You may remember Dan Quayle’s immortal contribution to political philosophy: ‘I have made good judgements in the past. I have made good judgements in the future.’

A man confusing time itself – just one of the category errors, logical impossibilities and tautologies he sprayed across public life between 1988 and 1992. Quayle never got the top job, so it didn’t really matter. Put it down to nerves.

I never thought his near-contemporary George W. Bush was particularly bright. George H.W., Barbara, Jeb, Laura – sure. George Jr? Not so much.

Why do I say that?

It’s 2000. Clinton’s in the lame-duck zone after Ms Lewinsky and Ken Starr’s subsequent interrogation and off to plan Hillary’s political career. Bush has beaten a lacklustre Republican field to win the GOP nomination. The Economist had interviewed Bush about foreign policy the previous June, when he was still a long shot. He’d said he wanted to ‘keep good relations with the Grecians’.

The who?

Some readers will remember Grecian 2000 – the hair dye that ‘works so gradual, it looks so natural, no one will even notice’. Hair today, the presidency tomorrow.

I never thought Reagan was a genius either. The hype about his grand strategy to beat the Soviets always struck me as textbook post hoc ergo propter hoc: the rooster crows, the sun rises — therefore the rooster caused the sunrise. America won the Cold War, Reagan’s the president — therefore he must have been a master strategist. A neat story. Too neat. We’ll return to this.

I could have lived with Bush. He lacked John Howard’s self-satisfaction – which in 1999 I’d mistakenly considered a flaw. The man had been sober for over a decade, but he still carried himself like a reformed party animal who missed the fun but not the hangovers. But ‘Grecians’ was genuinely uninformed. So how did he win?

Bush didn’t defeat a field of philosophers. He defeated John McCain – the only adult in the room – the old-fashioned way: money, message discipline and a South Carolina knife-fight primary behind a Baptist church. Strom Thurmond watched on, holding the rooster. McCain had wit, biography and moral courage. Bush had the party machinery.

McCain would have made a fine president. But by 2000 we must ask: what did conservatism even mean anymore? What could it mean in a republic reshaped by the social revolutions of the 1960s and the economic upheavals of the 1980s?

The Reagan settlement had exhausted its moral energy. Clintonism had run out of legitimacy. The GOP, lacking intellectual spine, drifted toward candidates who could perform belonging rather than articulate vision.

In the election, Bush faced Al Gore – a man who combined the charisma of a council recycling brochure with the charm of a workplace harassment seminar. Gore had the résumé of a demigod: senator’s son, Ivy League, veteran, environmentalist, Gore Vidal’s second cousin. Al radiated the warmth of a malfunctioning photocopier.

Enter Bush: aw-shucks grin, off-the-rack cowboy accent, the vibe of a man who’d fix your fence, forget where he left the pickup, and still talk his way into your good graces.

Faced with ‘Howdy, let’s go fishin’ or ‘Let me explain cap-and-trade’, America didn’t hesitate.

Between Bush and Trump lies a sixteen-year window in which American conservatism didn’t merely change – it moulted entirely. The question isn’t why Trump won. The question is: why don’t the Eisenhower-Ford-Bush Sr conservatives get elected anymore? Why does the modern Republican party treat basic competence like a communicable disease? Where Eisenhower built the interstate highway system, two generations later, the party sent Marjorie Taylor Greene to Congress – a woman who’d blamed California wildfires on the Rothschilds and space-based solar technology. Critical thinking seems to have become an automatic disqualification for office in her blue-collar, predominantly white district in Georgia.

Bush Sr was patrician but serious. Ford was fundamentally decent. Even Reagan, no policy intellectual, possessed exemplary moral clarity; he didn’t know everything, but he knew what it meant to lead the Republic.

Post-2000 conservatism is something else entirely: identity without intellect, grievance without governance, theatre without philosophy. The meritocratic elite lost legitimacy. Iraq 2.0 neutered the foreign-policy priesthood. Offshoring jobs and bailouts made the pro-business Republicans equally malodorous. Wages stagnated while Wall Street soared. The country stopped believing competence meant anything.

These new Facebook conservatives wanted a brawler – a man who didn’t read briefings, didn’t pretend to, and didn’t care that he didn’t. When you need a middle finger, you don’t hire Mitt Romney. You hire Donald J. Trump.

This is where the left reaches for its comfort blanket: calling Trump a fascist. New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani recently declared Trump exactly that. It’s become liturgy in progressive circles.

It’s wrong. Spectacularly wrong!

Trump is the product of a system that can no longer produce fascists – only celebrities. Fascism requires ideology; Trump requires ratings. Fascists build disciplined parties; Trump builds merch tables. Fascists demand sacrifice; Trump demands loyalty. Mussolini was a headmaster of destiny. Trump is a PE teacher with a megaphone.

Even John Bolton – Trump critic, former national security adviser, and hardly a soft touch – captured this perfectly. While acknowledging Trump breaks norms ‘left and right’ and shows signs of a ‘retribution presidency’, Bolton insisted the constitutional framework would hold. Why? Because Trump ‘doesn’t have the mental wherewithal to be an authoritarian’.

Mamdani’s error is the error of the age: confusing symptom for cause. Trump didn’t cause the rot. He is what the rot produces. Some of the serious money is now on the world having reached ‘peak-Trump’.

Remember our rooster? The rooster crows, the sun rises – therefore the rooster caused the sunrise. We said that was Reagan: America won the Cold War, so Reagan must have been a master strategist.

With Trump, the logic inverts but the fallacy persists: the Republic is broken, Trump appears, therefore Trump broke the Republic.

But Trump isn’t the cause. He’s the symptom of a civilisation that once agreed ‘I like Ike’ and now elects reality-show contestants with supermodel wives. Calling him a fascist isn’t analysis – it’s therapy. It saves the left from facing the collapse of its own legitimacy.

Trump isn’t Hitler. He isn’t even Franco. He’s the exhausted Republic’s neon-lit cry for help – proof that when serious people abandon politics, the unserious step in.

What America has is stranger than fascism: a hollowed-out conservatism that traded intellect for identity, and a people who stopped believing anyone was competent enough to deserve power.

The rooster didn’t make the sun rise. Bush didn’t make America choose belonging over competence – the ground was already shifting. And Trump didn’t break American conservatism – he simply inherited the rubble and painted it gold.