Only One Man Can Stop the GOP From Breaking Apart Into Pieces, and That Man Is the Little-Loved Ted Cruz

Bumped.

Nate Silver: Don't assume most conservatives will rally to Trump's banner.

Via Hot Air, this observation which is kinda what I've been saying forever.

"For many Republicans, Trump is more than just a political choice," said Kevin Madden, a veteran operative who advised 2012 nominee Mitt Romney. "It's a litmus test for character."

Madden, like some of his peers, said he could never vote for Trump. If he is the nominee, Madden said, "I'm prepared to write somebody in so that I have a clear conscience."

Even if you think the vanity and preening of the Establishment/Respectable Upper Middle Class is silly, you cannot avoid the fact that it is a palpable and real fact on the ground, and it must be factored into one's considerations. People will not commit a political act which causes them to lose social face or reduce their own estimation of their social class, and that is what supporting Donald Trump represents for this class.

Of course, that isn't to say this accursed class should be capitulated to, either.

In a generally anti-Trump column, Angelo Codevilla says this about the ruling class:

America is now ruled by a uniformly educated class of persons that occupies the commanding heights of bureaucracy, of the judiciary, education, the media, and of large corporations, and that wields political power through the Democratic Party. Its control of access to prestige, power, privilege, and wealth exerts a gravitational pull that has made the Republican Party’s elites into its satellites.

This class's fatal feature is its belief that ordinary Americans are a lesser intellectual and social breed. Its increasing self-absorption, its growing contempt for whoever won’t bow to it, its dependence for votes on sectors of society whose grievances it stokes, have led it to break the most basic rule of republican life: deeming its opposition illegitimate.

Ben Domenech adds:

Democrats and Republicans who still think that this is a phase--a fever they just need to wait out before a return to normalcy -- are utterly delusional. They keep talking about voters "waking up" to realize that Trump is a bad choice – but the whole reason Trump is the choice is because voters believe they have woken up to the truth about the American leadership class.

There are two types of rulers:

1. Rulers who are politically adroit and who can sense the ground shifting beneath them and adapt themselves to the changes accordingly, and

2. Former rulers, deposed rulers.

The GOP "Smart Set" thinks being a Type 2 ruler is better than changing a thing.

I can't take the Rubio people who continue insisting on an All-Out Win for this class: The guy that most flatters that class' sense of what a Right Thinking Person ought to be, the guy who's still, to this day, very much pro-amnesty, in a year in which the party's base is showing they've had it up to their necks with one amnesty con after another.

They keep claiming to be the Smart Set, and to have "electability" in mind, but how do they get past the fact that if you nominate Rubio, a large fraction, maybe a full half, of Trump voters stay home or bolt for a third party?

They keep hand-waving that away with the magic of the biggest little word in the world, if. If Rubio should somehow squeak a victory, if Trump doesn't go third-party, if some other anti-immigration populist doesn't jump in to run third party, seeing an opening, if all those Crass and Uneducated Lower-Class Nonpeople finally respect the judgment of their better-educated Betters and simply fall in line...

Yeah, here's the thing: They won't. This is a full on class war now and you don't compromise your way out of class war by saying "Once again, we win everything, we decide everything, and you ignorant proles can go back to your dirty hovels and shut the f*** up. Vote GOP."

So we are either going to lose the Trump Wing of the party, or the Establishment Wing of the party -- either way, the party cracks in half, irreparably, and we get Hillary Clinton.

Unless the alleged Smart Set stops agitating for the candidate they Love, Love, Love because he's a polished member of their Class and accepts a candidate who they can live with, who, it turns out, is a candidate the Trump Wing doesn't love but could live with as well, because he's more anti-Establishment than Trump and also, at this point, firmer on the immigration issue than Trump too.

That candidate is Ted Cruz, of course.

No one really likes him, but then, no one would bolt the party over him, either, which is exactly what will happen if the nominee is Trump, and also what would happen if the party angles for a brokered convention and then tries to foist Amnesty Mario on us, too.

Wars and all, annoying sermonizing and all, Ted Cruz is the Least Worst Option of all of our bad options.

Go with anyone else, and the GOP is finished as a party. The GOP will become the party of the populist working class, with a lot of Democrat demands, and what's left of the GOP's upper-middle-class suburban set will have no choice but to drop its conservative social positions (which most of them don't seem to hold very strongly, anyway) and join the Democrats and Hillary.

That is the way it all works out.

And I'm tired of the fucking brain-dead stupidity of the hilariously named "Smart Set" being unable to see this simple truth.

Ted Cruz is revolutionary enough for the populists, without being too revolting for the Polite Set.

He is, quite literally -- and I've never said this before -- the only man who can save the party. The only man who can keep it together.

The only man who can actually defeat Hillary Clinton.

posted by Ace at 01:40 PM

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