Among my political readings and podcasts there are two distinctly conservative voices, The Bulwark and The Dispatch. Both are staunchly ‘Never Trumpers’ who did not support and have consistently argued against and fought the Trump takeover of the Republican Party.

The Dispatch includes a number of writers exiled from National Review for their anti-Trump views including David French, Steve Hayes, and Jonah Goldberg. The Bulwark rose from the ashes of The Weekly Standard and includes the likes of Charlie Sykes, Jonathan V. Last, and Bill Kristol.

Among the ‘Never Trumpers’ one common divisor is the ‘Burn it All Down’ camp vs the “Reformers” camp, the former believing that the current GOP and its leaders must be driven from public life before conservatism can be reclaimed and the latter supporting a more limited expulsion of Trump supporters but not of the core GOP elected officers.  The Bulwark, while not uniformly, is pretty much a ‘Burn it All Down’ establishment and The Dispatch are ‘Reformers.’

Perhaps the most significant difference between these two conservative voices is the level of self-reflection they are willing to tolerate. Both camps hate Trump and his enthusiastic cult-like followers and call out the authoritarian bent that led to the Jan 6 2021 attempt to overthrow the election and the incoming legitimate government but there is a difference when it comes to the reason Trump took their party.

The Bulwark team has been much more willing to look much earlier than 2015 and search for what made it possible for a vile, corrupt, bigoted conman to leapfrog to the head of the GOP primary while The Dispatch’s team seem much more willing to label Trump a bolt from the blue, a strange and unique occurrence abetted by media influence, that is unlikely to repeat.

Frankly, I am with The Bulwark on this. Trump did not spring from the GOP fully formed like Athena from Zeus. The voting base of the GOP had been primed, cultivated, and molded for years into the sort of force that would respond to Trump’s brand of cruelty and without recognizing that fact and destroying that foundation there is no salvaging of any movement on the right.