I'm going to start with my Caveat: I was born approximately a week before the USSR began to really unravel. I never lived through any of conservativism's grand success. I grew up with Rocky IV and Red Dawn as cable TV staples. But I've never lived in a world where the US wasn't the global superpower. Based on my limited life experience, I'm going with "it was all a lie". My childhood was defined my my parent's various failings and incompetence, and as a teen I desperately needed to believe I could pull myself up by my own bootstraps. I liked conservative principles. Work hard and succeed. A foreign policy that made the whole world safer (after all, I didn't want to live in my dumpy town forever!) Balanced budgets! I read Charles Krauthammer's column every Friday. He seemed smart. George Bush seemed to be authentically well-intentioned to me (PEPFAR, No Child Left Behind) and I bought into the Team America let's invade Iraq schtick. John McCain seemed like a good embodiment of teenage Maggie's value system. In retrospect, I think my parents were motivated by entirely different things. Things weren't going well for them; they wanted people to blame. Rush Limbaugh offered that to my dad, in spades. Blame Dems, blame women, blame immigrants, Let's Go Buchanan, that was my dad. My mom was looking for validation that she had done the right things, and that her problems weren't her fault. I think the "moral majority" stuff really spoke to her. They were both looking for a bail out. McCain ticked their boxes, but he didn't excite them, at all. In 2016, Trump is basically the antithesis of everything I have ever believed in and the embodiment of everything I despise the most in America. He's a hard no for me and meanwhile they're lapping it up. All of it! (I then realize that I actually share no values with the people who raised me, have an existential crises, vote for Gary Johnson, and perm my hair.) I'm sympathetic to the intellectual merit of the Cargo Cult theory and the demographic change theory (I studied abroad in France while Jean-Marie LePen was handing over the reigns of Le Font National to his daughter.) But for anyone my age, it's a hard sell that the Republican party has any real moral, philosophical, or policy underpinning.