The Republican Dilemma
If my mailbox is anything to go by Donald Trump is about to cause the Republican party a nervous breakdown. Get the couch ready.
Scarcely a day goes by without someone on the political punditry writing at length about the intricacies of a brokered convention. I am not going to regale you with the arcane nature of the procedures and rulebooks of the Republican party. I don’t care enough to steep myself in them. One thing I will comment on, however, is the democratic mess the Grand Old Party finds itself in.
It is now clear that of all the current and still standing candidates in the GOP primary process, only Trump has the possibility of acquiring sufficient delegates to win the party’s nomination. If he does reasonably well in tomorrow’s primaries, he will only have to win between 40% and 45% the rest of the way to wrap things up. No one else is anywhere near close enough to win outright. So anyone hoping that the Republican nominee isn’t Trump has to focus on stopping him from achieving an outright win, and then throw their hopes onto the uncertainties of a brokered convention.
A rising theme amidst the panic within the GOP is that the party elders and betters have to stop Trump ‘for the good of the country’.
Think about this for a moment. There are a few problems with it. Here are two:
First: let’s all be honest, stopping Trump isn’t for the good of the country. It is for the good of the party. A Trump nomination would split the GOP apart. Whatever is left of its old centrist tendency would be sorely pressed to support someone as extreme in his rhetoric as Trump. The more dominant hard core conservative wing loathes Trump’s soft and middling opinions of social policies. And the plutocratic wing just can’t stand Trump’s anti-free trade attitude nor his apparent liking for higher taxes on the rich. No, a Trump candidacy isn’t just bad for the country, it’s a lot worse for the Republicans themselves.
Second: and ought not the voice of the party’s voters have some say in the election of the party’s candidate? To prevent that voice from its democratic expression in the name of some ‘higher’ principle, as if the voters are clueless as to what that principle might be, smacks of old world smoke filled autocratic rule. It’s hardly the kind of smack down of democracy that sends a good message about the understanding the GOP leaders have of the wishes of their own people. It calls into question the entire primary process: why have one if you ignore a result you don’t like?
My own view is that the GOP leadership ought to allow Trump to win the nomination, if that’s what the voters want, and then campaign against him in the election in November. That way they validate their democratic worthiness by acceding to the voter’s wishes, and then they protect the interest of the country by preventing someone they think unfit for office from winning election.
Of course they won’t do this. They’ll opt to protect the party above all else.
I have a view on that too: what kind of party is it that allows a demagogue to get this far in its own internal selection process? It seems to me that the GOP is so saddled with rotten policy objectives, stuck with poor alternative candidates, and a tangled contradictory set of factions, that it has ceased to exist as a coherent party at all. The GOP is already lost. A whole swathe of its own supporters apparently don’t like it. So what’s to save?
Except face?
