Conservatism has been watered down to the point where the public has no real understanding of what it is. Is Paul Ryan a conservative ? John McCain ? These guys are not Russell Kirk. They have no center....look at the budget the GOP helped the dems pass. You can’t expect the public to think the GOP stands for anything after such a folly.
Trump is not offering conservatism as movement conservatives like to define it, but he’s offering a nationalist/populist creed which is in step with the times. Good or bad, that’s the space the conservative movement has left empty...and Trump is filling that hole.
Please don’t confuse Republicans with conservatives. You can’t “water down” conservatism. It’s a set of bedrock principles. A liberal Republican isn’t “watering down” conservatism, he’s watering down the Republican party. McCain, Ryan, McConnell, etc. obviously have nothing to do with conservatism. That’s why there’s a Tea Party wing in Congress. They are the conservatives. There has been a Rockefeller and Goldwater wing in the Republican party for a long time.
Of course I don’t expect the public to think the GOP as a whole stands for conservatism. That’s why Cruz’ campaign focuses on him being a Tea Party conservative who criticized his own party.
Movement conservatives don’t “like” to define conservatism a certain way. It HAS a definition of its own. That’s why you have to use words like populism and nationalism to describe what Trump is posturing himself as. He’s not a conservative. He’s not very consistent on anything at all though. Rah, rah, America great, I’ll make everything better, I’ll run things better and smarter, the establishment hates me but now they like me, yippie dippie doo...he offers up a lot of empty, substance-free platitudes and sells it on his brand name recognition.