The Lebanon Valley News (N.H.), March 1:
As it now appears, the Republican Party is on the verge of nominating for president a candidate who is neither a conservative nor a Republican. Indeed, if Donald Trump runs the table in this week’s primaries and caucuses, it could be all over but the shouting – and be assured, there will be a lot of that.
Thus, mainstream Republicans – whoever and whatever they are at this point – could very well face the prospect of swallowing hard and lining up behind Trump for the fall campaign or seeking some alternative way forward, perhaps by blocking his nomination at a brokered convention. That, of course, would be seen as a betrayal by Trump supporters, whose anger at the Republican establishment is already white hot.
Should the party split, America could be poised for one of those periodic realignments that fundamentally reshapes the nation’s political life, as when white Southerners fled the Democratic Party in large numbers during the civil rights era a half century ago.
If that does indeed happen, leaders of the institutional Republican Party will have nobody to blame but themselves. We don’t refer here to their strange passivity in failing to confront Trump directly early on, although that was certainly a tactical mistake. Rather, it should not be a shock to those leaders – although it apparently is – that after 30 or 40 years of disparaging the efficacy of government in solving problems, ridiculing fact-based policy-making, nurturing racial and social grievance, and worshiping at the altar of wealth, the party’s rank-and-file have taken it all to heart and embraced a billionaire whose campaign is fact-free, offers no policy prescriptions and is racially charged and xenophobic. Nor is the bullying tone, accompanied by a hint of violence, that characterizes Trump’s campaign different in kind from the one set by the conservative media that mainstream Republicans have assiduously cultivated for a quarter century or more. What’s different about Trump is that he says publicly – and loudly – what too many Republicans have only been thinking. It is as if he has conquered their inhibitions.
Equally troubling to GOP leaders should be the realization that Trump’s campaign demonstrates that much of the party’s base doesn’t actually subscribe to conservatism of the small-government, free-market variety. For instance, Trump’s embrace of health care for all and preservation of Social Security benefits and his antipathy to free-trade agreements depart in important respects from conservative orthodoxy. In fact, one senses that Trump is not averse to a strong, activist government, as long as he is the one running that government. Similarly, his scathing condemnation of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq runs squarely counter to the party’s foreign policy narrative and aligns him much closer to Democrats. So it is hard to imagine what sort of a platform the party might adopt should Trump capture the nomination.
What’s the silver lining? It’s hard to think of one, except that maybe as with alcoholism and drug addiction, America can only begin to address the breakdown of its politics when it hits bottom, which the Trump phenomenon shows every sign of representing. Or so we hope.
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