THE OPPOSITE OF CONSERVATISM:

The shock of 2016 was so profound for many conservatives that they could not see past their revulsion of a man who challenged and disrupted the tenets of Meyer's fusionism. Their instinct was to oppose him, often ferociously, as he chased the Republican presidential nomination, captured it, and went on to an unexpected general-election victory. Continetti takes a different approach. A chronicler rather than a combatant, he seeks to understand Trump and the pull of his populism--and to interpret the 45th president not as an alarming aberration from conservative orthodoxy, but as the logical product of a movement that always has wrestled with populist urges in a lineage that includes Joseph McCarthy, the John Birch Society, Reagan Democrats, Pat Buchanan, and others.

Continetti blends intellectual and political history to reimagine the mainsprings of conservative success, with populism serving as a source of energy for conservatives as well as a threat to the high principles that many of them hold dear. 

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