Embarrassed members of the conservative intelligentsia have long been dismayed by Donald Trump. He’s crude, he’s violent, he’s garish, he has little interest in any contest of ideas. Liberals often feel the same way.

But as Corey Robin — a Jacobin contributing editor and the author of The Reactionary Mind — argues, many things that so many on the Right and center-left see as aberrant about Trump are in fact deeply rooted in the Right’s often contradictory frameworks — frameworks that date back to the movement’s dawn. The bugs you see were meant to be features. It’s just that today, even as conservatives dominate all three branches of the federal government, those features no longer work.

In his new edition of The Reactionary Mind, Robin points to a central tension that has marked conservatism from the get-go, between two conceptions of virtue and nobility: one, defined by political and military distinction, and another, by entrepreneurial acumen and accumulated wealth.