The intelligent case for voting Trump

Last week more than 130 right-wing thinkers put their names to a defiant document — a list of ‘Scholars and Writers for America’ in support of Donald Trump. It includes the editors of five of the country’s leading conservative journals of ideas: R.R. Reno of the Christian conservative First Things; Roger Kimball of the New Criterion, the right’s leading journal of the arts; Charles Kesler of the Claremont Review of Books; the American Spectator’s R. Emmett Tyrrell; and me, the editor of the American Conservative. (Notably lacking are names from America’s oldest conservative magazine, National Review, which has been as hostile to Trump as the columnists of the New York Times and Washington Post. NR, representing what now seems like the establishment wing of the right, published a ludicrously ineffective cover story in February demanding that Republicans not nominate Trump.)

The list of scholars and writers for Trump includes high-profile thinkers who have also succeeded in business and politics — such as Peter Thiel, Conrad Black and Newt Gingrich — as well as academics who are at the top of their fields, such as the philosophers Scott Soames, Robert Koons, Daniel N.