every political movement in a democracy is shaped like a pyramid <u+2014> elite actors on the top, the masses underneath. but the pyramid that is modern american conservatism has always been misshapen, with a wide, squat base that tapers far too quickly at its peak. the broad base is right-wing populism, in all its post-world war ii varietals: orange county cold warriors, <u+201c>silent majority<u+201d> hard hats, southern evangelicals, reagan democrats, the tea party, the trumpistas. the too-small peak is the right<u+2019>s intellectual cadres , its philosophers and legal theorists and foreign policy hands and wonks. the peak is small because conservatives have always had a relatively weak presence within what james burnham, one of modern conservatism<u+2019>s intellectual godfathers, called the <u+201c> managerial class <u+201d> <u+2014> the largely liberal meritocrats who staff our legal establishment, our bureaucracy, our culture industries, our universities. whether as provincial critics of this class or dissidents within it, conservative intellectuals have long depended on populism to win the power that the managerial elite<u+2019>s liberal tilt would otherwise deny them. sometimes this interdependency has worked out well. at its peaks of political success, the conservative intelligentsia has channeled and directed populism, responding to grass-roots passions without being ruled by them. but now, in the age of donald trump, the populists have seemingly decided that they can get along just fine without any elite direction whatsoever. <u+201c>this is the crisis of the conservative intellectual,<u+201d> writes matthew continetti, the editor of the washington free beacon, in a long essay tracing how the highbrow conservatism of burnham and william f. buckley sought to work with and through the anti-establishment impulses of the middle american right. <u+201c>after years of aligning with, trying to explain, sympathizing with the causes and occasionally ignoring the worst aspects of populism, he finds that populism has exiled him from his political home.<u+201d> and, continetti adds, <u+201c>what makes this crisis acute is the knowledge that he and his predecessors may have helped to bring it on themselves.<u+201d> the only word amiss in this analysis is <u+201c>may.<u+201d> the crisis described in continetti<u+2019>s essay was not created by the conservative intelligentsia alone. but three signal failures of that intelligentsia clearly contributed to the right<u+2019>s disastrous rendezvous with trumpism. the first failure was a failure of governance and wisdom, under george w. bush and in the years that followed. had there been weapons of mass destruction under iraqi soil and a successful occupation, or had bush and his advisers chosen a more prudent post-sept. 11 course, the trust that right-wing populists placed in their elites might not have frayed so quickly. if those same conservative intellectuals had shown more policy imagination over all, if they hadn<u+2019>t assumed that the solutions of 1980 could simply be recycled a generation later, the right<u+2019>s blue-collar voters might not have drifted toward a man who spoke, however crudely, to their more immediate anxieties. the second failure was a failure of recognition and self-critique, in which the right<u+2019>s best minds deceived themselves about (or made excuses for) the toxic tendencies of populism, which were manifest in various hysterias long before sean hannity swooned for donald trump. what the intellectuals did not see clearly enough was that fox news and talk radio and the internet had made right-wing populism more powerful, relative to conservatism<u+2019>s small elite, than it had been during the nixon or reagan eras, without necessarily making it more serious or sober than its bircher-era antecedents. some conservatives told themselves that fox and drudge and breitbart were just the evolving right-of-center alternative to the liberal mainstream media, when in reality they were more fact-averse and irresponsible. others (myself included) told ourselves that this irresponsibility could be mitigated by effective statesmanship, when in reality political conservatism<u+2019>s leaders <u+2014> including high-minded figures like paul ryan <u+2014> turned out to have no strategy save self-preservation. both of these errors were linked to the most important failure of the right<u+2019>s intellectuals: the failure to translate the power accrued through their alliance with populists into a revolution within the managerial class <u+2014> one that would have ultimately made conservatism less dependent on the vagaries and venom of populism, made the right-leaning intelligentsia less of a wobbly peak and more of a sturdy spire. partial revolutions there were. free-market ideas were absorbed into the managerial consensus after the stagflation of the 1970s. the fall of communism lent a retrospective luster to reaganism within the foreign policy establishment. there was even a period in the 1990s <u+2014> and again, briefly, after sept. 11 <u+2014> when a soft sort of social conservatism seemed to be making headway among atlantic-reading , center-left mandarins. but the same bush-era failures that alienated right-wing populists from their own intelligentsia also discredited conservative ideas within the broader elite. and then the progress of sexual individualism and the energy of a renascent left has pulled that elite further left across the last eight years. so it is that today, three generations after buckley and burnham, the academy and the mass media are arguably more hostile to conservative ideas than ever, and the courts and the bureaucracy are trending in a similar direction. reflecting on this harsh reality has confirmed some conservatives in their belief that the managerial order is inherently left wing, and that the goal of a conservative politics should be to sweep the managerial class away entirely. this is part of the appeal of trump to a small cohort within the right<u+2019>s intelligentsia, who imagine that his strongman approach can unweave the administrative state and strip the overclass of all its powers. this idea strikes me as fatuous and fantastical at once. but is there an alternative? continetti<u+2019>s essay hints at one: to make intellectual conservatism a more elite-focused project, to seek <u+201c>a conservative tinged establishment capable of permeating the managerial society and gradually directing it in a prudential, reflective, virtuous manner respectful of both freedom and tradition.<u+201d> this path seems considerably more appealing (and more republican) than the dream of a trump-led thermidor. but is it any more plausible? to begin anew, at such steep disadvantages, what amounts to missionary work? or, as another alternative, conservative elites might simply try to build a more intellectually serious populism out of the trumpian wreckage and wait for a less toxic backlash against liberal overreach to ride back into power. but can the populist right actually be de-hannitized, de-trumpified, rendered 100 percent breitbart-free? or would building on populism once again just repeat the process that led conservatism to its present end? history does not stand still; crises do not last forever. eventually a path for conservative intellectuals will open. but for now we find ourselves in a dark wood, with the straight way lost. i invite you to follow me on twitter (@douthatnyt) . follow the new york times opinion section on facebook and twitter (@nytopinion) , and sign up for the opinion today newsletter .
what the right<u+2019>s intellectuals did wrong
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