America’s collective intelligence is being tested. As is often the case in primaries, in which voters who largely agree with one another are thrust into internecine conflict by politicians who largely agree with one another, the public is being bombarded by boundless stupidity masquerading as arguments. The most insulting of which are those that rest upon the notion that the voters’ own eyes deceive them.
“(T)he establishment has decided Marco Rubio cannot win,” declared Ted Cruz on the campaign trail yesterday. Cruz compounded this alarming contention by averring that the party’s “establishment” class has decided to back Donald Trump instead. Now, any interested voter gifted with the power of eyesight and who is familiar with Arabic numerals knows full well that Rubio polls better than any other GOP candidate in the field against Hillary Clinton. It is to Cruz’s advantage to frame the race as a binary choice between him and the reality television star, who was and remains a doctrinaire liberal on most issues. Much to the “establishment” class’s detriment, however, some within their ranks are helping Cruz to make this argument for him.
“I question his allegiance to the party,” said former Senate Majority Leader and 1996 Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole of Cruz in an interview for the New York Times. “I don’t know how often you’ve heard him say the word ‘Republican’ – not very often.” Dole, who has endorsed Jeb Bush, largely declined to praise the former Florida governor. The one-time Kansas senator did, however, unload on Cruz. Dole claimed that only Donald Trump might still prevent the Texas senator from securing the party’s presidential nomination and save the GOP from a down-ballot disaster in November. That’s right – according to Dole, Donald Trump, who has by far the worst favorability ratings among independents and Democrats (and is by no means beloved by Republicans), would save the GOP from losing control of the House and the Senate along with the White House, whereas Ted Cruz might not. Bob Dole cannot honestly believe that. You certainly shouldn’t.
Dole isn’t alone in expressing support for Trump over Cruz. “Trent Lott just told me he’d take Trump over Cruz if he had to choose,” The Atlantic’s Molly Ball reported on Wednesday evening. Now, granted, we’re plumbing the depths of the Republican well and reaching back over a decade in order to come up with figures that might represent “the establishment” backing Trump over Cruz, but these aren’t nobodies. What’s more, they are being validated by reputable Republicans currently holding elected office. “I’ve come around a little bit on Trump,” Orrin Hatch, the U.S. Senate’s most senior Republican member, recently rationalized. “I’m not so sure we’d lose if he’s our nominee because he’s appealing to people who a lot of the Republican candidates have not appealed to in the past.”
These voices likely reflect the thinking among the comfortable lobbyist set on K Street. “(T)he cadre of Republican lobbyists, operatives and elected officials asked in Washington are much more unnerved by Mr. Cruz,” Times reporter Jonathan Martin noted, “a go-it-alone, hard-right crusader who campaigns against the political establishment and could curtail their influence and access, building his own Republican machine to essentially replace them.”
And what’s not to love about that?
You might be asking, what about Rubio? Isn’t he the “establishment candidate,” who has a remarkable appeal across all the blocs that make up the GOP’s coalition of voters and yet also enjoys the support of Republican lawmakers invested in the status quo? The truth is that Rubio is not all that different from Cruz, although he has taken a softer tone and alienated fewer denizens of the Beltway in his time in the Senate. The fight over subsidized ethanol in Iowa has clarified matters greatly. Rubio has called for the Renewable Fuel Standard mandate to sunset when it was originally set in the middle of the next decade. Cruz agrees but also believes it should be gradually phased out even before it sunsets. Trump, sensing an opportunity, has called for an even higher ethanol mandate than the one that already exists. It’s telling that Trump is the figure toward which these capitulatory Republicans are gravitating.
Trump might be a nasty, vulgar demagogue who would utterly castrate the conservative movement as an intellectually coherent force, but he is pliable. He makes deals. He compromises, even if he presents himself as rigidly dogmatic on the stump. We can work with him, the comfortable Republican fixtures in Washington tell themselves. Even if that means relinquishing the gains the party has made in the Obama era.
Surely, the “establishment,” to the extent that such a thing exists, would be better off if they were to coalesce around one of the party’s moderate candidates – particularly Rubio, although he’s about as conservative as a moderate can get. If they were successful, the wing of the GOP that concerns itself with the electability of their nominee might present an alternative vision to that offered by Trump and Cruz that could still call itself conservative. This, however, is the course of the righteous and the self-assured. It requires strength of conviction and a unity of purpose. It means being convinced of your own legitimacy and the value of your ideas. The professional big “R” Republican class is a spent force – the will to resist the Trump onslaught simply isn’t there. This is an institution that is no longer convinced of its own merits. The “establishment” GOP has become what their conservative critics always said they were: timid and insecure.
Surely, one week before the very first votes of the 2016 race are cast seems an odd time for surrender. It does, however, appear that the party’s influential moderate politicians and donors have all decided to put pride before party and principle. Those who are waiting for the “establishment” to unite behind a single candidate are missing the fact that this wing is already hopelessly fractured. Many in this faction who have not yet endorsed are unlikely to do so; they have their own electoral futures to worry about. Meanwhile, the elephant in the room – Jeb Bush’s campaign and his well-heeled allies at Right to Rise PAC – appear determined to keep the party’s moderates fractured (and to destroy Rubio, in particular). “It looks like they’re blowing the whole thing up, like even if Jeb can’t win, they’re not going to let anyone else win either,” one frustrated Bush donor told Politico. It was earlier reported that Bush’s pitch to donors is no longer about winning the nomination but a guilt trip about “loyalty.” Not loyalty to a cause or a set of ideals, or even loyalty to the vehicle that has helped so many conservatives achieve political power – the Republican Party. No, the loyalty they are demanding is tribal and dynastic. It’s an appeal that signals a willingness to abandon any attachment to conservatism for nothing more than vanity.
Only a truly bankrupt institution not only cannot mobilize its resources for the cause of self-preservation but is seemingly unconvinced of its own worth. In the face of a serious challenge to its primacy, the Republican Party’s professional governing class would scorch the earth, surrender any pretense of affinity for conservatism, and preserve its treasured perks and the clientelism that has defined it for years. This was a tolerable arrangement only so long as the party’s elected officials represented a center-right alternative to the liberal progressivism of their counterparts in the Democratic Party. No longer; not if they are keen to support an erstwhile liberal, who just happens to be popular among a subset of GOP primary voters, only because he might keep the spigot open for a few more years.
An organization that isn’t interested in fighting for its own survival doesn’t deserve to endure. Perhaps it is time to let it all go.
