Are you presenting Mitch McConnell as a sane Republican? Because I wasn’t.
I suspect that if their primary system had a ranked/instant runoff voting.system then, plausibly, someone else would have gotten it.
And, likewise, if the members of Congress had been willing to tell their electorate the hard truths during any point, that would have prevented Trump from being able to create a false reality and maintain it.
Trump is, ultimately, the evolutionary outcome of purely democratic systems. You need better voting mechanisms to not result in the sorts of people that you see in government.
Personally, I would say McConnell is perfectly sane. He is evil and a complete bastard and awful human being and to be despised. But he is sane (which makes him that much worse).
Trump, on the other hand, is some kind of insane.
I’d say he’s generally considered one of the sane ones. He’s not one of the frothing so-called Freedom Caucus types.
I agree with @Whack-a-Mole. It makes him worse.
Frankly, I don’t see how any conclusion other than “they were hypocrites all along, respect for the military and family values never mattered - they were just excuses for jingoistic nationalism and enforcing patriarchal social roles respectively” can be reached. Anyone who actually respected the military or held family values in high regard would have left the party when you did at the latest - the rest are still making excuses.
This has a huge part of it. Just like the idiosyncrasies of the electoral college led to his winning the general election, the setup of the Republican primaries gave him the nomination before others figured out what was happening. He was probably just as surprised when both of those things happened as the rest of us were. And the exact same thing is happening again, but this time no one should be surprised when he wins the nomination.
Yep, that’s what I was trying to express. He wasn’t rehearsed and refined, he would blurt out whatever he felt like, and he didn’t play the game of being nice about people he didn’t respect. I think mostly he’s still the same, frankly.
@velomont , I think you’re trying to apply parliamentary party rules to the US system, and it just doesn’t work. The two main parties in Canada have chosen leadership systems that are very hard to hijack by an outsider. To get elected leader of either Liberal or Conservative, you need to win support from party members (a concept that doesn’t exist in the US), and you need broad-based support that includes support from a majority of individual members of the party, and strong support from a majority of the riding associations. That means that an outside has a very weak chance of election, as Kevin o’Leary found when he tried for the Conservative leadership back in 2017. He tried to ride the same sort of Trump wave, and it didn’t work. You need to have good roots in the party to win the leadership.
By contrast, in the US, the parties don’t really control the nomination process. The voters do, even voters who have no tie to the party.
I recently read Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas. For me, it’s the best book describing Trump’s rise. And it appeared in 2004.
The book is a chronicle of how the far-right fraction of the party ousted the ruling country-club Republicans, the pro-business, low-taxes wing that seemed to everyone to be the sane crowd. Yet, over less than a decade, people we would recognize today as Trumpists blazed to prominence by spouting ever-more insane denunciations of America as they saw it. The old-time Republicans had no more idea how to combat them than did the Democrats.
I tend to agree that Trump won because he had sixteen opponents. The party still had resources outside of Trump’s command. If all the party leaders had settled on one candidate, that one might have used the party deep organization and apparatus to bring out their voters in a low-turnout year.
The Trumpists would not be eliminated. We would still have the Freedom Caucus and a lot of state legislatures on the ultra-far-right. But they would not have support from the top, and they’ve have to battle their own controlling party, weakening them.
The crazies have been working toward this goal since the 1980s. Trump suddenly deciding to run for office in 2015 was a gift. He did what nobody else in the party could accomplish: unite the crazy minorities into a monolithic force that could challenge the status quo. Of all the political outcomes in 2016, the demagoguery of the head of a cult of personality was postulated by, to my knowledge, no one. Any little thing could have moved the needle to Clinton. Not having Trump would have been a big thing.
I’ve come up with a hypothesis that the biggest difference in the age of Trump is that previously the people like @OldOlds relative were more evenly split between the Democrats and Republicans. The Republicans had hitched their wagon to a shrinking demographic, and McCain’s and Romney’s losses were seen as evidence of that. Their only option was to recruit some component of the people who had previously been voting D. Unfortunately they chose to try to recruit the people who wanted to watch the whole thing burn rather than moving a little to the left and going after moderates. Had they decided to move a little to the left and go after the moderate voters, things would have turned out differently. Someone like John Kasich could have probably pulled it off, had he won the nomination in 2016.
Personally I believe, and have believed for years, that he knew there was a constituency for what he was selling, but that he was surprised (pleasantly, sure, but still) when it turned out to be so dominating.
He has always sought out and targeted the gullible, weak, and stupid. That’s his whole bag. It’s always been his angle. And anyone watching how the GOP treated its base — stringing them along on abortion, dog-whistling on race while avoiding blunt “truth,” baffling them with economic voodoo while trashing the middle class, etc. — could and did recognize that the party had little bit contempt for the useful idiots whose votes they courted.
What Trump uncovered was that the whole party had been taught for decades to wallow in its foolishness and short-sighted reactionary ignorance. I am convinced he was as shocked as anyone — pleasantly, again — to gallop out to such a commanding position. And then when he actually won? He definitely did not expect that.
He was planning on his usual grift. But he exposed a much bigger, much deeper seam of corruption than most would have been willing to recognize beforehand.
So, in answer to the original question, I am in agreement with the position that, as the GOP was positioned with its heavy emphasis on pure popular support, once Trump became a magnet for the worst people in the country, it was effectively impossible for the party to stop him. And it still is.
Agree. ISTM that he was looking to expand his gullible-fleecing operations into politics for a couple of decades at least, but started out testing the waters with the nascent Reform Party. I don’t know whether on closer acquaintance he found them sufficiently dumb for his purpose, but I suspect that he decided their low market share of the voting public made them not worth his while.
But by 2012, especially after having trialed his anti-Obama “birther” product line, he seems to have made up his mind that the Republican Party possessed a large enough and functionally-stupid enough customer base to make it worthwhile to pitch them.
And, as we know, he turned out to be more right even than he expected.
They wouldn’t have wanted to. Trump is the natural destination for the modern American conservative movement. To date, he is best embodiment of American conservativism.
The one thing that might have stopped him is if all but one or two of his 2016 primary opponents had agreed to drop out early in the campaign season. As others have mentioned, he had more than a dozen opponents splitting up the non-Trumper vote. He only managed to win about a third of the popular vote in the early primaries, but that was still more than any of his other individual opponents, and he was thus able to score a number of crucial victories from the get go. Even as late as Super Tuesday, he was only managing to garner roughly 30 percent of the popular vote, and it wasn’t until the New York primary on April 19, nearly three months after the Iowa caucuses, that he was able to win more than 50 percent of the vote in a state.
I seem to recall that in some of the later primaries Ted Cruz and John Kasich teamed up for a half-baked scheme in which they each agreed to stop campaigning in certain states and ask their supporters to support the other candidate in order to deny Trump a plurality of the votes, and thus a win, in those states. But, at that point, it was too little too late. Trump had built up a good deal of momentum by then and was essentially being treated as the de-facto nominee.
Thanks for all of the info btw. So it sounds purely like a numbers game without any concessions to quality; is that essentially correct?
Trump supporters believe - fervently - that he is quality. The best quality. Nobody has seen quality like that.
It’s kind of a chicken-and-egg situation, or maybe a feedback loop. His takeover was made possible by what conservatism has become, yet itself has pushed it further into wackoism.
I too often get the feeling that folks just don’t remember how much Newt and Friends changed how American politics and governance worked, or, in the aftermath of their success, no longer works.
I am one who often forgets because each succeeding generation of republican seems worse than the last. I forget who started it all (Reagan lit the match, Gingrich decided to drop any restraint).
(We might dig a little further back into the 70s and how republicans decided to make abortion a wedge issue even though they didn’t really care about abortion.)
IMHO, the death of both parties having distinct ideological wings starts with Nixon’s Southern Strategy.