I've been feeling a bit sorry for the good old-fashioned conservative movement of yore lately. You remember those people who fought for Ronald Reagan's "three legged stool" of Republican ideology: small government, strong national defense and "traditional values," right? I'm thinking about folks like Richard Viguerie, Morton Blackwell and Phyllis Schlafly, the movement O.G.'s who slaved for years in the trenches training Republicans to embrace such arcane subjects as "free trade," "individual liberty" and "limited government" — only to have a billionaire demagogue throw that all out the window for libertinism, central planning and vendetta by police state.
But there's really no need to feel sad for them. Blackwell and Viguerie are still around and now peddling Trumpism, as did Schlafly before she died in 2016. And we know that later Reagan revolutionaries like Ralph Reed and Roger Stone have been all-in on Donald Trump from the beginning. Still, they deserve more credit than they're getting for the ghastly state of American conservatism and the toxic politics we are living in today. Without them there would be no Trump.
