Over the coming years, environmental scientists will probably chronicle the many species that Donald Trump’s presidency has brought to extinction. Political scientists may add another: the conservative Jewish intellectual.
I’m using the phrase in a specific way. By “intellectual,” I mean someone who traffics in ideas, not tribal or partisan loyalties. By “conservative,” I mean someone whose views roughly approximate the views of self-described conservatives in America at large.
Reasonable people can quarrel with that definition. Conservatism, they might argue, is a set of enduring dispositions: reverence for tradition, fear of radical change, distrust of state planning. Its meaning should not rest on public opinion. But in common parlance, popular sentiment does determine political labels. Americans once used the term “liberal” to denote someone skeptical about government intervention in the economy. (Europeans still use it that way.) But in the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt began employing the term to describe his New Deal agenda, and liberalism’s American meaning changed. To this day, some “classical liberals” or “libertarians” bemoan Roosevelt’s linguistic theft and insist that they — not Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama — are the true liberals. But that’s not how they’re generally described.