"Blunt force trauma with a loud, orange object" by @BloggersRUs

"Blunt force trauma with a loud, orange object"

by Tom Sullivan

The Republican Party's post-mortems have already begun. Cause of death: "blunt force trauma with a loud, orange object." So writes Julia Ioffee in Politico.

The candidacy of Donald Trump has exposed much of conservative ideology as as much a Potemkin village as Trump's campaign. Free trade and supply-side economics were only the lipstick applied to a much uglier Republican base. The neocons have "broken off," says conservative political scientist and commentator Peter Berkowitz. Gen-X "reformicons" who might have been the party's ideological future now see older party pragmatists willing to go along to get along as "collaborators." Mike Pence has disgraced himself in their eyes:

With less than two weeks until election day, this is what Republican agony sounds like. “I’ve never seen so many really smart people at a loss for what to do,” says the head of one prominent conservative think tank. “They’re pulling their hair out, to the extent they have any hair left.” Douglas Heye, a former RNC official and Eric Cantor staffer, rejects the word “collaborator.” “I don’t like that language. I don’t think it helps,” he told me. “I’ve been watching a French TV series about World War Two, and now I’m watching the part about the aftermath of the war where they’re trying to figure out who’s a collaborator, shaving women’s heads, etc.” The echo scares him. “I would like to see us sort out our difference in non-punitive ways,” he says.

“The ugliness of those forces is real. The number of people who supported Trump is alarming. It turned out that those forces within the Republican Party were larger than what I had imagined.” He sees “a moral necessity” to hand Trump a humiliating defeat and to scrub out the uglier things he brought to the surface of American politics. But, like Soltis Anderson, he recognizes that splitting the two may prove a Solomonic task. “Is there a way to repudiate the worst of Trump—the nativistic, racist, misogynistic elements—and appeal to people whom he brought because of economic anxiety?” he asked. “It won’t be easy because he has loyal following. If you morally repudiate him—which has to happen—those people may decide they don’t want to be part of that.”

“Back up and look at the map of 50 states,” says Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, the activist who has badgered hundreds of Republican politicians into signing a pledge never to vote for tax increases. “There are 31 states with Republican governors. Thirty-one where we have both houses of legislature; twenty-three where we have both houses of the legislature and the governorship. The Democrats have all of seven states where they have all three. That is a depth of Republican strength that is enduring. We really ought to have 60 senators on a bad day. The focus on the Presidential race alone give people a strange view of the miracle strength modern Republican Party.”