I've seen a lot of praise for this Kevin Williamson piece on Trump and the GOP. I obviously agree with the "Trump is bad" sentiment, which accounts for its popularity among Never Trumpers. However.... https://www.nationalreview.com/the-tuesday/the-end-of-the-gop/

There are a couple massive flaws worth highlighting, because they're characteristic of the poisons that inhabit even many species of anti-Trump conservatism.

The first his Williamson's whitewashing of William F. Buckley's support for white supremacy:

Williamson justifies Buckley's support for disenfranchising blacks on the grounds that Buckley also wanted to disenfranchise "unqualified" whites.

But that was not on the table. What was on the table was measures to equalize voting for blacks and whites. Buckley opposed them.

And while his view "evolved," that means that he gave up on restoring de jure segregation after he lost his fight to preserve it.

His principle didn't change.

How do we know? When faced with the same question in South Africa two decades later, Buckley made the same choice! https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/12/mandela-and-conservative-racial-blindness.html

Buckley's reasons for supporting Aparthied in South Africa in the 80s were identical to his reasons for supporting it in the South in the 60s: black people were inferior, white people therefore entitled to rule.

The second tic worth noting is Williamson's contempt for democracy:

This is a very NR belief. The NR version of it lionizes elites, who are entitled to rule by dint of their superior intelligence and cultivation.

It's a creepy Buckley view his heirs still cling to.

One can believe in the need for elites to supply expertise, and also for elected representatives to use independent judgment. But when you're to the point of using democracy as a hate term, you've crossed into a disturbing place -- as evidenced by the uses Buckley put that notion

and the Buckleyite contempt for democracy helped open the door for Trump's attacks on democracy. They're difficult to disentangle in practice: both forms of belief that certain kinds of white people are entitled to minority rule.