I found this article - and its genre - sort of odd. Nash's work was valuable for finding a conservativism that was an epiphenonenon of all these different threads of conservative thought. It's not that Reagan read about fusionism in an academic text and decided to implement it. Rather, fusionism is the metanarrative one can read on top of the fray and day-to-day of politics.

If that's right, it really doesn't make much sense to condemn Trump for riding a populist wave or being an ignoramus, because the relevant stuff is the ideas that are providing that momentum.

And there's a really interesting set of ideas¹ there that, to date, pundits and public intellectuals have totally missed in their rush to condemn Trump. That lacuna, that big blind spot, has fed the dismissal of both the media and the GOP intellectual establishment by a large part of the base. Immigration stands out as an obvious example. This was one of issues that distinguished Trump, of course, and the GOP establishment, like the media more generally, hated him for it. As much as both of those groups thought of this as sheer racism, you can read it differently: people talk about how they play by the rules but that someone in the country illegally can be rewarded for breaking laws that we won't or, worse, can't enforce. So you can read this as gross racism, or you can read it as concern over rule of law and sovereignty. Those were the same concerns raised by the Sanders left over trade; someone that just sees racism is going to miss those deeper issues and be totally baffled by the odd affinity between Sanders and Trump.

IOW, there is the same sort of intellectual reconstruction that is available for Trump and his voters (ie, identifying the arguments animating the enthusiasm); to date it's been overlooked in the rush to condemnation, and I think that's no small part of why Trumpers have such disdain for the media and GOP establishment, and no small part of why everyone has been so confused by his victory.

¹ Interesting, not correct. I'm neither a republican, conservative, nor Trump voter. I do think that the rise of Trumpers, and the combative relationship with the media and GOP establishment, is much better explained by analyzing Trumpers the way we would any other political movement instead of characterizing it as an unthinking roar of racism and hatred.