Next month, on the forty-seventh anniversary of the first manned lunar landing, the Republican party is virtually certain to make Donald Trump its 2016 presidential nominee, a choice that so-called reform conservative David Frum suggests has more in common with Apollo 13 than with Apollo 11. “Whatever happens in November,” wrote Frum in a Tuesday Atlantic essay, “conservatives and Republicans will have brought a catastrophe upon themselves.”
In the piece, Frum analyzed how so much of the GOP wound up backing an “ignorant” candidate who “lie[s] all the time” and “is running not to be president of all Americans, but to be the clan leader of white Americans.” Some of his major points:
-- Republicans are what many left-wingers call a “post-policy” party (bolding added):
It’s a fair generalization that Republicans demand less policy expertise from their national leaders than Democrats have usually expected from theirs. Ronald Reagan was less well-informed than Jimmy Carter; George W. Bush had mastered less detail than Al Gore. Yet both Reagan and Bush had at least proven themselves successful governors of important states…
What’s different now is the massive Republican and conservative rejection of the idea that a candidate for president should know anything substantive about governing at all…
Over the past three cycles, Republicans have elevated a succession of manifestly unqualified people to high places in their national politics. Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann shot to stardom in the Tea Party era. For a brief period in late 2015, Ben Carson led the Republican polls…Republicans have come to value willpower over intellect, combativeness over expertise. Donald Trump’s nomination culminates that evolution.
-- In a related issue, for plenty of Republicans these days, conservatism is primarily an “individual identity,” not a “political program”:
What this meant, for politicians, was that the measure of your “conservatism” stopped being the measures you passed in office—and became much more a matter of style, affect, and manner…Trump may not be much of a conservative by conviction. But he functions as a conservative in silhouette, defined by the animosity of all the groups that revile him.
-- High-profile GOPers overpromised what could be accomplished under a Democratic president, which eventually caused “radical Republican rejection of the trustworthiness of their leaders—all their leaders. What, then, was one liar more—especially if that liar were more exciting than the others, more willing to say at least some of the things that Republicans wanted said? Cynicism leads to acceptance of the previously unacceptable.”
-- “Negative partisanship” has left Republicans believing that even Trump is preferable to Hillary Clinton: “Once you’ve convinced yourself that a president of the other party is the very worst possible thing that could befall America, then any nominee of your party—literally no matter who—becomes a lesser evil.”
Frum commented that even though Trump has some of the same positions as reform conservatives, that’s just a coincidence (bolding added):
Much of the traditional conservative ideology was obsolete. Migration should be reduced. Americans reasonably depend on Medicare and Social Security. It’s time to move past culture wars on private sexual behavior. Policy, however, is not the first or second or third impetus of the Trump campaign. It’s driven by something else—and the source of that something is found inside the conservative and Republican world, not outside…Of all the alternatives for their post-Obama future, Republicans and conservatives selected the most self-destructive of the options before them. Why? What went wrong? That will be the excruciating mystery to ponder during the long and difficult work of reconstruction ahead.
