A self-serving moral judgment is always implicit in any political judgment, for the simple reason that a politics without morality would be the physics of randomly colliding human atoms, of no meaning to anyone, or not authentically political at all.
And now it’s America First time again—the inevitable outcome of the GOP’s descent into populism. Mr. Cruz, who used to be fond of calling Mr. Trump “my friend Donald” when it seemed opportune, now presents himself as the only man…
…[T]hose Democrats who are gleefully predicting a Clinton landslide in November need to both check their complacency and understand that the Trump question really isn’t a cause for partisan Schadenfreude anymore. It’s much more dangerous than that. …[T]hose Republicans desperately…
In sum, the Republican party is in a very bad way. Bereft of good organization—nationally, in many states, and in Congress—it is struggling to field and support principled, electable candidates for office and cannot hold them accountable to those principles…
We seem to have – or our polity or pseudo-polity in this period appears to be constituted as – an ignorocracy: rule by an ignorant majority ignorantly insisting on its own peculiarly ignorant concept, resulting in a system among whose defining characteristics is the imperviousness to criticism of the ignorocrats’ own self-serving but mostly sincere self-concept.
You could look at the week as an aberration that Trump, the magician, will somehow surmount. In fact, these episodes tumbling one upon the other ratify what Trump skeptics said all along: that he is utterly unprepared to be a…
Should Trump, facing unfavorable and deteriorating political prospects, seek to humiliate himself leading a fractured Republican Party to an “epic” defeat in November? Should he prefer to “do all he could to destroy Cruz and the GOP” – turning himself into a hated loser and maker of losers? How would either alternative profit him – or preserve and burnish his all-important brand – at all?
Like all of the rest of us, including Trump and his voters, Cruz and his team may have underestimated how long it would take for the tectonic shift in the sub-structure of the race to occur. They likely hoped to depend on nominally “evangelical” voters to carry them through the first part of the primary, and did not fully recognize how much they needed the terror of Trump to drive the rest of the party into Cruz’s arms. Still, their theory of the race seems to be holding.
It is perfectly normal, and beyond that it is natural and altogether archetypical, for human communities in times of crisis to look for and seek to rally behind a commanding figure. The American electoral process is in many ways already the institutionalization of crisis even in the normal course of events, and this year, with one of the two major parties struggling to fight off a hostile takeover by a crypto-fascist and his movement, has had more of that character than usual.
“I don’t make a habit out of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my family.”
