The Roots of Evil

To the great despair and surprise of the “establishment” within the party that anticipated watching his campaign collapse in on itself, Donald Trump is sticking to his guns. But this despair and surprise are misplaced. With Donald Trump, the Republican Party is simply reaping what it has sown for decades.

Super Tuesday brought “The Donald” a bit closer to the Republican nomination for the presidency; although he is still considerably short of delegates, he is still closer than his primary opponents, who have not managed to stand out much. Hyperconservative, religious-right candidate Ted Cruz was a resounding success in “his” Texas, as in neighboring Oklahoma and in Alaska, but these victories don’t threaten to strain Trump’s persistent popularity. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio delivered an even gloomier performance, and it’s clear that there is less and less reason for the Republican establishment to count on Rubio to ensure its redemption. If this pattern holds, Trump will secure the Republican nomination by May.

What is also notable about Trump’s performance in the primaries and the 12 state caucuses held on Tuesday is the all-out success that he achieved with white, lower-middle-class voters, as indicated by the exit polls. Trump dominated the more moderate, more or less politically correct Republicans of Massachusetts and those in the heart of the conservative and Evangelical electorate in the Deep South, the traditional backbone of the Republican Party.

So it’s not so much Trump that’s imploding as the party itself. The GOP may have been at its breaking point before Trump’s appearance on the scene as a diabolical spokesperson for a social anger that is not without justification — an anger that, according to New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall, is the result of the slow erosion of economic quality of life for the American middle class in the past 40 years, an erosion aggravated by the Great Recession in 2008. In addition, the number of jobs in the manufacturing sector dropped by 36 percent in the United States between 1979 and 2015, while the population increased by 43 percent. Edsall notes that, since the early 2000s, it is not only that the middle class has continued to shrink, but also that the percentage of more economically comfortable families (those making around $100,000 a year) in the middle class has also decreased. In fact, the only socio-economic group that has grown in the past 15 years is households with an annual income of $35,000 a year or less …

The result is that a large part of the Republican electorate is becoming aware of the failure of a conservative philosophy founded on free trade, the dismantling of the state, and the deregulation of the economy. And they are rebelling against the Wall Street investors and the political elites of Washington.

Here we find the roots of the evil that is weakening the Republican Party. However, it is true that this evil also affects the Democratic Party — Bernie Sanders is the proof — but in a manner that seems, at least for the time being, considerably less harrowing.

Trump’s sales pitch boils down to repeating — with unprecedented verbal violence — the same old Republican arguments: promoting a militaristic conception of American foreign policy and demonizing the “other” — Muslims, Latinos, blacks — all while taking the same approach as Sanders concerning, among other things, protecting Social Security and condemning the impact that the free trade agreements signed in the last 20 years have had on the average citizen. Incidentally, it’s possible that, so far as Trump and Sanders are reluctantly in a position of occasionally defending similar political views, Trump will now start to soften his rhetoric while outlining, slowly but surely, an electoral clash with Clinton for the presidency next November.

“I am a unifier,” Trump claimed Tuesday night, as if he had nothing to do with the Republican civil war.

Except, for the time being and judging by the results of Super Tuesday, it’s Hilary Clinton who is uniting the Democratic electorate around her. She has managed to unite Democrats from nearly all backgrounds. In this vein and in the short term, the challenge is to go easy on Sanders so that he doesn’t scare off young voters and white voters of modest means who are currently enamored with the old Vermont senator.