New York Magazine
By Jonathan Chait
March 6, 2016
People
get worked up during presidential campaigns. But the rise of Donald
Trump has provoked conservative intellectuals to express their dismay in
existential
tones. Conservative writers have used terms like unmitigated, unalloyed, potentially unsalvageable disaster
to describe a Trump nomination and have declared that they are
“fighting for our movement’s existence.” Marco Rubio has made this kind
of talk
the lingua franca of his once relentlessly chummy campaign, warning
that the Republican Party “would split apart” were Trump to prevail.
Trump’s opponents have planned for the kinds of dire, schismatic
responses not seen in generations of American presidential
politics: using the party’s summer convention, normally a scripted
infomercial, to wrest the nomination from him. Or even bolting the GOP
to start a third party.
The
fear inspired by Trump is not merely that he would blow the party’s
chances of winning the presidency (though he probably would), or even
that he would
saddle it with long-term damage among the growing Latino bloc (though
he would do that as well). It is that Trump would release the
conservative movement’s policy hammerlock on the Republican Party.
The
ideological stakes in a fight between conservatives and Trump can be
difficult for outsiders to fathom. After all, Trump endorsed Mitt
Romney, loathes
President Obama, favors a gigantic tax cut, denies global warming,
issues ritual praise for Ronald Reagan, and so on. But one place to
start — a mystery that reveals a clue — is a recent report in the
Times describing frantic efforts to organize an intraparty
opposition to Trump. At one meeting, advisers to the Koch brothers, who
control a political organization much larger than the actual Republican
Party, “characterized Mr. Trump’s record as utterly
unacceptable, and highlighted his support for government-funded
business subsidies and government-backed health care.”
That
may seem odd — Trump’s position on health care is almost
indistinguishable from that of the rest of the field. He calls Obamacare
a disaster and promises
to repeal it and replace it with a sketchily defined alternative that
will take care of everybody without any trade-offs. But the basis for
the suspicion lies in Trump’s long-ago-renounced support for
single-payer health insurance and his more recent promises
not to allow people to “die in the streets,” a line that provoked
horror in Rubio and Ted Cruz at a February debate. Before Obamacare,
those too poor or sick to afford insurance routinely died from illness
or suffered horribly. By invoking their suffering,
Trump implied that Obamacare did something good.
More
important, his history of liberalism and his aversion to letting the
uninsured die in the streets imply that Trump lies outside the
anti-government consensus
that has ruled the party for decades. Among major conservative parties
in the democratic world, the U.S. Republican Party is unique in its
ideological anti-statism. Conservative parties elsewhere accept
universal health insurance, the idea that government
might play a role in weaning an economy off fossil fuels, and the
general budgetary principle that tax revenue needs to bear some
long-term relation to expenditures. Trump does not challenge
anti-government orthodoxy frontally. Instead, he evades it. He denounces
government for being not too big but too dumb, and his solution
frequently involves not shrinking it but putting a smart person in
charge (himself). Trump’s cult of personality implies the heretical
possibility that government could be made to work.
The
Republican Party has, for decades, been organized around a stable
hierarchy of priorities, the highest of which is to reduce taxes for the
wealthiest Americans,
i.e., “job creators,” and loosen regulation of business. As long as
their party is anchored by its economic consensus, conservatives
tolerate wide disagreement on social issues. Some Republicans want to
expand the party’s coalition by taking more liberal stances
on issues like gay marriage, immigration, and racism in the
criminal-justice system. Other Republicans still rail against gays and
immigrants. Representative Steve Scalise, the House majority whip, has
ties to the white-supremacist movement and once described
himself as “David Duke without the baggage.” Nothing Trump has said
about immigrants, the Ku Klux Klan, or anything else violates the GOP’s
baseline standards. The problem is that he implicitly proposes to invert
the party’s hierarchy, prioritizing its right-wing
social resentments while tolerating ambiguity on economics. And his
popularity suggests that maybe average Republicans aren’t maniacally
obsessed with shrinking government after all.
By
making race and nationalism the text rather than the subtext of
Republican politics, Trump threatens not only the party’s agenda but the
self-conception
of its intellectual class. The conservative movement seized control of
the Republican Party momentarily in 1964 during Barry Goldwater’s
candidacy, and completely in the decades to come. It succeeded in large
part because many whites, especially in the working
class, identified the GOP as the party that would protect their
security and tax dollars from black people. Conservatives prefer to deny
this history. “Liberals may have been fond of claiming that Republicans
were all closet bigots and that tax cuts were a
form of racial prejudice, but the accusation rang hollow because the
evidence for it was so tendentious,” wrote
The Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens recently, citing
as counterevidence William F. Buckley’s break with a small sect of
anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists to help found the modern conservative
movement. “Not anymore.” Now, he said, Trump
had besmirched the movement’s long record of racial innocence. In a
similar spirit, the Republican consultant Rick Wilson, who has
spearheaded the party’s anti-Trump backlash, recently lamented Trump’s
refusal to immediately disavow the Klan: “A generation
of work with African-Americans, slow, patient work … we’ve pissed that
away because of Donald Trump in one day.” In reality, Buckley spent the
civil-rights movement mocking Martin Luther King Jr. and defending white
supremacy and spent the ’80s defending apartheid
in South Africa. The Republican Party’s “work with African-Americans”
is mostly focused on making it harder for them to vote, and Republican
presidential candidates’ share of the black vote has declined from the
mid-teens in the ’70s to the mid–single digits
in the last couple of elections.
Trump
has also exposed another, equally deep insecurity among right-wing
intellectuals: the fear that their movement appeals to rubes. The
conservative movement’s
tightening grip over the Republican Party has coincided with its
elevation of leaders incapable of explaining their policies cogently.
Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Sarah Palin all drew the disdain of
liberal elites for their reliance on simplistic aphorisms
and poor grasp of detail, humiliating conservative intellectuals, who
defended the keen minds of their heroes. Whether or not Donald Trump the
human being is intelligent, there’s no question that “Donald Trump,”
presidential candidate, is not. His entire campaign
operates well below the level of rational thought — it’s all boasting,
absurd promises, repetitive sloganeering, and abuse. Just as email
scammers intentionally salt their messages with typos in order to weed
out anyone educated enough to see through their
swindle, allowing them to focus on the most gullible, Trump seems to
consciously repel anyone possessed of a brain. When he says he could
shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any support, or that he
appeals to “the poorly educated,” he is broadcasting
his contempt for his supporters.
The
secret fear lying beneath Rubio’s accurate depiction of Trump as a “con
artist” is that Republican voters are easy marks. The Republican Party
is constructed
as a machine: Into one end are fed the atavistic fears of the white
working class as grist, and out the other end pops
The Wall Street Journal editorial-page agenda as the finished
product. Trump has shown movement conservatives how terrifyingly rickety
that machine is and how easily it can be seized from them by a
demagogue and repurposed toward some other goal.
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