With Marco Rubio’s grudging, painful statement this week that he intends to support “the nominee” (for many Republicans, He Who Must Not Be Named), and with Paul Ryan possibly contemplating assimilation, it’s a good time to take one last look back at what I got wrong — oh, so very wrong — about the Republican Party’s leadership in the age of Donald Trump.
Before Trump’s emergence, the Republican elite was in the midst of a long-running civil war, pitting the much-hated “establishment” against the much-feared “base,” the center-right against the Tea Party, the official party leadership against a congeries of activists, media personalities and up-and-coming right-wing politicians.
This civil war was real enough, with competing leaders, clear battle lines, tough infighting and insulting rhetoric.
But beneath the noise of battle, the establishment’s leaders and the base’s tribunes were often in near-agreement on policy (or, in some cases, on the absence thereof). The establishment wanted a more cosmopolitan and compromise-oriented party and the base a more socially conservative and combative one. But on many issues they were fighting about how to fight, as much as about what specifically to do. Because of this underlying agreement, the G.O.P. elite’s civil war actually covered over many of the deeper ideological divisions within the party’s rank and file.
Then came Trump, the great exposer, bringing those deeper divisions into the light.
As soon as the nature of his candidacy became clear — his populism and nationalism, his indifference to many doctrines and policy preferences shared across the Tea Party-establishment divide — so did his disruptive potential.
But precisely because he challenged both factions, both sides of the civil war, on issues crucial to their respective identities, I assumed that both would eventually resist him fiercely (especially given that his ideological challenge came wrapped in a personal package that promised to be less electable than the G.O.P. norm). If he came close enough to the nomination, I assumed that both would have no choice but to reluctantly unite against him.
This hypothesis would have been correct, if the entire Republican primary campaign had taken place in the state of Wisconsin. There, a version of what I confidently expected to happen actually transpired: The state party apparatus and its grass-roots activists and media personalities formed a mostly united front against Trump, supporting Ted Cruz either out of genuine affection or because he was the last plausible not-Trump; Cruz took one of his few easy victories and briefly seemed as if he could take the nomination as well.
But on the national level, nothing remotely like this happened. Instead, confusion reigned, groups and individuals worked at cross-purposes, donors sat on the sidelines and politicians hedged their bets.
Beyond confusion and incompetence, though, there was also flirtation, normalization and finally acceptance, as a wide array of figures whose own commitments seemed incompatible with Trumpism decided that he was worth defending and eventually supporting.
These figures, strikingly, came from both sides of the pre-existing civil war. Early in the campaign, when it seemed as if Jeb Bush had a chance to coast to the nomination as the standard-bearer of the establishment, it was mostly voices from the professional base — talk-radio voices, Fox News voices and for a time Cruz himself — who worked to build up Trump as a populist alternative, to vouch for him and bring him within their faction’s tent.
Then as it became clear that the most establishment-friendly candidates (Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich, even the more right-wing Rubio) weren’t going to hack it, it was the establishmentarians and self-conscious moderates who decided that Trump was a man they could do business with, not like that crazy Tea Partier Senator Cruz.
Which is how Trump ended up as the candidate of Sean Hannity and John Boehner, Ann Coulter and Jon Huntsman, with Rush Limbaugh running interference for him with the grass roots, and various lobbyists doing the same on Capitol Hill.
Of course many converts to Trumpism were motivated simply by expediency, ambition, power worship. But many were clearly motivated by grudges and fears instilled by the party’s civil war, and by a sense that even though Trump might represent a grave threat to their vision of Republicanism, it would still be better to serve under his rule for a season than to risk putting their hated intraparty rivals in the catbird seat.
The narcissism of small differences, in other words, led both the professional establishment and the professional base to surrender to a force that they had countless ideological and pragmatic reasons to oppose.
For those of us who have long been frustrated precisely by the smallness of those differences, the narrowness of the G.O.P. policy debate, it’s a particularly staggering result: A party whose leading factions often seemed incapable of budging from 1980s-era dogma suddenly caved completely to a candidate who regards much of the conservative vision with indifference bordering on contempt.
So to catalog my wrongness: I overestimated the real commitment of both factions’ leaders to their stated principles and favored policies. (Even though I didn’t agree with many of those policies myself, I assumed from the party’s longstanding resistance to change that someone did!) I overestimated their ability to put those principles ahead of personal resentments. And yes, since to acquiesce to Donald Trump as the Republican nominee is to gamble recklessly with the party’s responsibilities to the republic, I overestimated their basic sense of honor.
Of course none of this means that the surrendering Republicans’ calculations are all wrong. It is possible that a dishonorable, cowardly, unprincipled course will yield the result that many in both G.O.P. factions clearly crave: Trump defeated in the general election, his ideas left without a champion, and then a reversion to the party’s status quo ante, to the comforts of a tactically narrow “wacko birds versus RINOs” family feud.
But then again it’s possible that the establishment and the Tea Party are more like Byzantium and Sassanid Persia in the seventh century A.D., and Trumpism is the Arab-Muslim invasion that put an end to their long-running rivalry, destroyed the Sassanid Dynasty outright, and ushered in a very different age.
No doubt many thought at first that those invaders were a temporary problem, an alien force that would wreak havoc and then withdraw, dissolve, retreat.
But a new religion had arrived to stay.
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ROSS DOUTHAT>
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