The problem is not just Trump himself but a party that would idolize a grotesquely bigoted authoritarian. jonathanchait writes
Photo: Pool/Getty Images Conservative intellectuals have spent most of the past four decades claiming — especially during periods of Republican ascent — to be winning the “war of ideas.” Hardly any of them bother to make such a boast now.
If Republicans’ goal is to replace Trump with a normal, noncriminal politician, they can achieve it without any systemic change. Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, or possibly even one of the Trump children would be capable of showing up every day, doing eight hours or so of actual work a day, and staffing the administration with people who do not secretly believe their boss is deranged.
And if any Republicans wish to alter their fate from that trajectory, the solution is both simpler and more radical than anything they have acknowledged: They must sever the party from the ideological movement that has controlled it for a generation and driven it into its present dysfunctional state.
The movement loathed Republican leaders for having accepted as a settled fact Franklin Roosevelt’s extension of the welfare and regulatory states — Barry Goldwater excoriated Eisenhower’s “dime-store New Deal” — and Harry Truman’s Cold War containment. It demanded an apocalyptic confrontation that would roll back big government at home and communism abroad.
Buckley and the conservative movement defended Joe McCarthy, whose depiction of a vast secret Communist conspiracy and demands for aggressive rollback of existing communism closely tracked their own beliefs. They supported racial apartheid, first in the American South and then, after it was defeated there, in South Africa. They were supportive of right-wing authoritarianism both abroad and at home.
The key break point in the history of the party came under George H.W. Bush. In 1990, Bush cut a deal with congressional Democrats to reduce the deficit. In return for spending cuts, Democrats prevailed on Bush to accept a small increase in the top income-tax rate. Conservative Republicans led by Newt Gingrich revolted against Bush and later credited their opposition with causing his defeat.
To be sure, some left-wing proposals really do overreach, and every country needs a healthy right to maintain some balance between state and market, traditionalism and social change. But the American conservative movement lacks the analytic tools to acknowledge what acceptable social programs look like. An inability to distinguish reasonable, well-designed government programs that address real market failures from Soviet-style oppression is a congenital defect in conservative thought.
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