, Columnist
Paleoconservatism Is Back
Trump may be a new kind of politician, but we've seen those ideas before.
Old-time GOP religion.
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The election of Donald Trump seems so shocking, so unprecedented, that most pundits are treating the election as a unique rupture in American political history.
That's an understandable reaction to the rise of a political novice who spends his days firing off angry tweets, but one that ignores the fact that the ideas he’s peddling have a long and tangled history that is inseparable from the history of the Republican Party. Viewed this way, Trump’s victory isn’t an anomaly. It’s the stunning resurgence of a wing of the conservative movement that went into exile many decades ago.
