Republicans are not conservative?

Dennis Prager writes at National Review,

There are many reasons Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. The four most often cited reasons are the frustrations of white working-class Americans, a widespread revulsion against political correctness, disenchantment with the Republican “establishment,” and the unprecedented and unrivaled amount of time the media afforded Trump.

They are all valid.

But the biggest reason is this: The majority of Republicans are not conservative.

...Why haven’t Americans over the past three generations known what America stands for?

Probably the biggest reason is the influence of left-wing ideas.

America stands for small government, a free economy (and therefore capitalism), liberty (and it therefore allows for liberty’s inevitable consequence, inequality), the “melting pot” ideal, and a God-centered population rooted in Judeo-Christian values (so that a moral society is created by citizens exercising self-control rather than relying on the state to impose controls).

Only America was founded on the idea of small government. But the Left is based on big government.

America was founded on the principle that human rights come from the Creator. For the Left, rights come from the state.

...The American Revolution, unlike the French Revolution, placed liberty above equality. For the Left, equality is more important than all else. That’s why so many American and European leftists have celebrated left-wing regimes, no matter how much they squelched individual liberty, from Stalin to Mao to Che and Castro to Hugo Chávez. They all preached equality.

It took generations, but the Left has succeeded (primarily through the schools, but also through the media) in substituting its values for America’s. While the Left has been the primary cause, there have been others. The most significant is success.

So, then, thanks to leftism and America’s taken-for-granted success, most Americans no longer understand what it means to be an American. Those who do are called “conservatives” because they wish to conserve the unique American idea. But conservatives now constitute not only a minority of Americans, but a minority of Republicans. That is the primary reason Donald Trump — a nationalist but not a conservative — is the presumptive Republican nominee. As I noted from the outset, I will vote for him if he wins the nomination — because there is no choice. But the biggest reason he won is also the scariest.

Read more here.