Trump Has Won and the Republican Party Is Broken [View all]

[applegrove]

Trump Has Won and the Republican Party Is Broken

by Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/05/trump-has-won-and-the-republican-party-is-broken.html

"SNIP...............



Indiana seems to have proved that stopping Trump has the effect of making him stronger. Go along with Trump, and he wins; fight Trump, and he wins by even more. The only thing they can do now is further cripple their already historically weak nominee.

Meanwhile the premise of the anti-Trump campaign — that his personality and moral character fundamentally make him unfit the the presidency — has crumbled. It is not that Trump had disproved these criticisms. Far from it. Rather, more and more Republicans could not bring themselves to make this case. Indiana governor Mike Pence, whom conservatives hoped would rally conservatives in his state in the same way Scott Walker had in Wisconsin, instead served up an endorsement so tepid it may have done more harm than good. (“I’m not against anybody, but I will be voting for Ted Cruz in the upcoming Republican primary. I urge everyone to make up their own mind.”)

The Wall Street Journal editorial page disavowed a third-party right-wing candidacy, which conservatives had hoped to use as a fallback to rally the base. Even Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, who had thrown himself into the anti-Trump cause with his customary Churchillian fervor — finally a case where his favorite historical analogy did not seem hysterically overwrought! — has begun edging away from the front lines. Asked about his professions to never support Trump, Kristol equivocated, “I mean, I guess never say never. On the one hand, I’ll say #NeverTrump, and on the other hand, I’ll say never say never.” Of course, the whole point of “Never Trump” is that you actually do have to say “never.”

Virtually the entire Republican apparatus will follow Trump sooner or later, because without the voters, they have no power. And those voters have revealed things about the nature of the party that many Republicans prefer to deny. Whatever abstract arguments for conservative policy — and these arguments exist, and a great many people subscribe to them earnestly — on the ground, Republican politics boils down to ethno-nationalistic passions ungoverned by reason. Once a figure has been accepted as a friendly member of their tribe, there is no level of absurdity to which he can stoop that would discredit him. And since reason cannot penetrate the crude tribalism that animates Republicans, it follows that nothing President Obama could have proposed on economic stimulus, health care, or deficits could have avoided the paroxysms of rage that faced him.

The paranoid mendacity of Joe McCarthy, the racial pandering of Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and George Bush, the jingoism and anti-intellectualism of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Sarah Palin — all these forces have embodied the essence of American conservative politics as it is actually practiced (rather than as conservative intellectuals like to imagine it). Trump has finally turned that which was always there against itself.



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