YOU LEFT OUT RACE:

This change allowed Donald Trump to arrive on the scene in favor of big government.

The "anti-state" conservatives--those who had arrived at conservatism on the merits of conservative arguments--refused to join him. But by then they had become the minority even within the right-wing intelligentsia, displaced by the barkers and hucksters.

At which point the schism became irreparable. Eliot Cohen drafted an anti-Trump letter, signed by fellow Republican national security experts, while John Bolton, an anti-left Republican, impatiently waited and lobbied for Trump's attention and a job. Robert P. George, the Catholic philosopher, rejected Trumpism, while the anti-leftists Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham were rallying Christians for Trump. Free-market libertarians stood athwart the Trump train while the pro-business tax-cutters, such as Art Laffer, Stephen Moore, and the Wall Street Journal opinion page, became advisers to the new big-government conservative president. East Coast Straussians who spent their lives studying regimes and virtues stood where they were. The West Coast Straussians at the Claremont Institute, more interested in everyday politics and culture war, followed Trump.

Looking back, none of these divisions should have surprised us.

For two generations, anti-state conservatives and anti-left conservatives had taken different paths to arrive at the same place. But when American politics transformed, they continued along their paths to arrive at different destinations. And only the divergence has allowed us to measure the relative size of the two groups. It turns out that the anti-state conservatives were a relatively small cadre. Most of the people who identified as being "conservative" were only at the party because they hated the left.

Trump finally exposed the division, and in so doing revealed that what's left of the conservative movement--the conservative movement as dominated by the popularizers and the populists, the conservative movement that gave up on its positive principles and only clung to the negative principle of anti-leftism--has become explicitly pro-state, just so long as it controls the state.

They want the state to have the power to tell businesses what to do.

They want the state to have the power to pick winners and losers.

They want the state to spend tons of money on entitlement programs.

They just want all of those things directed to their constituents. It's a nationalized vision of machine-era politics.

The erstwhile anti-state conservatives look at their former friends and ask, "How can you betray the principles you once preached?"

Meanwhile, the anti-left conservatives respond by saying, "Trump is all that is standing between us and the left. How can you take a position that puts you on the side of the liberals?"

The dispiriting truth is that these two sides never wanted the same thing from politics.

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