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OXON HILL, Md. The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is the nation's largest gathering of conservatives, but it sometimes seems to attract almost as many headlines for whom it kicks out.

This year, CPAC is hosting both the president and vice president of the United States during the first two days. But a lot of the coverage has focused on internet provocateur Milo Yiannopolous being disinvited and a prominent white nationalist being expelled.

The media attention attracted by both men is disproportionate. Donald Trump has, in many ways that matter to your average CPAC attendee, been a normal Republican president, social media habits aside. The conference is no more "alt-right" than it is alt-punk or alt-country.

Yet there is also a palpable anxiety among some conservatives that their movement is being repealed and replaced with something more sinister. Yiannopolous lost his speaking slot for other reasons, but he has gleefully danced right up to the lines Richard Spencer long ago crossed lines mainstream conservatives aged 40 and under especially thought had been inerasable since William F. Buckley Jr.'s purge of anti-Semites and other cranks.

Two factors much larger than Twitter trolls and anonymous 4Chan users are at play here. First, a look around any large conservative gathering reveals it is not very racially diverse. There's nothing wrong with that in theory, but in practice is not conducive to building racial sensitivity.

Even a movement as progressive as that which coalesced around socialist Bernie Sanders faced criticism for not being sufficiently inclusive. His African-American former press secretary reported encountering racism on the campaign trail, though not from fellow staffers. But Sanders' supporters, and some of the areas where he was most popular, were not racially diverse relative to the Democratic primary electorate in 2016.

For Republicans, the challenge is even greater. Partisan politics has grown increasingly polarized since the 1980s and, with the exception of Barack Obama's first election, every presidential race since 2000 has been a hard-fought affair that could have plausibly gone the other way.

These political divisions dovetail with racial ones. George W. Bush won single-digit black support in his first presidential race. The 1996 Republican ticket headed by Bob Dole, who voted for both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Jack Kemp, the party's most effusive proponent of minority outreach in the post-Reagan era, received 12 percent.

In Mississippi in 2004, 85 percent of whites voted for the Republican presidential candidate and 90 percent of blacks voted for the Democrat. That's with Bush, not Trump, as the GOP nominee and John Kerry, not Obama, as the Democratic standard-bearer.

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"Where would you find the olive branch in the first six weeks? I haven't seen it," Durbin said.

02/27/17 10:03 AM

Mississippi is an extreme example, but not unrepresentative of the broader trajectory. In that kind of climate, it is easy for political rancor to become racialized, even without the long history of racism and conflict that did in fact precede it.

Similarly, it is very easy for a racially monolithic political movement to become insensitive to communities it does not represent. It is also difficult for groups that have more mixed feelings about, say, the Founding Fathers to be won over to the Right.

Secondly, conservative elites lost touch with many right-leaning voters. While the late Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Robert Bartley denied claims he said the nation-state was finished, he did support open borders.

With the end of the Cold War indeed, the end of history many on the center-right developed views on borders, sovereignty, immigration and multiculturalism that, while more market-oriented, that more closely resemble Mark Zuckerberg's views than those of millions of Americans who were voting Republican long before Trump came along.

In its own way, the utopianism of this vision was as simplistic as the "They took er jerbs!" zero-sum economic thinking ascribed to Trump voters. It is not surprising that it failed to gain much of a popular following.

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"I consider the media to be indispensable to democracy," Bush said.

02/27/17 8:44 AM

When it came to disappearing factories and paychecks or a diminished sense of community, conservative elites brandished think tank papers countering these fearful observations, in effect channeling the comedian Richard Pryor and asking, "Who you gonna believe me or your lyin' eyes?"

The main exception before the Stephen Bannon era at Breitbart was conservative talk radio, which can at times be low-brow and irresponsible. But it also has to be responsive to its audience in a way that most conservative intellectuals do not. Perhaps the hosts weren't fanning the flames of economic nationalism but, in act of market signaling free enterprisers should have recognized, giving their consumers what they wanted.

President Trump, a businessman and reality TV star, eventually did too.

Voters who wanted a more ideologically consistent, limited-government conservatism don't feel they have much to show for their efforts either. Republicans have been running on repealing Obamacare since it passed. Now that the constellation of forces in Washington has lined up in a way that should make it happen, a former leader of those Republicans is tellling them it ain't gonna happen.

Many conservatives don't feel like their leaders are providing leadership, even as they have trouble relating to the other side of the political divide.

The mutually reinforcing challenges of racism and non-assimilation, the disconnect between conservative elites and much of the rank-and-file, and then the disconnect between that rank-and-file and much of the rest of an increasingly diverse country those factors dug a hole in the conservative movement.

Real conservatives must build something much bigger than the alt-right to fill it.

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How the 'alt-right' came to haunt conservatism - Washington Examiner