Chronological Isolation

Like other political movements, American conservatism offers predictable explanations as to where bad ideas arise.  During the Cold War, the explanation for this problem that one would have found with some regularity in conservative publications would have been communism, socialism, the welfare state, or “totalitarianism.”  More recently, socialism has alternated with “fascism,” or “Islamofascism.”  For today’s conservative media, moreover, these “isms” are mostly interchangeable designations...