'I should have seen this coming':  Conservative kicks self for missing Trump warning signs

David Brooks, a wayward Reagan conservative who has felt estranged from the Republican Party in the era of Donald Trump, says that warning signs about conservatives' embrace of the current president have been present for decades.

Writing in The Atlantic about his formative years within the conservative movement, Brooks argued that there was always a strain among his ideological brethren that prioritized nonstop culture wars over constructive ideas for improving the country.

"The reactionaries just wanted to shock the left," he wrote. "We conservatives oriented our lives around writing for intellectual magazines; the reactionaries were attracted to TV and radio. We were on the political right but had many liberal friends; they had contempt for anyone not on the anti-establishment right. They were not pro-conservative — they were anti-left."

Brooks claimed he first saw signs of this type of reactionary thinking as far back as 1986 at Dartmouth College. His article was titled, "I should have seen this coming."

ALSO READ: 'No way to sugarcoat': Wisconsin GOP 'struggles to find a path' if Trump not on ballot

"A group of progressive students at Dartmouth had erected a shantytown on campus to protest apartheid," wrote Brooks. "One night, a group of 12 students, most of them associated with the right-wing Dartmouth Review, descended on the shanties with sledgehammers and smashed them down. Even then I was appalled. Apartheid was evil, and worth opposing. A nighttime raid with sledgehammers seemed more Gestapo than Burkean. But conservative intellectuals didn’t take this seriously enough."

At the time, Brooks believed that people this destructive would simply self-destruct, but "instead, history has smiled on them," he wrote.

"A prominent publisher of right-wing authors once told me that the way to sell conservative books is not to write a good book—it’s to write a book that will offend the left, thereby causing the reactionaries to rally to your side and buy it," Brooks elaborated.

Read the full essay here.