Many "conservatives" feel they have been mislabeled for a long time now, with still more damage done more recently by the manner in which the mainstream media routinely refer to Donald Trump and his MAGA acolytes as such.

I've never really felt like a "conservative," but also know that whatever I am, Trump isn't; he isn't remotely a conservative either.

Trump has thoroughly taken over the primary organizational vehicle of alleged American conservatism, the Republican Party, but because MAGA consists of little more than Trump's ephemeral whims, dislikes and quirks of the moment, that takeover occurred largely without ideological struggle.

None of those I know who claim to be part of MAGA can tell me what its underlying principles are, other than support for whatever Trump wants or does, let alone provide any definition of conservatism that would permit Trump to somehow fall into that category. More often than not, MAGA is defined by what it detests (the woke left, the "swamp," the legacy media, the "establishment," etc.), combined with an unfocused shotgun populism and a desire to reverse whatever malfeasance the Joe Biden administration was deemed guilty of.

Closing the border and reducing crime rates might be widely shared desires, but do not in and of themselves a political ideology make.

Even if we were to painstakingly parse Trump's tendencies in search of kernels of ideological content, what one........

© Arkansas Online