RUSH LIMBAUGH CHANNELS KURT SCHLICHTER.

Complete with a wisecrack about cruises.

I was raised to believe the last thing in the world you defend is your own? That’s a manners thing that you don’t focus on yourself. You defend and protect everything but your own so that you can show you’re not selfish and into it for yourself. But he’s had a total reversal. Like you don’t defend your own, who else will? And if your own and what you believe in is under attack, you have no reason to shy away from defending it. So that’s what he means by that.

But [Norman Podhoretz's] observation, the conservative elite has allowed its sense of superiority to overcome its intellectual powers. That’s right on the money. Superiorist arrogance, condescension really aimed at Trump supporters as much, if not more, at Trump. But I think there’s jealousy. I think Trump coming along has proven the lack of need.I mean, these people for the longest time thought of themselves as the intellectual bulwark for conservatism. They were defining it. They were the locomotive. They were propelling it. They were enforcing it. They were influencing others. And in that regard, they were always asking for donations. Their hands were always out. “Here. Donate to my think tank. Donate to my magazine. Donate to my cruise. Whatever, give me money.”

Wait a minute, you’re conservative. What is this “give me money” business? “Well, we’re so important, the conservative movement, that we need our funding in nontraditional ways.” Well, if your magazine can’t make a profit, then how valuable is it, really? “Well, uh, the value is not the magazine, but the intellectual prowess that puts it together,” blah, blah, blah, blah.

Here comes Trump, somebody they have no respect for, somebody they think is an absolute birthing idiot, [c.q.] and is not asking anybody for a dime and is implementing everything they believed in to cheers and applause that they will never hear for themselves, and they’re just jealous.

Trump is demonstrating that they’ve been running maybe a little bit of a scam. What good have they been in implementing conservatism and advancing it if a guy who’s never been in politics before can come in and get elected president in less than two years, implement 90% of what they devoted their lives to. So I think that’s a factor.

But as Mr. Podhoretz says, it’s really a class thing. The superiorist, nose in the air looking down at lessers and having those lessers outperform you and demonstrate your own irrelevance got to be infuriating. And now their magazines are going belly up, so they’re starting new websites, and they can’t get subscribers for that. So it’s doubly frustrating.

Well, yes, and it amuses me that The Bulwark (that's a land fortification) uses a picture of a ship of the line as its emblem.  The Trump presidency has revealed some of the Conservative Establishment as simply bipartisanship by other means, properly understood as the Political Class protecting its perquisites against the rabble.