During the last few years, I've been following Jonah Goldberg's Twitter feed. Many years ago, I saw him speak when I interned with the Heritage Foundation in Washington D.C. It was clear that the man thought at the time that he was at the forefront of conservatism but his Twitter feed now conveys a different feeling.

Years later, a friend of mine from high school got caught up in a CPAC video in which him and a friend ended up in an argument about interracial marriage with an older guy who was part of the then growing Alt Right movement. I remember bringing it up with him and just hearing that "there are many different types of people in the conservative movement." A Lincoln Project video I saw said that maybe they were naive about the nature of racism in the conservative movement.

I think that conservative intellectual types like Goldberg, or Michael Medved, Ross Douthat, etc. got so wrapped up in a philosophy that extolled all the warm and fuzzy things that seem to be worth preserving that they thought that's what right wing politics was for everybody. I would say that militia politics is really the primary basis of the modern GOP and has grown in to that since the 1990s at least. Militias are also a much smaller, but still potent, part of left wing politics, as seen by the rise of antifa in the Pacific Northwest. (Unlike right wing militias, left wing extremist groups aren't being validated by national political leadership of a major party.)

This doesn't dismiss conservative philosophy - but Donald Trump, while fading, being supplanted by an equally controversial figure like Hawley shows that this ideology has staying power. It resonates more with struggling white people in Red State America than Jonah Goldberg ever would. It's possible that sticking it out like this is a big gamble on the part of Hawley, to see if he can be seen as a daring leader for a movement that he knows will last long past Donald Trump.