It’s not every day that you get a long, tortured analogy likening the Republican party to the post-revolution Soviets. But it’s the post-Indiana Trump Day, so buckle up. Here we go.
Last week, a friend who’s a conservative first and a Republican second, was scratching his head thinking about what was going to happen when Trump became the nominee:
This sounds about right to me. The modern Republican party and the modern conservative movement more or less begin with Reagan. Under the Reagan administration, these two branches were, more or less, co-terminal. (Yes, this is simplifying history-listen to Gary Bauer and you understand that there was always tension between the two.)
In the years following Reagan, however, the two lines began to diverge. And in the last decade, the divide between the Republican and conservative establishment has become so complete that you could argue that Reaganism is now a dead-letter. (And yes, I understand that there are actually a bunch of different establishments and that they’re all different things, but for the moment, let’s simplify.)
On the one side, you had the Mitch McConnells and John Boehners of the world-establishment Republican officials who wanted to do nothing more than minimally serve the interests of the Chamber of Commerce. These guys-let’s call them the Establishment Republican Elites (or ERE’s)-didn’t believe in much of anything, except for lowering the top marginal tax rate and expanding the labor pool through immigration reform (which even they understood meant amnesty). These ERE’s never once saw a hill they were willing to die on.
On the other side were the Establishment Conservative Elites (or ECE’s). And the ECE’s spent the last decade taking stock of the Republican party’s problems, trying to understand them in the light of conservatism’s guiding principles, and devising real reforms. Ramesh Ponnuru, Ross Douthat, Yuval Levin, Jeff Anderson, Henry Olsen, Reihan Salam-there was a whole cottage industry of ECE’s who thought that the ERE’s were a disaster (to borrow a Trumpism) and were devising policy reforms that would drag the party out of its thrall with the Chamber of Commerce and make it more responsive to the needs of your average middle-class voter.
Anyway, what my buddy was saying is that the great irony of 2016 is that the people supporting Trump are mad at the ERE’s. And it was the ECE’s who saw this coming and tried to do right by these voters. Yet Trump is going to liquidate the ECE’s-because a magical wall and the miraculously evaporating national debt don’t need no eggheads. And the ERE’s-precisely the people the Trumpkins hate-will do just fine in Trump’s party. Because Trump doesn’t care about any of this stuff. He just wants power.
So where’s the Soviet analogy? Well, if this all sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because it’s more or less the story of post-Bolshevik Russia. Reagan was-this is the most malapropistic analogy you’ll ever read-the Lenin of American conservatism. And with Reaganism now dead, you have two movements fighting to take over the party mantle. The intellectual conservatives-the ECE’s-are Trotsky. They still believe in conservatism itself and believe it can be adapted to the current age.
But then there’s Trump, who is Stalin. Which is to say that he is a man who cares not a whit about the ideology, or the party, but merely sees these things as vehicles to power.
As for the ERE’s, they’re the rank and file nomenklatura, the people who knew how to get by no matter who was in power.
