As Donald Trump begins to look like the presumptive Republican nominee, prominent conservatives sound desperate in their appeals against him.
“Movement conservatives,” however, still don’t understand why Trump appeals to the Republican base.
Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, elected on an anti-establishment campaign himself, declared in a lengthy Facebook post Sunday that he “cannot support Donald Trump.”
“If Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee, my expectation is that I will look for some third candidate – a conservative option, a Constitutionalist,” Sasse wrote. “A presidential candidate who boasts about what he’ll do during his ‘reign’ and refuses to condemn the KKK cannot lead a conservative movement in America.”
Sasse is the first elected Republican who has publicly refused to support the Republican Party if Trump becomes its nominee. The emerging split highlights the misleading nature of conflating “conservative” with “Republican:” the GOP, like the Democratic Party, goes beyond labels of “conservative” and “liberal.”
Trump’s supporter base isn’t necessarily conservative. Evangelical, Tea Party, Reagan Democrat, nativist, and pro-business are all Republican labels, but aren’t necessarily within the realm of conservatism.
Trump himself is aware of that, and it’s part of the reason why he has not postured as the “conservative candidate.”
“I’m representing a lot of anger out there,” Trump said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” according to The Washington Post. “We’re not angry people, but we’re angry at the way this country’s being run. And a lot of them are angry at the way the Republican Party is being run.”
The voter base for Republicans – and Democrats – has become frustrated. Their priorities have been ignored for decades. The establishment has expected them to accept policies advocated by special interest groups and donors, policies that benefit all those involved except the voters.
The GOP is in denial of its populism problem. Donald Trump has channeled that anger and that resentment that voters hold for being ignored in favor of the well-connected. Republican voters, once they’ve tasted that forbidden fruit, are loathe to desert Trump because the establishment scolds them for not being “conservative” enough.
Nor is this phenomenon limited to the United States. If anything, it’s been a strong force in western Europe for years. Brendan O’Neill, in a piece for The Spectator, calls this the “revenge of the plebs.”
“America’s new elites, fancying themselves superior to the rural, the old, the religiously inclined and the rest, have increasingly turned politics into something that is done to people, for their own good, rather than by people according to their moral outlook,” he wrote. “And then they wonder why people go looking for something else, something less sneering.”
The French found Marine Le Pen to oppose the political class. The British have Nigel Farage. The Americans now have Trump.
The Republican establishment has fundamentally failed to accept this twist of fate. Trump’s promise to “Make American Great Again” resonates with voters disaffected and derided by the political class. Change has been swift, and their wages have stagnated or their jobs have disappeared as their representatives in Washington D.C. dismiss their plight.
Reihan Salam in Slate refused to hate Donald Trump for distinctly populist reasons. “The deeper explanation for my ambivalence is that he is speaking for millions of Americans who’ve lost faith in the political process,” he wrote.
The crack-up of the Republican Party looks more likely with every state primary because GOP leaders demand voters to change, rather than the reverse.
If Trump establishes a dominating victory on Super Tuesday, it could force more Republicans to endorse Trump or risk losing their next election.
There are persuasive arguments that the GOP will resign itself to a Trump candidacy. Voting for Hillary Clinton instead of a Republican nominee remains unthinkable to many, but there are those, like Senator Sasse, who refuse to accept Trump. Until a Trump ticket becomes official, however, it’s unlikely that the political class will grapple with the reality that voters will not cow to the party line when they’ve found a viable alternative.
