This diary is about a couple of newspaper columns published last week in the Washington Post and New York Times, in response to Trump becoming the presumptive Republican nominee for President in the wake of his primary victory in Indiana. Both columns passed by with little comment, to my surprise, for this reason:
The far and away number one takeaway regarding Trumps ascendance has been, I can only assume intentionally, almost completely ignored by the media. It is that a plurality of Republican primary voters have through their votes demonstrated that they are solidly opposed to the fundamental tenets of modern conservatism, which first achieved prominence under Ronald Reagan. If you add this to Democrats and left-leaning independents, that means that a solid majority of Americans, as reflected in the outcome of the primaries, are on record as opposing conservative policies. I won’t call it an astonishing shift, because I think most people felt that way all along, but they are now on both sides voting against conservatism to an extent that becomes pretty hard to ignore unless your income depends on your doing so.
Amazingly, it is two conservative columnists, Charles Krauthammer and Ross Douthat no less, that have been the ones to highlight this shift. And they clearly express it in this manner. They don’t say that conservatism has been betrayed by Trump. They say that it has been solidly rejected by Republican voters.
From Krauthammer, in “The Ideological Earthquake and the Aftermath”:
Received wisdom among conservatives is that he (Trump), the outsider, sensed, marshaled and came to represent a massive revolt of the Republican rank and file against the “establishment.”
This is the narrative: GOP political leaders made promises of all kinds and received in return, during President Obama’s years, major electoral victories that gave them the House, the Senate, 12 new governorships and 30 statehouses. Yet they didn’t deliver. Exit polls consistently showed that a majority of GOP primary voters (60 percent in some states) feel “betrayed” by their leaders…
But then comes the paradox. If insufficient resistance to Obama’s liberalism created this sense of betrayal, why in a field of 17 did Republican voters choose the least conservative candidate? A man who until yesterday was himself a liberal...
Trump has expressed sympathy for a single-payer system of socialized medicine, far to the left of Obamacare. Trump lists health care as one of the federal government’s three main responsibilities
and the money quote:
Which makes Indiana a truly historic inflection point. It marks the most radical transformation of the political philosophy of a major political party in our lifetime.
It is not a transformation. It is a complete repudiation.
Douthat, in “The Defeat of True Conservatism” makes exactly the same points:
When Donald Trump knocked first Jeb Bush and then Marco Rubio out of the Republican primary campaign, he defeated not only the candidates themselves but their common theory of what the G.O.P. should be — the idea that the party could essentially recreate George W. Bush’s political program with slightly different domestic policy ideas and recreate Bush’s political majority as well.
Now, after knocking Ted Cruz out of the race with a sweeping win in Indiana, Trump has beaten a second theory of where the G.O.P. needs to go from here: a theory you might call True Conservatism…
True Conservatism looked at his (Bush’s) administration’s collapse and argued that it proved that he had been far too liberal, and that all his “compassionate conservative” heresies had led the Republican Party into a ditch…
But it turned out that Republican voters didn’t want True Conservatism any more than they wanted Bushism 2.0. Maybe they would have wanted it from a candidate with more charisma and charm and less dogged unlikability. But the entire Trump phenomenon suggests otherwise, and Trump as the presumptive nominee is basically a long proof against the True Conservative theory of the Republican Party.
The media in general ignores this, because they are on the gravy train that conservatism has produced for certain groups of people, and they don’t want it to end. That is why it is astonishing to me to see two conservative columnists go out of their way to drive home this point unambiguously.
We as Democrats have an incredible opening as a result of this situation. Our economy will never be reformed in a way that truly brings the changes that people including Republicans are now demanding by going with the uncertain and truly incoherent mishmash of policies espoused by Trump.
First of all Trump isn’t really for “the little guy”. He admitted that in West Virginia when he told voters he didn’t need them any more, and he was debating with himself whether to even show up there. It isn’t about him looking to help them, it is all about what people can do to help him. What kind of sucker except an out and out masochist could respond positively to this?
Secondly, even if Trump wanted to pass “health care for all”, as an example, his win would come along with a still conservative Republican Congress that would oppose anything he actually did try to do to help improve peoples’ lives. To really get the change that people want requires the election of actual Democrats, not a weak Democrat lite brew adopted only as a campaign ploy. It requires replacing Republican majorities in the House and Senate with Democratic ones. If we drive this point home incessantly, that this is what people truly want, a point that even conservative columnists recognize, and that this is the only way to achieve it, we could actually make this happen. Stranger things have occurred — I never thought I’d see someone like Trump as a presumptive nominee, nor an actual honest reaction regarding what this truly means by the likes of Krauthammer and Douthat!