Ross Douthat
again today insists on portraying Donald Trump as a product, not of the party which
produced him, but of an angry outcry against both parties. This equivalence in
the press, always attempting to portray the two parties as equally unbalanced,
has been commented on before, notably by Paul Krugman. Today, Douthat says,
“The core of (Trump’s) support is a white working class that the Democratic
Party has half-abandoned and the Republican Party has poorly served … stuck
with a liberal party offering condescension and open borders and a conservative
party offering foreign quagmires and capital
gains tax cuts.”
Now, when
did the “half-abandonment” occur? Could it possibly have begun with the
election of 1968, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965, when the Democrats abandoned five southern states to
George Wallace, and also abandoned enough voters in several other states to
Wallace to place their electoral votes in Richard Nixon’s column and insure Nixon’s
victory?
Did the
Democratic Party abandon voters in 1980, so that Ronald Reagan could use “welfare
queen” and “strapping young buck” slurs to energize his thoughtful,
conservative base?
Or might it
have been in 2000, when Democrats unaccountably abandoned their own majority of
votes, in Florida and the country at large, in order to assure George W. Bush’s
victory?
Well, how
about Douthat’s assertion that what “liberals” offer white working class voters
is “condescension?” Could we have a few examples? Remember, Mitt Romney was a
Republican, and a “conservative,” when he said that 47% of the populace
consists of “takers.”
And, I
forget: where did the Democrats offer “open borders?” Was it in the law from
the 1960s that allows Cuban migrants to the U.S. a much easier path to both
admission and permanent residency?
Douthat feels
that he cannot condemn Trumpism without assigning blame for it equally to both
parties. So he invents formulations such as “But there are still basic norms
that both parties and every major politician claim to honor and respect.” Is
this sort of “respect” in evidence when the Senate Majority Leader and the chairman
of the Senate Judiciary Committee each announce their intention to deny, not
only hearings but even face-to-face interviews, of any Supreme Court nominee
that the President could designate?
This is just
one in a long list of examples of conduct that does not respect “basic norms”
(if the Constitution can be so designated), to which we are so used that we are
almost inured, over the past several years.
Trump is a
creature of the Republican abandonment of politics in favor of the totalitarian
outlook: no compromise is permissible, and our adversaries are unworthy of
common courtesy, let alone respect or the entertaining, however fleetingly,
that their ideas and goals have any legitimacy at all.
The decline
of the Republican Party has been in evidence for a long time. Sensible
Americans have lamented this, in the knowledge that our system requires
competing interests to engage in order to craft solutions, however partial, to
the problems confronting us. There is no longer any such engagement, as the
direct result of Republican opposition to an elected president and the party’s
slavish adoption of the prejudices of its most extreme, potentially violent,
and backward elements.
That this
state of affairs threatens the future of the Republican Party is bad enough.
What is worse is the attempt of an apologist such as Douthat to place an equal
share of blame elsewhere.
