The old world of the Cold War and the American Empire was over an older world of nations-a community of nations! A brotherhood!-was struggling to be reborn. Some political-theological exegesis would be required to unspool the nature of the accomplishment. Trump the Man might be crude and venal, but Trump the Spirit had opened a trapdoor in history. Someone philosophical, who knew how to extract timelessness from the tawdriness. Someone had to stand up for Trumpism in the noble abstract. The ancien régime was threatening to reconstitute itself. If Trumpism were snuffed out with Trump, Republicans would fall back into march with the party lemmings in hock to their donors (hardly any Republican voters agreed with the donors about anything, as Trump had intuited), who would connive with liberals to contaminate the country with more immigration, more Big Tech treason, more “free” trade, more endless wars, more slouching toward nihilism. Trump might be ejected from office or lose the election or win the election-but he was, also, definitely going to die. They were here because of one undeniable fact: Donald Trump was going to die. Disparate tribes had posted up for the potlatch: reformacons, blood-and-soilers, curious liberal nationalists, “Austrians,” repentant neocons, evangelical Christians, corporate raiders, cattle ranchers, Silicon Valley dissidents, Buckleyites, Straussians, Orthodox Jews, Catholics, Mormons, Tories, dark-web spiders, tradcons, Lone Conservatives, Fed-Socs, Young Republicans, Reaganites in amber. There was a new movement afoot: National Conservatives, they called themselves, and they were gathering here, at the Ritz-Carlton, at 22nd Street and M. I had come to Washington to witness either the birth of an ideology or what may turn out to be the passing of a kidney stone through the Republican Party. Untouchables in hard hats drilled into sidewalks, carried pylons, and ate lunch from metal boxes, while waiters in restaurants complimented old respectable bobbing heads on how well they were progressing with their rib eyes and iceberg wedges. Coming from Berlin, where the manual laborers are white, I felt as though I was entering the heart of a caste civilization. Bunting, starched and perfectly ruffled in red-white-and-blue fans, hung everywhere-from air conditioners, from gutters, from statues of dead revolutionaries. The corridor between Dupont Circle and Georgetown was like the dream of Yugoslav planners: long blocks of uniform earth-toned buildings that made the classical edifices of the Hill seem the residue of ancestors straining for pedigree. Everyone was polite and smooth in their exchanges. There was a civil war–like fracture in America-the president had said so-but little of it showed in the capital. At the height of summer, people in suits, shellacked by the sun, moved like harassed insects to avoid the concentrated light. The city was not beautiful no one made that claim for it. The course of true nationalism never did run smooth.
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