bulwark’s success has been driven in large part by Miller’s natural loose on-camera persona and the interest in some of its well-known hosts like George Conway. But its growth on YouTube mirrors that of conservatives like the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro or Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News personality, whose YouTube following rivals that of major broadcasters.

“Because my bigger political ambition is: How do you build a new center in the country that sort of refuses to engage in extreme sides of politics? And so I want to build as big a community as possible.”

The older writers knew that being cultured and urbane wasn’t a sign of elitism. Culture was the tool they used for social mobility. T.S. Eliot was cheap and sophisticated argument was free.

Hillary Clinton is therefore now winning among white college graduates by 52 to 36 percent.

First, talk radio, cable TV and the internet have turned conservative opinion into a mass-market enterprise

Today’s dominant conservative voices try to appeal to people by the millions. You win attention in the mass media through perpetual hysteria and simple-minded polemics and by exploiting social resentment.

conservatism has done its best to make itself offensive to people who value education and disdain made-for-TV rage.

an intellectual tendency that champions free markets was ruined by the forces of commercialism

Conservatism went down-market in search of revenue. It got swallowed by its own anti-intellectual media-politico complex — from Beck to Palin to Trump.

The conservative intellectual landscape has changed in three important ways since then, paving the way for the ruination of the Republican Party.

Second, conservative opinion-meisters began to value politics over everything else.

The very essence of conservatism is the belief that politics is a limited activity, and that the most important realms are pre-political: conscience, faith, culture, family and community.

This is a sad story. But I confess I’m insanely optimistic about a conservative rebound.

Among social conservatives, for example, faith sometimes seems to come in second behind politics

Today, most white evangelicals are willing to put aside the Christian virtues of humility, charity and grace for the sake of a Trump political victory.

As conservatism has become a propagandistic, partisan movement it has become less vibrant, less creative and less effective.

That leads to the third big change. Blinkered by the Republican Party’s rigid anti-government rhetoric, conservatives were slow to acknowledge and even slower to address the central social problems of our time.

For years, middle- and working-class Americans have been suffering from stagnant wages, meager opportunity, social isolation and household fragmentation. Shrouded in obsolete ideas from the Reagan years, conservatism had nothing to offer these people because it didn’t believe in using government as a tool for social good

Trump demagogy filled the void.

recently conservatism has become more the talking arm of the Republican Party.

Conservatism is now being led astray by its seniors, but its young people are pretty great

It’s hard to find a young evangelical who likes Donald Trump. Most young conservatives are comfortable with ethnic diversity and are weary of the Fox News media-politico complex.

Conservatism’s best ideas are coming from youngish reformicons who have crafted an ambitious governing agenda (completely ignored by Trump).

A Trump defeat could cleanse a lot of bad structures and open ground for new growth.

It was good to be a young conservative back in my day. It’s great to be one right now.

"But, as I think you're quite familiar, the Espionage Act does not permit a public interest defense. You're not allowed to speak the word 'whistleblower' at trial."

During the hour-long conversation with Axelrod, Holder -- the country's first African-American attorney general -- also accused presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump of playing the race card in his campaign.

"The fact that he questioned the legitimacy of President Obama by questioning where he was born, what he's said about Mexicans...I think there's a race-based component to his campaign. I think he appeals too often to the worst side of us as Americans."

As it turns out, the core Tea Party demographic — working white men between the ages of 45 and 64 — would do fairly well under the law.

“Passage of the Clinton health plan in any form would be disastrous,” Mr. Kristol wrote, italicizing for emphasis. “It would guarantee an unprecedented federal intrusion into the American economy. Its success would signal the rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy at the moment that such policy is being perceived as a failure in other areas.”

“The main beneficiaries tend to have lower wages, employed in smaller businesses that are not providing health insurance,” she said. “They are not elderly. They are also not the poorest.” And they might be grateful to Democrats for the benefit. To conservative Republicans, losing a large slice of the middle class to the ranks of the Democratic Party could justify extreme measures. <img src="http://meter-svc.nytimes.com/meter.gif"/>

n’t add up any more.”

Mr. Kristol, emailing from Israel where he was meeting with Mr. Netanyahu, described the shift as a result of broader underlying trends in American politics as the political left grows more “European” and the political right grows more “Reaganite.”

He added that “the conservative belief in American exceptionalism is akin to Zionism.

J Street, the liberal pro-Israel advocacy organization that hosted Mr. Baker at its convention in Washington this week, said the Republican Party had grown more radical, leaving behind the former secretary of state and others like Brent Scowcroft, who was national security adviser under the first President George Bush, and Colin L. Powell, another former secretary of state.

“These used to be the center of the Republican Party,” Mr. Ben-Ami said. “I don’t think they’ve shifted. They’re still saying the same thing. The Republican Party of today has moved so far to the right they can’t relate to what these folks are saying.

Within minutes, conservatives on Twitter blasted Mr. Baker, who served under the first President Bush, and who had just been listed as an adviser to Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor now poised to run for president. By the next morning, Jeb Bush authorized his spokeswoman to publicly differ, but Mr. Adelson and other pro-Israel donors are said to remain incensed at Mr. Bush for not stopping the speech or dumping Mr. Baker.

Republican presidents like Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon and George Bush were not always seen as unequivocally supportive of Israel. For decades, throughout the Cold War especially, Republican leaders were viewed as close to anti-Communist Arab allies and the oil industry. They presided over a predominantly Protestant electoral base while Democrats assembled a more urban coalition with lopsided support from American Jews. Even when Republican presidents supported Israel, they also openly quarreled with its leadership at times, much as Democratic presidents did.

As secretary of state, Mr. Baker gave a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, calling on all sides in the Middle East conflict to face hard truths, including Israel, which he said should stop settlement activity. Mr. Baker even barred Mr. Netanyahu, then a deputy foreign minister, from the State Department building after the Israeli called American policy dishonest.

“Historically,” Mr. Ross added, “it was the Democrats who were closer to Israel than the Republicans. Now among Republicans, it is not just a possible issue to try to wean voters away but a measure of American reliability with its friends.”

That shift really began in earnest under President George W. Bush. Although he, too, had his differences with Jerusalem at times — he was the first president to make support for a Palestinian state official American policy — he became known as probably the strongest ally Israel had ever had in the Oval Office

Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary at the time, recalled a flare-up of violence between Israel and Arabs. He was given talking points with a typical American message for such episodes urging both sides to refrain from violence.“I took them to Bush, and Bush said: ‘No, don’t say that. Just say this: Israel has a right to defend itself,’” Mr. Fleischer said. “It was one of those decisions that sent shock waves through the bureaucracy. But that was Bush.”

Mr. Bush, and other Republicans, came to identify with Israel’s struggle with terrorism. “Sept. 11 made it vivid, made it real and made it powerful,” said Mr. Fleischer, now a member of the Republican Jewish Coalition’s board of directors. “It happens to them, it happens to us, we’re on the same side. Being pro-Israel is a no-brainer, absolutely moral issue to take inside the Republican Party.”

“The news staff and the editorial pages do operate more independently than people assume, but it’s the combined effect we should look at,” Rosen says. “The news side gives him the benefit of doubt, the editorial pages endorse an extreme position in which Mueller cannot fairly investigate. The signal to what used to be called establishment Republicans is: There are no institutionalists among us any longer; it’s tribalism all the way down.”

The perceived shift in the Journal’s editorial board, not unlike the further decline into journalistic insanity at Fox, is symptomatic of the intellectual rot that has eaten away at the right, and at the Republican Party specifically. On the right, years of bashing liberal media turned from criticism to paranoia and a sense of victimhood. The Clinton bogeyman became so exaggerated that anything Trump did became “not as bad as Hillary.” The rise of a worldwide populist movement suffused with nativism left conventional Republican outlets and politicians racing to catch up to the mob, running to defend Trump and his movement, whatever the cost and whatever intellectual gymnastics were necessary.

Bill Kristol observes, “As political movements go, American conservatism has been relatively principled and idea-driven. That’s served America well. But the survival of such a conservatism — one that would resist authoritarianism, nativism and demagoguery — is now very much in question.”

The answer is that for conservatives the market has become a cult

The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer's history of magic. Frazer identified certain immutable principles that have governed magical thinking throughout the ages.

Among these is the imitative principle according to which a favorable outcome is obtained by mimicry — the endless chants of entrepreneurship, vague nonsense about charter schools, calls for tax cuts for people who don't make enough money to benefit from them.

There also is taboo, the primitive assumption that by not speaking the name of a thing, the thing itself will be thereby be exorcised. This is one reason that any attempt to criticize the current consensus is met with whingeing about "socialism.

Russell Kirk, the author of The Conservative Mind, rejected the free market and indeed many elements of modern commercial and technological life, albeit in an occasionally affected and cloying manner. Christopher Lasch, the great cultural historian, was essentially a kind of Tory Marxist, a reactionary who agreed with the authors of The Communist Manifesto that capital would leave the "bonds and gestures" of civilization "pushed to one side / like an outdated combine harvester." Even Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism himself, could only summon up "two cheers" for capitalism and argued for the moral necessity of a broad and generous welfare state.

Going beyond the legacy of avowedly conservative thinkers, many opponents of capitalism, such as Theodor Arodno and Eric Hobsbawm, recognized the fundamental incompatibility of endless creative destruction not only with human dignity but with other more tangible things that intellectual conservatives claim to value, such as classical music and literature

Conservatives should engage with these writers and thinkers — and going further back, with Keats and Beethoven and Dickens and Wagner and Heidegger, with all those who have valued what is fundamentally human for its own sake.

Fortunately there are already signs that the right-wing libertarian consensus is starting to come apart

In Why Liberalism Failed, a somewhat clunky book recently praised by Barack Obama of all people, Patrick Deneen argued that American conservatives are wrong to look to the Founding Fathers and to libertarian ideology for solutions to our present discontents.

At American Affairs, the splendid magazine founded in 2016 by Julius Krein and Gladden Pappin, you can read conservative arguments for things like postal banking alongside articles by Marxist writers like Slavoj Zizek

Andrew Willard Jones, a talented young historian, has launched a new journal called Post-Liberal Thought to examine the question of how religious people can look beyond the political and philosophical legacy of liberalism

A new political and social life founded upon the principle of solidarity, and not upon those of indulging our acquisitive instincts or congratulating our fellow achievers on having performed the rituals of competence, is one that will not be realized by role-playing characters from a preferred historical moment. Nor will it come about through modest reforms

This is not an argument for quietism but for radical and difficult change.

William F. Buckley Jr. famously said, “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.” More recently, George W. Bush joked at a Yale commencement: “To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students I say, you, too, can be president of the United States.”

The Republican embrace of anti-intellectualism was, to a large extent, a put-on.

Eisenhower may have played the part of an amiable duffer, but he may have been the best prepared president we have ever had — a five-star general with an unparalleled knowledge of national security affairs. When he resorted to gobbledygook in public, it was in order to preserve his political room to maneuver. Reagan may have come across as a dumb thespian, but he spent decades honing his views on public policy and writing his own speeches. Nixon may have burned with resentment of “Harvard men,” but he turned over foreign policy and domestic policy to two Harvard professors, Henry A. Kissinger and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, while his own knowledge of foreign affairs was second only to Ike’s.

There is no evidence that Republican leaders have been demonstrably dumber than their Democratic counterparts. During the Reagan years, the G.O.P. briefly became known as the “party of ideas,”

In recent years, however, the Republicans’ relationship to the realm of ideas has become more and more attenuated as talk-radio hosts and television personalities have taken over the role of defining the conservative movement that once belonged to thinkers like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and George F. Will. The Tea Party represented a populist revolt against what its activists saw as out-of-touch Republican elites in Washington.

the primary vibe from the G.O.P. has become one of indiscriminate, unthinking, all-consuming anger.

It’s one thing to appeal to voters by pretending to be an average guy. It’s another to be an average guy who doesn’t know the first thing about governing or public policy.

The Trump acolytes claim it doesn’t matter; he can hire experts to advise him. But experts always disagree with one another and it is the president alone who must make the most difficult decisions in the world. That’s not something he can do since he lacks the most basic grounding in the issues and is prey to fundamental misconceptions.

In a way, the joke’s on the Republican Party: After decades of masquerading as the “stupid party,” that’s what it has become

the G.O.P. still has a lot of soul-searching to do. Mr. Trump is as much a symptom as a cause of the party’s anti-intellectual drift. The party needs to rethink its growing anti-intellectual bias and its reflexive aversion to elites.

Trump has added to this ugly record by banning Iranians from entering the United States and repeatedly denigrating Muslims and Islam. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that according to a 2016 survey by the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies, 87 percent of Iranians held a negative view of the United States government. And that by a margin of three to one, according to a Zogby Research Services poll taken last summer, Iranians think Trump has made U.S.-Iranian relations worse.

Why can’t Pence understand that? I suspect a lot of it has to do with Ronald Reagan. Reagan, according to conservative legend, denounced the USSR—calling it an evil empire and demanding that it tear down the Berlin Wall—and thus helped inspire the revolts that brought down the Soviet empire. Pence wants to do something similar in Iran. But it’s a poor analogy. Eastern European countries like Poland were suffering under Soviet domination, and had little history of being dominated by the United States. Thus, Reagan was able to help stoke a Polish nationalism that expressed itself largely against Moscow. Iranians, by contrast, are rising up against homegrown dictators who use the specter of American domination to justify their hold on power. Iranians are thus less like Poles in the 1980s than Nicaraguans in the 1980s, who distrusted Reagan’s denunciations of their repressive Sandinista government because of their long, ugly experience with American power.It’s ironic that Pence, in his oped, called Iranians “proud.” It’s precisely because they are proud—because, like Americans, they desire both individual freedom and national self-determination—that they can reject Ayatollah Khamenei while also rejecting Donald Trump.