Donald Trump: Defeat Of True Conservatism

By Rod Dreher

Ross Douthat says the results of this GOP primary process are “a defeat for True Conservatism™” — that is, the idea that all defeats of GOP candidates can be explained by their lack of ideological purity. Excerpt:

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.

Trump proved that movement conservative ideas and litmus tests don’t really have any purchase on millions of Republican voters. Again and again, Cruz and the other G.O.P. candidates stressed that Trump wasn’t really a conservative; they listed his heresies, cataloged his deviations, dug up his barely buried liberal past. No doubt this case resonated with many Republicans. But not with nearly enough of them to make Cruz the nominee.

Douthat is right, and it’s hard to overstate the historic nature of Trump’s hostile takeover of his party. Well, okay, that’s a bit overstated. Trump hasn’t really taken over the party, in that a true takeover would involve gaining control of the institution. That clearly has not happened, and it’s very unlikely to happen. But what Trump has shown is how weak the GOP Establishment is. Even if Trump loses in November, they will never be restored to their former position.

I once interviewed a Dutch historian, asking him why his country, which used to be quite conservative, shifted so suddenly in the early 1960s. He said that the Second World War had shattered Dutch institutions. After the war, their leaders regathered themselves and tried to resume life as it had been before. It didn’t work. When the first strong countercultural forces asserted themselves, the institutions cracked.

I expect that whatever happens in the fall, this is going to be the fate of the GOP. The structure will be there, and so will the people, but it will be extremely vulnerable.

This is not a bad thing, in some ways. Trump, the crude destroyer, almost certainly has demolished barriers to new ideas getting a serious hearing in the GOP. A return to foreign policy realism, for example. Reformist economic policies. That sort of thing.

On the other hand, this may well be the end of social conservatism, except in the law-and-order sense. The GOP business class doesn’t want it, nor do the young. And Trump has shown that it’s possible to win without it.

Overall, though, True Conservatism™ — aggressive foreign policy, aggressive pro-corporate policy, and Christian-ish social conservatism — has been shown by Trump to have been hollow. It is interesting to contemplate what this will mean for the DC infrastructure of Conservatism, Inc. What will the activist groups do now that they are shown to be much less effective than we previously thought? Trump’s victory is not a good thing, but if it means the end of this mentality, as described back in January by Tucker Carlson, then Trump’s victory is not the worst thing:

American presidential elections usually amount to a series of overcorrections: Clinton begat Bush, who produced Obama, whose lax border policies fueled the rise of Trump. In the case of Trump, though, the GOP shares the blame, and not just because his fellow Republicans misdirected their ad buys or waited so long to criticize him. Trump is in part a reaction to the intellectual corruption of the Republican Party. That ought to be obvious to his critics, yet somehow it isn’t.

Consider the conservative nonprofit establishment, which seems to employ most right-of-center adults in Washington. Over the past 40 years, how much donated money have all those think tanks and foundations consumed? Billions, certainly. (Someone better at math and less prone to melancholy should probably figure out the precise number.) Has America become more conservative over that same period? Come on. Most of that cash went to self-perpetuation: Salaries, bonuses, retirement funds, medical, dental, lunches, car services, leases on high-end office space, retreats in Mexico, more fundraising. Unless you were the direct beneficiary of any of that, you’d have to consider it wasted.

Pretty embarrassing. And yet they’re not embarrassed. Many of those same overpaid, underperforming tax-exempt sinecure-holders are now demanding that Trump be stopped. Why? Because, as his critics have noted in a rising chorus of hysteria, Trump represents “an existential threat to conservatism.”

Let that sink in. Conservative voters are being scolded for supporting a candidate they consider conservative because it would be bad for conservatism? And by the way, the people doing the scolding? They’re the ones who’ve been advocating for open borders, and nation-building in countries whose populations hate us, and trade deals that eliminated jobs while enriching their donors, all while implicitly mocking the base for its worries about abortion and gay marriage and the pace of demographic change. Now they’re telling their voters to shut up and obey, and if they don’t, they’re liberal.

It turns out the GOP wasn’t simply out of touch with its voters; the party had no idea who its voters were or what they believed. For decades, party leaders and intellectuals imagined that most Republicans were broadly libertarian on economics and basically neoconservative on foreign policy. That may sound absurd now, after Trump has attacked nearly the entire Republican catechism (he savaged the Iraq War and hedge fund managers in the same debate) and been greatly rewarded for it, but that was the assumption the GOP brain trust operated under. They had no way of knowing otherwise. The only Republicans they talked to read the Wall Street Journal too.

Hey, trying to stay positive here. You know how hard that is for me to do. Scott McConnell’s analysis helps. Excerpt:

Republican voters, told for months that Trump was not a real Republican, not a real conservative, not whatever National Review, the Wall Street Journal, or theWeekly Standard thought a Republican nominee ought to be, have said they didn’t care. Every important national pundit predicted Trump would, eventually, lose. The voters disagreed. Record Republican turnout in one state after another. Trump wins. Last night, a long resistant GOP establishment acknowledged the fact.

The first point to make is that the Republican establishment deserved to lose. Honestly, it is impossible to point to one single thing that the national Republican party has done this century for the mostly middle class voters who regularly support it. It has no legislative accomplishments, nor shown evidence of successful pushback on social issues. A large segment of its regular voters have experienced a massive sociological decline in wages, life chances, and life expectancy. The only significant thing the national GOP has accomplished since the millennium is starting the Iraq war. If ever a defeat was richly deserved, it was this one.

Who can plausibly deny it? The agony of it, though, is that it came at the hands of a man like Trump.

This article was first published here.