Trump The Illusion-Shatterer
The secret fear lying beneath Rubio’s accurate depiction of Trump as a “con artist” is that Republican voters are easy marks. The Republican Party is constructed as a machine: Into one end are fed the atavistic fears of the white working class as grist, and out the other end pops The Wall Street Journaleditorial-page agenda as the finished product. Trump has shown movement conservatives how terrifyingly rickety that machine is and how easily it can be seized from them by a demagogue and repurposed toward some other goal.
.. When National Review, in a Clinton-era cover story, crowned Rush Limbaugh “Leader of the Opposition,” they were not wrong. This is what the Republican Party had become. Its leaders saw their interests perfectly aligned with conservative talk radio’s, which represented the views of the People.
Now it turns out that the People prefer Trump and Cruz. It turns out that the People were actually absorbing all that GOP anti-government, anti-elite rhetoric these past 35 years, and have now turned it on the Washington class that used that rhetoric so effectively to mobilize the People against liberals. This is such a shock to the Establishment Republican class because they really did believe their own story.
it is clear that the biggest problem is a widespread failure of French elites to look to the common good and offer a vision for the future. Similarly, since the Bush presidency collapsed under the failures of Iraq, Katrina, and the financial crisis, almost everybody who counts for something in the Republican Party has been implicated in a failure of imagination and a failure to seek or promote a vision and a governing agenda.
.. no Republican presidential candidate from 2008 onward had ever dared to say the Iraq War was in any way a failure.
.. These lower-skilled workers did not just lose their jobs — they lost their dignity.
.. Other laws, like the bailout and Obamacare, seemed to help the upscale and downscale, while doing nothing to improve middle America’s economic outlook or, in the case of Obamacare and the subsequent rise in health insurance rates, straining its resources even further.