Posted on September 8, 2015

#NRORevolt, Explained

Matthew Yglesias, Vox, September 8, 2015

Donald Trump has been tearing the Republican primary apart for months now, and the success of his campaign has begun exposing cracks in the broader conservative movement.

One window into these strains is the #NRORevolt hashtag, in which NRO stands for National Review Online, the digital edition of the flagship publication of the American conservative movement. As it’s become clear that the Trump surge has some real staying power, the National Review has become increasingly vocal in its criticisms of Trump–referring to his campaign, for example, as a “medicine-man show.”

The #NRORevolt is a backlash to the National Review’s historic role as the self-appointed monitor of what is and is not an acceptably mainstream view in the American conservative movement, including its sporadic “purges” of excessively anti-Semitic or racist elements. But it relies in part on a broader critique that the mainstream right is filled with “cuckservatives” who refuse to stand up for white interests and are laying the groundwork for LGBTQ equality, and encompasses an ugly critique of Jewish “kikeservatives” and other anti-Semitic themes.

Most of all, the #NRORevolt takes much of what is merely the subtext of the Trump phenomenon and turns it into text. The explicit question it raises is whether the American conservative movement should be organized around tax cuts, business-friendly regulations, and a hawkish foreign policy–an ideology that, in practice, happens to be overwhelmingly supported by white people–or whether it should be an explicit vehicle for white interests in an increasingly diverse society.

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[Editor’s Note: This entire article is worth reading. Read further at the original article link below.]