Wall Street Journal (Opinion)
By Bret Stephens
August 31, 2015
If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.
If
you have reached physical maturity and still chuckle at Mr. Trump’s
pubescent jokes about Rosie O’Donnell or Heidi Klum, you will never
reach mental maturity. If you
watched Mr. Trump mock fellow candidate Lindsey Graham’s low poll
numbers and didn’t cringe at the lack of class, you are incapable of
class. If you think we need to build new airports in Queens the way they
build them in Qatar, you should be sent to join
the millions of forced laborers who do construction in the Persian
Gulf. It would serve you right.
Since
Mr. Trump joined the GOP presidential field and leaped to the top of
the polls, several views have been offered to explain his popularity. He
conveys a can-do image.
He is the bluntest of the candidates in addressing public fears of
cultural and economic dislocation. He toes no line, serves no PAC,
abides no ideology, is beholden to no man. He addresses the broad
disgust of everyday Americans with their failed political
establishment.
And
so forth and so on—a parade of semi-sophisticated theories that act as
bathroom deodorizer to mask the stench of this candidacy. Mr. Trump is a
loudmouth vulgarian
appealing to quieter vulgarians. These vulgarians comprise a
significant percentage of the GOP base. The leader isn’t the problem.
The people are. It takes the demos to make the demagogue.
There
will be other opportunities to write about the radical affinities and
moralizing conceits of Democrats and liberals. For now let’s speak
plainly about what the Trump
ascendancy says about the potential future of the Republican Party and
the conservative movement.
It
says that we may soon have a conservative movement in which the
American creed of “give us your tired, your poor” could yield to the
Trumpian creed that America must
not become a “dumping ground” to poor immigrants from Latin America, as
if these millions of hardworking and God-fearing people are a specimen
of garbage.
It
says that a party that carries on about the importance of e pluribus
unum and rails against the identity politics of assorted minorities is
increasingly tempted to
indulge the paranoid (and losing) identity politics of a dwindling
white majority.
It
says that a sizable constituency in a party that is supposed to favor a
plain reading of the Constitution objects to a plain reading of the
14th Amendment: “All persons
born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the
jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state
wherein they reside.”
It
says that a movement that is supposed to believe in defending
old-fashioned values and traditions against the assorted degradations of
the postmodern left might allow
itself to be led by a reality-TV star whose meretricious tastes in
trophies, architectural and otherwise, mainly remind me of the
aesthetics of Bob Guccione.
It
says that a party that is supposed to believe in the incomparable
awesomeness of America thinks we are losing the economic hunger games to
the brilliant political leadership
of . . . Mexico. It says that a movement that is supposed to believe in
economic freedom doesn’t believe in the essence of economic freedom: to
wit, the free movement of goods, services, capital and labor.
It
says that many of the same people who have bellyached nonstop for the
past seven years about the cult-of-personality president currently in
the Oval Office are seriously
willing to consider another cult-of-personality figure on the
off-chance he’s peddling the cure America needs. Focus group testing by
pollster Frank Luntz suggests that Mr. Trump’s fans could care less
about his flip-flopping political views but responded
almost rapturously to his apparently magnetic persona.
When
people become indifferent to the ideas of their would-be leaders, those
leaders become prone to dangerous ideas. Democracies that trade policy
substance for personal
charisma tend not to last as democracies. They become Bolivarian
republics. Donald Trump may be America’s Hugo Chávez, minus the
political consistency.
***
Because
the Republican Party has not lost its mind—at least not yet—I doubt
that Mr. Trump will be its presidential nominee. A single bad poll could
break him. The summer
before an election-year summer tends to be a political clown-time.
Voters, like diners in a fancy restaurant, may entertain the idea of
ordering the pigeon, but they’ll probably wind up with the chicken.
Still,
Mr. Trump’s political star is rising in a period when fringe politics,
both on the right and the left, are making a comeback in the West.
Marine Le Pen in France.
Beppe Grillo in Italy. Jeremy Corbyn in Great Britain. Bernie Sanders
in the Democratic Party. Every now and then some of these characters get
into office. Look at Viktor Orbán in Hungary, or Alexis Tsipras in
Greece.
Republicans
like to think of America as an exceptional nation. And it is, not least
in its distaste for demagogues. Donald Trump’s candidacy puts the
strength of that
distaste to the test.
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