Sometimes, for reasons that are hard to explain to the kids, you have to keep living together—but just don’t want to share the same bedroom. Now that we’re absolutely sure Donald “Tiny Hands” Trump is going to be the Grand Old Party’s candidate, we’re witnessing an unprecedented (though pretty damned amusing) split within the party where lots of other candidates and officials still call themselves Republicans, but refuse to support the presidential nominee of the Republican Party.
But as the Real Republicans line up against the Orange Line to glare in anger at the True Republicans, the shape of the auto-purge is becoming clear: Those who don’t want to admit that Donald is one of them are the pretenders to Buckley’s throne, the brain of the right, the people who CNN, NPR, and other ostensibly neutral news source parade forth to throw five-dollar words at the same old two-bit ideas.
So on the one side, you have Douthat in despair, Erikson showing outrage, Benson on a bender, and Klein calling it quits.
But on the other side are the people who have always understood one thing: The modern Republican Party is about nothing but channeling hatred of The Other. Your Ingrahams. Your Coulters. Your whoever is on your local AM dial.
Only as the intelligensia pack their bags, there’s one thing they’re taking with them that Republicans have regarded as a wee bit important over the last few decades:
Conservatism.
Trump is a racist. Trump is a xenophobe. Trump is an unreliable megalomaniac who in any sane universe would be the last person on the planet allowed within a thousand miles of the nuclear button. But Trump isn’t a conservative—or at least he’s not when it comes to economics.
That doesn’t mean that Trump is liberal. Far from it. In good old D&D terms, Trump’s a chaotic neutral. He says whatever sounds good at the moment. Does whatever makes a dollar on that day. He’s revealed little that constitutes an economic philosophy, and the details he has spilled mostly consist of things that are demonstrably false, simply ludicrous, or long disproven.
The important thing is that while Cruz, Kasich, Jeb!, Christie, the Professor, and Mary Ann were all following the script, saying all the things it was assumed Republican voters wanted to hear on the economic end, Trump ignored all that. He treated economics with the same disdain he displayed for everything else not happening beneath his day glow combover. He flung whatever poo was handy and moved on.
And in the process he proved definitively that Republican voters don’t give a flip about Genuine Conservative Economics. Practically every aspect of the Laffer–Reagan–Kemp–Gramm Give to the Rich economics package came in for a drunken pummeling at some point in the Trump campaign, and to the horror of the defenders of the faith, no one cared.
Republicans were under the delusion that they had convinced half the nation that trickle-down was gospel and voodoo was the only thing to do. But they’d actually only trained their troops to accept any number of impossible things before breakfast ... and Trump presented them with a whole feast of shiny new nonsense. Better still, Trump’s isolationist nonsense is a much, much easier fit with the Republican anti-immigrant position than is the standard conservative open market nonsense. For the people clamping red, white, and blue hats to their heads, even Trump’s random patter seemed more self-consistent than the positions other Republicans were offering.
Because it is.
So now conservatives are The Men without a Party, doomed to wander in the wilderness till some neo-Norquist comes up with a better package for their losing ideas. Or they could flee the elephant entirely, moving on to form a righteous Austrian Policy Establishment. I’d suggest a gorilla as an emblem, but gorillas are both good-natured and already under enough torture.
And now, for your amusement, Republican tweets …
Erik, son of Erik:
Fox News contributor and political editor at Townhall, Guy Benson:
Phillip Klein, managing editor of the Washington Examiner:
The Kochs and company:
Repelled by Trump and convinced he can't beat Hillary Clinton, wealthy GOP contributors are abandoning the presidential contest and directing their lucrative networks to spend to invest in protecting vulnerable Republican majorities in the House and Senate.
GOP media consultant Rick Wilson:
The Federalist columnist David Harsanyi:
Feel free to add more.