Two months ago, in an editorial whose headline expressed both a hope and an imperative—”Neither Trump Nor Hillary”—we concluded, “Can the Republican party be saved from Donald Trump and the country from Hillary Clinton? The possibility of defeat is obvious and of failure is close.”
The possibility of defeat remains obvious. The possibility of failure is closer today. Though a substantial majority of Republican primary voters have resisted the allure of Trump, and though he’s falling short of winning a majority of the delegates selected so far, he’s ahead of everyone else in the race for the Republican nomination.
But there remains a reasonable chance to defeat Trump. There remains the possibility of selecting a nominee who will not be an embarrassment to the Republican party and the country. Meanwhile, the Democrats seem stuck with Hillary Clinton. The only alternative in their contest is a fellow-traveling socialist even less qualified for the presidency than she is.
So it’s up to Republicans in the states still to vote to save us from the manifestly unsatisfactory choice of Trump or Clinton. Indeed the prospect of such a choice is more than unsatisfactory. It’s deeply demoralizing, not to say historically horrifying. It would be unprecedented in our lifetimes.
Since World War II, from 1948 on, the Republican party has nominated 12 men for president of the United States: Thomas E. Dewey, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. These candidates were of varying quality. They had a mixed record of electoral success, winning nine elections and losing eight. But all had either personally impressive achievements or politically principled convictions; some had both. Of the five winners, some had records as presidents of which to be proud, others less so. But none was an utterly unprincipled demagogue. None was a Donald Trump.
In these 17 elections, the Democrats have offered up 13 nominees: Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Barack Obama. One could argue that Hillary Clinton doesn’t fall as far below the Democratic norm—especially the norm in recent elections—as Donald Trump does below the Republican. Still, Hillary Clinton is close to the bottom of what has become an increasingly undistinguished barrel.
So is this really what we have come to in 2016? A choice between an utterly mediocre limousine liberal and an utterly repellent pseudo-conservative rabble-rouser?
It need not be. Republicans still have it in their power to save the country from this choice. As of this writing, more than half the GOP delegates have yet to be selected; even after the Ides of March, about 45 percent of the delegates will remain to be chosen. There is time to defeat Trump.
If time runs out, and Trump prevails in the Republican contest, many of us will rally behind an independent Republican candidate to save the honor of the party, and to offer a decent alternative to the American people. Edmund Burke, the founder both of party government and of modern conservatism, wrote, “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
If offered a truly bad choice by our two parties, many of us will choose not to go gently into the night as unpitied sacrifices in a contemptible struggle between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. But it would be better not to have it come to this. Republicans still have a chance to associate in a good cause. They still have a chance to do their party and their country the signal service of denying Donald Trump the nomination of a party which, for all its flaws and deficiencies, has never failed so horrifyingly nor permitted itself to stoop so low.
