ArcaMax

A pivotal debate has broken out in conservative ranks in the age of Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. Call it "the Trumpists vs. the anti-Trumpists."

The anti-Trumpists, including the editors of William F. Buckley's seminal National Review magazine, don't think he's a true conservative. Their free-market approaches differ sharply from Trump on such issues as trade, immigration, outsourcing and the protection of Social Security and Medicare, among other middle-class entitlements.

Under the headline "Against Trump," the magazine ran a "symposium" of 22 contributions by conservative thinkers in January that challenged Trump's brand of conservatism.

Trump, in his usual fashion with critics, dismissed the magazine as "a dying paper," a diagnosis that its editors would call wildly exaggerated, even as Trump's primary victories continued to mount.

Yet Trump's success has forced many mainstream Republicans and other conservatives to take a closer look at his appeal to figure out how the Grand Old Party went wrong.

Michael Brendan Dougherty, senior correspondent and rising star at The Week, struck a nerve with his recent provocatively titled essay, "How Conservative Elites Disdain Working-Class Republicans."

His central theme: The working-class "Reagan Democrats" who crossed over to vote for Ronald Reagan and other Republicans since the mid-1960s have been abandoned by conservative elites as their wages have stagnated and jobs have fled overseas.

Sure, billionaire Trump also has used special visa programs and outsourced jobs to further enrich himself. But that has not hindered his image with voters who see him as a guy who is on their side.

Sure. If you can't trust the founder of "Trump University," whom can you trust, right?

Polls show Trump's pitch is working particularly well with voters who have only a high school diploma or less, a group buffeted by a half-century of structural changes in the economy.

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(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.