March 13, 2016
CHRISTIAN, PATRIOT, REPUBLICAN:
The Party Still Decides (Ross Douthat MARCH 12, 2016, NY Times)The less-than-democratic side of party nominations is a virtue of our system, not a flaw, and it has often been a necessary check on the passions (Trumpian or otherwise) that mass democracy constantly threatens to unleash.
That check has weakened with the decline of machines, bosses and smoke-filled rooms. But in many ways it remains very much in force -- confronting would-be demagogues with complicated ballot requirements, insisting that a potential Coriolanus or a Sulla count delegates in Guam and South Dakota, asking men who aspire to awesome power to submit to the veto of state chairmen and local newspapers, the town meeting and the caucus hall.
The weird rigors of this process have not always protected the parties from politically disastrous nominees, like Barry Goldwater or George McGovern. But Goldwater and McGovern were both men of principle and experience and civic virtue, leading factions that had not yet come to full maturity. This made them political losers; it did not make them demagogues.
Trump, though, is cut from a very different cloth. He's an authoritarian, not an ideologue, and his antecedents aren't Goldwater or McGovern; they're figures like George Wallace and Huey Long, with a side of the fictional Buzz Windrip from Sinclair Lewis's "It Can't Happen Here." No modern political party has nominated a candidate like this; no serious political party ever should.
Because such figures speak -- as Wallace did, and Long, and Ross Perot, and others -- to real grievances, the process of dealing with them is necessarily painful, and often involves a third-party bid and a difficult reckoning thereafter. Trump would be no exception: Denying him the nomination would indeed be an ugly exercise, one that would weaken or crush the party's general election chances, and leave the G.O.P. with a long hard climb back up to unity and health.
But if that exercise is painful, it's also the correct path to choose. A man so transparently unfit for office should not be placed before the American people as a candidate for president under any kind of imprimatur save his own. And there is no point in even having a party apparatus, no point in all those chairmen and state conventions and delegate rosters, if they cannot be mobilized to prevent 35 percent of the Republican primary electorate from imposing a Trump nomination on the party.
Duty to God and country must always trump duty to party.
Posted by Orrin Judd at March 13, 2016 12:09 AM