TODAY IN CONSERVATIVE INTELLECTUALISM.

I hate to do such a quick reprise of the "My Frontrunner is Your Fault" theme, but I can't let this Erick Erickson thing at The Resurgent pass without remark:

In other words, the one group to blame for Donald Trump is everybody.
Opportunity Lives and the Koch Brothers deserve blame.
The conservative movement deserves blame.
Republican leaders and the actual Republican establishment deserve blame.
Democrats deserve blame.
The media deserves blame.
I deserve blame.

It sounds like a suicide note, but alas! I'm pretty sure it's just Erickson trying to reassure his base, who (it's a safe bet) are suffering similar spasms of existential dread over Trump,  that the whole world's gone crazy and it's not just them. There are some blind-squirrel-nut moments like this:

Conservatives too, myself included, deserve blame. We have fought awfully hard against the establishment, but often decided we wanted to fight more than we wanted to solve the problem.

This from the architect of Operation Leper! It'd be even funnier if he meant it. Oh, and this:

Another perfect example of the one group to blame for Donald Trump is Barack Obama and his Democratic coalition. In 2007, Obama heaped scorn on white, blue collar workers in Pennsylvania bitterly clinging to their guns and religion. He went to war with them, dividing classes and races and putting a lot of blue collar workers in the energy industry on the unemployment line.

If only Democrats were actually serious about the needs of the white working class, they could have had those votes instead of Trump -- because, Erickson's argument clearly implies, his own party is totally shit at meeting those needs.

You know who else thinks Trump voters have been "left behind by liberalism" and #NeverTrump conservatives are missing a trick? The Federalist's Mytheos Holt, who starts by telling us about this straight-up White Nationalist chick, "Sylvia," who he was able to turn, guys (high five!). He came to her at first "in the company of another friend, who had made it his personal mission to deconvert her from her ideology, a task with which I agreed to help" (sexy already, right?), but then on his own:

I continued to send out feelers... so I could probe her ideology... After a while, she got used to me... she began to open up about her more risqué beliefs. So, this time with more gentle prodding, I started to make her doubt what she’d been taught.

Things got even hotter when Holt revealed to her that he's Jewish: "my ethnic revelation actually made her open up more to me rather than less."

After that revelation, gently poking holes in her worldview was out of the question, as I’d just metaphorically sent a cannonball straight through its foundation.

Boom! So, Holt reasons, if he can shoot his cannon of understanding into this racist chick, why can't other conservatives appeal to her co-racists? After all, they're not bad people, just misguided:

Ultimately, the biggest reason the pain that drove Sylvia’s family and so many like them into the arms of white nationalism is unfair is a pain that I, as a Jew, can empathize with. After all, once many Jews turned to communism as a way of trying to get political rights they didn’t think they could get any other way, and as a way of lashing out at a society that unfairly disdained them and their culture.

Even though this ideological shift made many people hate Jews more, at least the communists were trying to do something. Only that kind of desperation can make a radical ideology like white nationalism attractive.

Be sure to catch Holt's version of Fiddler on the Roof, in which Perchik turns into Norman Podhoretz.

On and on it goes, so let's wrap it up: Holt thinks conservatives don't complain enough about social justice warriors (I know! And at The Federalist! He's got nerve, I'll give him that), causing white proles to turn to Trump, so you squishes better drop the "Kemp-and-W-style 'bleeding heart conservatism'" and start Trumping it up --

Otherwise, the people damaged by multicultural, leftist attacks on Western civilization will be thoroughly justified in sneering at us as proverbial “cuckservatives” forever mentally masturbating with our own empty universalism while barbarism rapes Lady Liberty.

Maybe Holt should drop the politics stuff and devote his considerable talents to specialty porn. (In a way, isn't he doing that already?)