No TNB tonight. But to make it up to you, I’m going to start unpacking something I mentioned as an aside on Tuesday.

1. Mind Palaces

On Tuesday I offered a question:

In 2016, Trump believed that the conservative movement was so desiccated and weak that it could be overthrown without risking schism. That the conservatism of the last 60 years was a spent force, which would accommodate itself to whatever a strongman demanded of it.

He was correct. There’s no real argument about that.

The question is whether or not a healthy conservatism ever truly existed in the first place, or if it was just the intellectuals’ mind palace.

My tentative answer was that (a) I could argue this both ways and (b) there was a third option: conservatism as a cargo cult.

So let me make my best case for all three and then you can discuss amongst yourselves. But here’s my ask for the comments: When you explain which answer you believe is the truest, I’d also like you to caveat it and explain why you might be wrong.

And I say “truest” because in the most basic sense all three of these options are true to some degree. It’s not either/or; it’s both/and. The question isn’t which explanation is correct—it’s which explanation is the biggest driver.

So let’s start with Stuart Stevens.

(1) It was all a lie. That’s the title of Stuart’s fantastic book about his journey through conservative politics and his thesis is that the current state of the conservative movement / Republican party was the inevitable endpoint.