Six Reasons for Optimism
The Trump campaign's bluster can't hide the fact that modern conservatism has lost confidence and direction.
Below are six causes for optimism. But I should stress, as I have since The Reactionary Mind, that the reason I think the Right has not much of a future is that it has won. If you consider its great animating energies since the New Deal — anti-labor, anti–civil rights, and antifeminism — the Right has achieved a considerable amount of success. Either in destroying or beating back these movements. So the hopefulness you read below, it needs to be remembered, is built on the ruins of the Left. It reflects a considerable pessimism and arises from a sober realism about where we are right now.
1.
An ABC News poll has Trump at 38 percent of the popular vote. It’s only one poll, and I haven’t been paying much attention to the polls (what’s the point?), but if Trump does get 38 percent — which is about what I’ve been thinking he’ll get, plus or minus a point — he’ll be squarely within McGovern territory. With very few exceptions, he’s rarely broken, in a four-way race, above 40 percent. (That said, Clinton, with her 50 percent, according to ABC, won’t be in Nixon territory.)
No major-party candidate of the last fifty years, aside from George H. W. Bush, has gotten less than 40 percent of the vote, and in Bush’s case, it had a lot to do with Perot. This will go down as a catastrophic defeat, at the presidential level, for the Republican Party.
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