“Party leaders should have anticipated Trump’s rise…”

Party leaders should have anticipated Trump’s rise—after all, he was created in their laboratory, before he broke free and began to smash everything in sight. The Republican Party hasn’t been truly conservative for decades. Its most energized elements are not trying to restore stability or preserve the status quo. Rather, they are driven by a sense of violent opposition: against changes in color and culture that appear to be sweeping away the country they once knew; against globalization, which is as revolutionary and threatening as the political programs of the Jacobins and the anarchists once were.

George Packer, “The Unconnected”, The New Yorker (31 October 2016), 59-60.