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Top headline in the Times points to the fracturing of the Republican party.
This shake-up, with any luck, will make them rethink the wisdom of obstructionism and the post-Nixon anger that has dominated their political decisions. Their rancor towards Donald Trump may in fact be wholly justified but it has served to separate them from their base. But the poisonous atmosphere which has enabled The Donald was created by the Republican right and the fringe they’ve been courting for a couple of decades. The leadership, not just their most fanatic voters, are to blame. Trump triumphs; the Republican party splits.
The furious campaign now underway to stop Mr. Trump and the equally forceful rebellion against it captured the essence of the party’s breakdown over the past several weeks: Its most prominent guardians, misunderstanding their own voters, antagonize them as they attempt to reason with them, driving them even more energetically to Mr. Trump’s side.
As Mr. Romney amplified his pleas on Friday, Mr. Trump snubbed a major meeting of Republican activists and leaders after rumblings that protesters were prepared to demonstrate against him there, in the latest sign of Mr. Trump’s breakaway from the apparatus of the party whose nomination he is marching toward.
As polls showed Mr. Trump likely to capture the Louisiana primary on Saturday, the biggest prize among states holding contests this weekend, the party establishment in Washington seemed seized by anxiety and despair. At the Conservative Political Action Conference, a long-running gathering of traditional conservatives, attendees feared that they were witnessing an event that has not occurred in more than a century: the breaking apart of a major American political party. …NYT
The Washington Post also stares as the right slides downhill not long after it was congratulating itself for having what it considered to be a stellar line-up of candidates. Months later, the flop-sweat is visible and “the question is how close the Grand Old Party will come to annihilating itself and what it stands for.”
Donald Trump — dismissed by GOP elders for months as an entertaining fringe figure who would self-destruct — has staged a hostile takeover and rebranded the party in his own image. What is being left by the wayside is any sense of a Republican vision for the country or a set of shared principles that could carry the party forward. ...WaPo
Thing is, though, how they manage the Trump candidacy, the tone, the money, and the penis, for god’s sake!
The GOP has always had internal tensions, but they have generally been over ideology — pitting its internationalists against its more libertarian non-interventionists on foreign policy, or its supply-siders vs. its deficit hawks on fiscal issues.
“What is happening now is bigger and less remediable in part because the battles in the past were over conservatism, an actual political philosophy,” Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, a former Reagan speechwriter, wrote in the wake of Trump’s string of victories in the Super Tuesday contests this week.
“We are witnessing history. Something important is ending,” she added. …WaPo
The New Yorker wisely identifies the most dangerous enemy for Republicans and it’s not Donald Trump. It’s the party leadership and its dismissal of the vast distance between rich and poor as “class warfare.”
The greatly felt rupture in the nation now is economic inequality, which Cruz has barely mentioned and which Rubio has met with inspiring words and a proposal to zero out the capital-gains tax. Whatever happened in Flint slid quietly under their radar.
The hard new fact that the Republican Party is confronting is not Trump, who last night looked more vulnerable than he has since his campaign began. It is instead Trump’s voters. “Millions and millions of people have come to the Republican Party over the last little while,” Trump pointed out, in closing last night, and that is in some sense true: they have come for him. For all the deeply felt horror from the Republicans across the spectrum over Trump’s ideological variability, and the crass and volatile strains in his personality, and the extremity of his xenophobia and economic nationalism, none of his rivals has offered much to the voters that Trump has brought in. None of them, really, seemed to perceive the actual experience of the voters who are backing Trump. As apocalyptic as it seemed, Detroit last night was not the final scene in the nominating contest. But it did seem like a fitting conclusion to the much longer arc of the great fraternal fight over who can claim the mantle of conservatism. Neither side has won that fight. It has just grown bigger and bigger, until it has consumed the Party, and blotted out all else. …Wallace-Wells,NewYorker
Cross-posted from Prairie Weather
Cartoon by DonkeyHotey via Flickr