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It may have taken quite a while, but the Republican Party has finally been booed off stage…or at least close to it. There is, after all, one last Act before the curtain, even as most actors have effectively been reduced to audience. Let us observe:

A mediocre businessman who, like most politicians, does not much believe in his Party’s stated goals, has, unlike most politicians, ditched the serious stuff for a burlesque on the Republicans themselves. Day, night, for practically a year now, Donald Trump has run the sweep of Republican history: from the right-wing populism of small towns, to the surprising social liberalism that was once immaterial to ‘real’ issues, to racism, evangelism, alt-right, and the affinity for switching sides and picking and choosing one’s politics as from a koldtbord. The GOP has worn all of these identities at some point, for the GOP — like any conservative entity — is by its nature volatile. It must adapt to change, but rarely engenders it; must, despite its values, accommodate the new mainstream, if only to hold on to other values still. I suppose, then, that the Republicans once knew the value of being flexible, of being able to renege on minor things without suffering a blow to their identity. The issue now is that Trump, in his pantomime of things past, understands the value of being flexible, as well, even as both parties scratch their heads at him, forgetting that the only reason he was allowed on stage is because they, at some point, decided to take a seat.

To be sure, Donald Trump’s complaints are many: illegal immigration, Islam, America’s growing debt, the observation that as our day-to-day reality has hardened, all people — including poor people who tend to vote against their own interests — have hardened, as well, into a kind of stasis. Liberals can’t stand him, but fail to admit how much political correctness has encouraged Trump: how much in poor, dumb, white people’s denunciations of clear ills, they had searched for the inevitable target, and being poor, dumb, and white, believed they had found it in Others (black, religious, irreligious, foreign) rather than in the PC ideas that have so tokenized them as beneficiaries. Conservatives are shocked by his rise, writing silly articles that, for all their technical rightness, miss the entire reason why he has become popular in the first place. Indeed, it has taken a fraud to expose the fraud of the Republican Party, which ignorantly continues the paeans to decades of failure that’s most responsible for his ascent. And while the GOP hopes for a fall, a blunder, some weakness, anything, they fail to see that Trump’s inevitable demise will take them, too. Unless, of course, they grow, adapt; unless they see that the choice is either more pandering or a shift back to a Center that, no matter the dilution, creates an average from which some good ideas can emerge.

The issue, then, is two-pronged, although the Republican … Continue reading →