So here we are. With the primaries now looming uncomfortably close, Donald Trump maintains his dominant position in polls of Republican voters—and Republican pundits, who have long considered themselves the spokesmen for what Republicanism "really" represents, are getting considerably worked up over it. To the point of declaring that a Trump nomination would be either the end of the Republican party, or the end of national conservatism, or both.
Conservative Washington Post op-ed writer Michael Gerson is alarmed. Deeply alarmed. Deeply, conservatively alarmed.
Trump’s nomination would not be the temporary victory of one of the GOP’s ideological factions. It would involve the replacement of the humane ideal at the center of the party and its history. If Trump were the nominee, the GOP would cease to be.
This will be the central conceit of the entire column, by the way. That the Republican Party is based on a humane ideal and that Trump is tarnishing that Republican nobility by saying, well, things. Entirely absent from the column will be any acknowledgment that if Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination it will be because Republican voters voted for him to do so. Nearly all of the pundit columns mourning the rise of Trump ignore the great reams of Republican Party voters putting him in that top position; part of this is the simple condescension of the conservative punditry, which is very sure that their op-ed interpretations of what the base wants is far superior to actual polls showing what the base wants.
Perhaps the larger part of it, however, is that you can't very well make an argument that the loudmouthed authoritarian xenophobe is alien to your upstanding humane freedom-loving conservative Republican movement when your upstanding humane freedom-loving conservative Republican movement is telling pollsters that the loudmouthed authoritarian xenophobe represents them just fine.
Better to just make some random assertions about the innate morality of your party as it existed literally 150 years ago, and skip all the bits that happened after horse-drawn wagons gave way to the automobile or after the invention of the phonograph, the lightbulb or denim pants.
Whatever your view of Republican politicians, the aspiration, the self-conception, of the party was set by Abraham Lincoln: human dignity, honored by human freedom and undergirded by certain moral commitments, including compassion and tolerance.
Moral commitments like, say, cutting food stamps. The compassion of shouting out "let 'em die!" when a presidential candidate struggles to explain what should be done to help American citizens who could not afford health insurance. The tolerance of English Only laws, and of anti-gay laws, and of laws banning sharia passed by ruddy-faced legislators who do not know what it is but know it is an existential danger nonetheless. But close your eyes, Mr. Gerson, and think of Lincoln.
It is this universality that Trump attacks. All of his angry resentment against invading Hispanics and Muslims adds up to a kind of ethno-nationalism — an assertion that the United States is being weakened and adulterated by the other. This is consistent with European, right-wing, anti-immigrant populism. It is not consistent with conservatism, which [...]
... has existed for a good long time now ginning up fears of invading Hispanics and Muslims. Donald Trump did not invent the idea of a border wall, or the idea of using it as two-word political shorthand for the base conservative fear that America is being adulterated by brown-skinned people with different surnames speaking different languages. It has been a fixture of the National Review since long before Trump seized hold of it for his own ends; Pat Buchanan wrote a book on it before Donald Trump ever mentioned it. Rep. Steve King led an anti-immigration movement in Congress, and it was successful, without Donald Trump's assistance, and Rep. Steve King's was hardly the first. Republicans pushed for anti-immigrant legislation in Arizona, and in California, and in the southern states, and did so on notions of decapitated heads littering the desert. It wasn't Donald Trump who first raised the alarm about secret Muslims sneaking across the border to kill us all, or warned that immigrant children might secretly be dangerous radicals in waiting, or who elected open, unapologetic theocrats like Roy Moore.
Make a list of all the “conservative” “Republican” politicians and pundits and hangers-on who have declared that America is a Christian nation and that therefore its laws should be written to protect Christian beliefs above the others, and above Islam in particular—Trump's name would be on which page? The tenth? The twentieth? Make a list of Republicans who have not fear mongered on the dangers of our never-secure-enough southern border with the never-tall-enough-wall and the dangers of the brown-toned immigrants that slip across it—is there a name on that list that still holds public office, or have they been primaried out in favor of a more robustly “conservative” opponent?
Liberals who claim that Trumpism is the natural outgrowth, or logical conclusion, of conservatism or Republicanism are simply wrong.
Oh, all right then. Glad we've settled that. It goes Abraham Lincoln, yada yada morality, yada yada compassion and tolerance. And here I was overthinking things.
But for me, and I suspect for many, the largest problem is that Trump would make the GOP the party of racial and religious exclusion.
As opposed to all the other Republican candidates demanding America deport children who have lived in America since infancy, or who have given angry speeches about the inherent danger of Muslim war refugees, or who pipe up with fears that Central American children fleeing poverty and gang violence are disease-riddled, despite their home countries often having better vaccine coverage than the American states they are fleeing to?
Well, that’s it, then. True conservatism, by which we mean the conservatism professed on the op-ed pages while the legislation gets legislated and the speeches get spoken and everyone wonders how the Republican base could have ever grown into something that would embrace a race-baiting blowhard like Donald Trump, is done for.
The humane values of Republicanism would need to find a temporary home, which would necessitate the creation of a third party. This might help elect Clinton, but it would preserve something of conservatism, held in trust, in the hope of better days.
Ah, of course. No doubt true conservatism can be placed in a small, humane, artisanally-crafted box and squirreled away, perhaps in a humane conservative think-tank somewhere, waiting for the day when the conservative base is no longer made up of xenophobic asses demanding to be led by a belligerent man-child. Because has that not been the history of conservatism, forever willing to be marginalized into obscurity if the choice is between that or catering to the base prejudices of racists and the religiously intolerant?
The nomination of Trump would reduce Republican politics — at the presidential level — to an enterprise of squalid prejudice. And many Republicans could not follow, precisely because they are Republicans. By seizing the GOP, Trump would break it to pieces.
I eagerly await this. I have eagerly awaited this for several decades now, not holding my breath because that is a very good way to die, and yet I continue to suspect that if the forces of Republicanism wanted to distance themselves from paranoia, xenophobia and declarations about which version of hard-right Christianity should legally supersede all other religions they probably could have pried themselves loose of it sooner than this. They could do it now, before Trump won or lost the nomination, if they truly wanted to distance themselves from Trump's rancid pronouncements.
Is it happening yet? No. No, it doesn't seem to be. The chair of the Republican National Committee has just now vowed that his Republican Party will support Trump, if Trump is the nominee, so it seems that if the humane conservatives who don't agree with Trump's racism or anti-Muslim rhetoric want to found themselves a new party they will find themselves rather more alone than they have been expecting.
Donald Trump is currently leading polls of Republican voters. Argue the point all you like, but the people who declare themselves to be the party continue to think he represents them more than any of those other fellows that the pundits would really rather see behind the wheel. So who is the alien? The man leading the polls, or the thought leaders who still cannot fathom how such a thing could have happened?