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Thank you from a new subscriber, Claire, for this incisive two-part essay. There seems to be a typo ("write critics") in one clause of one sentence: "As Ryan Girdusky and Harlan Hill, both proponents of the national populism that cohered under Trump, explained in 2020, write critics of illiberal democratic movements around the globe, fail to understand that this political uprising didn’t need to happen."

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Again, right on the money. Kagan and most of the other never-Trumpers want us to believe--perhaps even want to convince themselves--that they never ran on nativism, dog-whistle racism, fear, overt lies, etc. And that they consistently held to whatever it is they're trying to claim were real Republican principles like "states' rights", which the real Republicans have only upheld when it was convenient to do so and ignored when it wasn't (say, in allowing Florida to go ahead and recount votes in 2000 if it wanted to). Nixon and his people engineered the acquisition of white Southern Democrats for the Republican coalition. The price for that was always going to be the preservation of their sociopolitical power by whatever means necessary.

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