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That was both political and practical. Political because obviously they didn’t want to be seen as piling on President George W. Bush; practical because it wasn’t nearly as depressing.

Just as important, Mr. Ailes encouraged his hosts to let their personalities and patriotism show through in their coverage. “I” was a typical refrain. “We” and “us” often referred to the United States (something that most mainstream media entities dropped during the 1960s).

Media critics, amateur and professional, could, and did, assail him and his on-air talent, especially Bill O’Reilly. In response, Fox News would simply ignore them or hit back harder, on the air or through its relentless public relations department. There were no objective norms, no establishment rules, no journalistic sanctity. Just Roger’s rules.

even today, every cable network is, in many ways, a Roger Ailes production. The search for hosts with “something to say,” the talking heads, the talking head butting, the over-the-top breaking news graphics, the invocations of “America,” the saturation coverage of events — all of it was either created or fully exploited by Fox News.

Second, by keeping supply-side economics front and center, Trumponomics satisfies the slice of the donor class for whom all conservative policy goals are secondary to keeping their own tax bill as low as possible.

If this sounds like a cynical view of my fellow citizens’ motivations, a view heretofore advanced mostly by liberal critics of the right — well, look, it’s been a year in which cynical interpretations of the conservative establishment have been vindicated time and time again

after the Sept. 11 attacks, and later after the Madrid and London bombings, we told ourselves that Islam and Islamism had nothing to do with each other. But sadly, they do. The peaceful religion can sometimes serve as a slope into a militant anti-Western ideology, especially when this ideology offers a strong sense of belonging amid the mental discomfort of our postmodern societies.

Belgium’s predicament mirrors Europe’s. Official Europe has worked hard to move past nationalism, so that there is no German or French Dream. But there’s no European Dream, either, not yet. So new migrants have no spirit to tap into, as they do in the United States. Instead, some Muslims find it more attractive to give their loyalty to Allah, their fellow believers or the Islamic State.

A result of this mutual apathy is too many Islamists, and too few police and intelligence officers — particularly in Belgium, but not just there. We may have a common European currency, but we still do not have a common European terrorism database. Islamists in Western Europe seem better coordinated than the European authorities hunting them. 19 Comments

There are serious grounds for the alienation between the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and her European partners. There are many practical things she can do in response, but also some big-picture steps. She should speak honestly about Europe’s illusions, past and present. She should lead Europe past its outmoded data-protection concerns and push for coordination among security services. And she should make integration and opportunity a common value for everyone in Europe — a European dream that is more appealing to immigrants than any afterlife kingdom could possibly be.

Politically it was by no means a crazy strategy. For all his blunders, George W. Bush is still the only Republican candidate for president to win the popular vote in the last 25 years, and the only figure to successfully unite and lead a fractious party. Parts of Bushism look more optimistic, inclusive and economically relevant than either the angrier Tea Party message that Rubio piggybacked on in his 2010 Senate campaign or the generic “Mr. Republican” messages that John McCain and Mitt Romney lost with in 2008 and 2012. And with the Middle East in flames, Russia increasingly aggressive and the Islamic State camped out in Iraq and Syria, you can see why many conservative elites imagined that Americans — and Republican primary voters, especially — might want a more hawkish, even Bushian successor to Barack Obama

he was also a victim of his own fateful look backward, his assumption that what worked for the last Republican president could be made to work again. It didn’t, it couldn’t, and it probably won’t be tried again: Whoever wins the nomination in 2016, George W. Bush has gone down to defeat.

they do add up to the desire for a new synthesis, and an understanding that whatever the Republican Party needs now, it can’t just be what worked for Bush and Karl Rove until Iraq went sour and Wall Street melted down.

These desires don’t add up to a new Republican synthesis, and the candidates who have catered to them more successfully haven’t devised one. Trump’s populist, illiberal Jacksonianism can’t unite the party the way Bush once did, and Cruz’s hard-edge social and economic conservatism probably can’t win the median voter the way Bushism did twice

While Mr. Rubio did initially, as the good opportunist he is, latch on to the rage of the Tea Party to win his Senate seat, he was only pretending to be mad. Based on his reading of the political tea leaves, he needed 1) to win the latino vote (hence his foray into immigration reform 2) he needed to be optimistic in the mold of Reagen.Marco realized too late that the Tea Partiers were not kidding. They were crazy then and they are crazy now - they are just a angrier and more violent. But they were never remotely interested in immigration reform and any Republican that could not see that was simply blind. They also are not interested in solutions or uniting America. If you asked Trump supporters to tell you what the Donald has in store for us in terms of policies, short of having Mexico pay for a big wall and rounding up a bunch of immigrants, I am not sure they could tell you whole lot. Why? They don't care. They are just angry. I guess robots aren't that good at reading emotions.

It’ll be a personality cult, without a hint of optimism, and certainly no overarching governing philosophy

In temperament and judgment, this is now Trump’s party. And take him at his word: His supporters will riot, as he predicted this week, if he doesn’t get his way.

There is no getting around how much Trump’s followers now echo his darkest sentiments. In Tuesday’s exit polls, huge majorities of Trump supporters backed his call to ban Muslims from entering the country, and for rounding up and deporting 11 million illegal immigrants.

This month, members of the Republican national security community issued a strongly worded missive against Trump. They said his trade policies would be a “recipe for economic disaster,” that his embrace of torture was “inexcusable,” that his anti-Muslim campaign would badly damage American interests abroad, and on and on and on.

Where were these people six months ago? Laughing at the orange-haired clown with the rest us. But if this who’s who of Republican foreign policy cardinals is serious about their words, they have no choice but to leave the party this summer. Either that or accept the man who said he got foreign policy advice “speaking with myself.” For him, a glance in the mirror is enough. “I have a very good brain,” Trump said.

What’s interesting, and somewhat in tension with Kagan’s original argument, is that all of this is happening without a major change in the relative power of the United States and Europe. We’re still the only hyperpower; they’re still militarily wea

This unstable combination suggests that the trans-Atlantic relationship may be headed for a strange inflection point, a kind of through-the-looking-glass version of the Iraq debate.

The time is the late 2020s, let’s say, and the French and Germans and Poles demand that the United States lend our still-unparalleled military strength to a conflict that seems essential to European security — toppling a nascent caliphate in North Africa, or recovering W.M.D. from a collapsing post-Putin Russia

And a Socialist administration in Washington, backed by more than a few Trumpian Nationalists in Congress, looks across the ocean at Europe’s wars and whispers, “not this time.”

One such assumption, that voters follow the signals sent by party elites and officeholders, is the basis of the famous “party decides” thesis in political science, which was invoked early and often to explain why Trump couldn’t possibly end up as the Republican nominee.

While his progress has undercut that thesis, it hasn’t been fully disproved, since the “party decides” conceit doesn’t tell us about what happens when the party simply can’t decide. Whether you look at endorsements or fund-raising or any other metric, that’s what happened this time

before the Trump experience it was reasonable to assume that there was a consistent logic to primary voting — that regardless of what party elites decided, a kind of “wisdom of crowds” thesis could suffice to explain why major political parties don’t nominate people like, well, Donald Trump.

They are engaged partisans, a more distinct group. They often have to be registered with their party, they have to care enough to vote on a random Tuesday in February, March or April, in some cases they have to set aside the time to show up and caucus. By definition, they tend to be more interested in both policy and politics than the average citizen

On the evidence of past campaigns, this engagement inclines them (in the aggregate) to balance ideology and electability when they vote

there was also a fair amount of political-science evidence that the Republicans really were a more ideological party than the Democrats, less inclined to view compromise in favorable terms, more inclined to regard politics through a philosophical rather than an interest-group service lens.

Is it a case of his victor’s image carrying all before it — if you win enough primary contests, even with 35 percent of the vote, people assume that your winning streak can be extended into November? Is this just how a personality cult rooted in identity politics works — people believe in the Great Leader’s capacity to crush their tribe’s enemies and disregard all contrary evidence?

Until Donald Trump blew this model up

Except for immigration hawks, practically every ideological faction in the party regards Trump with mistrust, disgust, suspicion, fear. Pro-lifers, foreign-policy hawks, the Club for Growth, libertarians — nobody thinks Trump is really on their side. And yet he’s winning anyway.

perhaps Trumpism can be understood as a coup by the G.O.P.’s ideologically flexible minority against the conservative movement’s litmus tests; indeed to some extent that’s clearly what’s been happening.

he’s untrustworthy and unelectable — a combination that you’d normally expect engaged partisans to consider and reject. And yet he’s winning anyway.

But here the model isn’t completely broken, because a majority of Republican voters don’t actually believe that Trump faces long odds,

Instead, since last fall Republican voters have consistently told pollsters that they think Trump is the candidate most likely to win in November. So the party’s voters are choosing electability — as they see it — over ideology; they’re just in the grip of a strong delusion about Trump’s actual chances against Hillary Clinton.

The reason for this delusion might be the key unresolved question of Trump’s strange ascent. Is it the fruit of Trump’s unparalleled media domination — does he seem more electable than all his rivals because he’s always on TV

Yes, Trump has adopted conservative positions on various issues, but he’s done so in a transparently cynical fashion, constantly signaling that he doesn’t really believe in or understand the stance that he’s taking, constantly suggesting a willingness to bargain any principle away

Or is it somehow the pundits’ doing? Did the misplaced certainty that Trump couldn’t win the nomination create an impression that all projections are bunk, that he’ll always prove his doubters wrong?

Furthermore, both Reagan and Clinton inherited depressed economies, with unemployment well over 7 percent. This meant that there was a lot of economic slack, allowing rapid growth as the unemployed went back to work. Today, by contrast, unemployment is under 5 percent, and other indicators suggest an economy close to full employment. This leaves much less scope for rapid growth.

The only way we could have a growth miracle now would be a huge takeoff in productivity — output per worker-hour. This could, of course, happen: maybe driverless flying cars will arrive en masse. But it’s hardly something one should assume for a baseline projection.

belief that tax cuts and deregulation will reliably produce awesome growth isn’t unique to the Trump-Putin administration.

We heard the same thing from Jeb Bush (who?); we hear it from congressional Republicans like Paul Ryan. The question is why. After all, there is nothing — nothing at all — in the historical record to justify this arrogance.

Yes, Reagan presided over pretty fast growth. But Bill Clinton, who raised taxes on the rich, amid confident predictions from the right that this would cause an economic disaster, presided over even faster growth. President Obama presided over much more rapid private-sector job growth than George W. Bush, even if you leave out the 2008 collapse. Furthermore, two Obama policies that the right totally hated – the 2013 hike in tax rates on the rich, and the 2014 implementation of the Affordable Care Act – produced no slowdown at all in job creation.

Meanwhile, the growing polarization of American politics has given us what amount to economic policy experiments at the state level. Kansas, dominated by conservative true believers, implemented sharp tax cuts with the promise that these cuts would jump-start rapid growth; they didn’t, and caused a budget crisis instead. Last week Kansas legislators threw in the towel and passed a big tax hike.

At the same time Kansas was turning hard right, California’s newly dominant Democratic majority raised taxes. Conservatives declared it “economic suicide” — but the state is in fact doing fine.

It would be nice to pretend that we’re still having a serious, honest discussion here, but we aren’t. At this point we have to get real and talk about whose interests are being served.

Never mind whether slashing taxes on billionaires while giving scammers and polluters the freedom to scam and pollute is good for the economy as a whole; it’s clearly good for billionaires, scammers, and polluters.

And on such matters Donald Trump is really no worse than the rest of his party. Unfortunately, he’s also no better.

rebels do not necessarily have all that much in common with one another, let alone with the remainders of the religious right. The Trump-voting “deplorable” is likely to be a cultural evangelical but not a churchgoer, or a pro-choice lapsed Catholic who never cared for religious moralists. The typical “manosphere” denizen is something else entirely — younger, tech-savvy, impious, impressed with his own unblinking Darwinism. As constituent parts of cultural conservatism, these groups don’t form a particularly coherent whole; what unites them are common fears (feminism, political correctness, sometimes Islam), not a common cause.

Moreover, his provocations tend to actually work, in the sense that they summon up the illiberal, “shut up or we’ll shut you down” side of left-wing politics.

for a cultural conservatism united only by a shared outsider sensibility, neither consistency nor propriety are consensus virtues any longer — and indecency in the service of attacking liberalism is no vice.