All explicitly supported him in the name of conservatism.
Now Jeb Bush says that Republicans have to stop Trump lest conservatives lose control of the GOP. And Limbaugh is rejecting a Bush who is no less conservative than his brother, insisting that establishment guys like him want to destroy Trump out of disdainful elitism, even though Trump has been uniquely successful building a coalition out of the ostensibly conservative voters that constitute the GOP’s core.
.. But for now, Trump remains the man to beat, even halfway through January 2016, and that tells us something: A large part of the GOP base supports a man who has never been an ideological conservative, and is less conservative than many of his rivals, because ideological conservatism is relatively unimportant to it.
In this, they resemble their favorite radio host.
Without admitting it to himself, more fully than ever before in his long political-talk career, Limbaugh has abandoned conservatism as his lodestar. All else being equal, he still prefers the ideology. But it’s now negotiable. He’d rather have a non-conservative nominee who attacks and is loathed by the Republican establishment than a conservative who is conciliatory and appealing to moderates.
And Trump was uniquely suited to bring him to this point.
.. It’s no wonder that Limbaugh likes Trump. The talk-radio host also got fantastically rich selling ego, bombast, and brazenness to the masses, elitist tastemakers be damned. They’ve both been used by politicians who don’t, in truth, have much respect for them.
.. The DJs who sound so suave and confident were usually not seen that way when they were growing up. Even the most successful disc jockeys have usually had to move from city to city every few years. Limbaugh’s early life sounds as if it fit this pattern. Moreover, he was by objective standards a failure well into his thirties. He was fired from several DJ jobs, had two short and unsuccessful marriages, was chronically broke, and spent five long years as a public-relations man for the Kansas City Royals, fearing that his radio career was over.
.. Limbaugh could mock liberals and “feminizes” on the air, but in person he was (Dowd made clear) very eager to be liked.
.. his tremendous success on the radio didn’t translate into the sort of respect or influence or deference or validation that he had once imagined it would. I don’t think lack of pedigree is high on the list of reasons that Limbaugh is disliked so intensely by so many, but I can see why he would tell himself that story.
.. But rather than carry no water this cycle, Limbaugh is carrying a lot of it for Trump, as if seeking validation from him will go any better than it did when he sought it from Bushes.
.. And Limbaugh is right that Bush doesn’t dislike Trump due to a lack of conservatism. Bush dislikes Trump because he’s a crude, thrice-divorced bully with no sense of propriety or noblesse oblige. Trump is antithetical to Bush’s values and manners. As a kid, Barbara never would’ve allowed him to play with a boy like that!
.. But Limbaugh seemingly no longer believes in the Buckley rule. He no longer considers conservatism the most important factor in elections. The impulse to destroy the establishment drives him more than any constructive vision. If Limbaugh can antagonize the Bushes, the mainstream media, the Hollywood liberals and the GOP establishment all at once by aligning himself with a Sarah Palin or a Donald Trump, the opportunity is too good to pass up, because Limbaugh is less invested in winning some ideological battles than fighting a culture war... Like all successful reality TV, half the audience is watching in horror and the other half in aspiration.
Catholicism at Year Zero
But these models, for all their potential wisdom, are also ones that any start-up Christian communion might adopt. Whereas part of the point of being Catholic — or so one might hazard — is that the church also has two thousand-odd years of prior argument, prior interpretation, and yes, prior rulings to tell us where the rough boundaries of our tradition lie.
.. Where matters are clearly unsettled, in other words, Martens is offering reasonable criteria to guide the church. But by only emphasizing those criteria, he seems to imply that no question is ever permanently settled, that one interpretation simply succeeds another as the church’s history unfolds.
.. Instead, the strong implication is that in every generation the Catholic Church is in roughly the same position as the nascent church of the 1st century, confronting crucial questions anew and reading the signs of the times afresh, and that the positions and teachings of the past are always up for revision when some combination of dialogue, prayer, experience and theological innovation suggests that the time has come to change.
.. but that a penitential path has to be followed prior to a second marriage, and this is the case even if the person seeking a second marriage is a widow or a widower, since one, indissoluble marriage is the ideal.
.. But given Catholicism’s understanding of the indissolubility of marriage, why should this be? Why should the death of one spouse end this marriage?
.. To write and act as if all those centuries don’t matter very much, to brush them away in favor of interpretative moves that start again at the very beginning without regard for what the church has taught in the intervening two thousand years, is to imply a vision of the church as a permanent debating society, an ongoing conversation in which no teaching is definitive so long as a reasonable and sincere Christian can make a case for the opposing view.
.. And again: part of the point of being Catholic, I would have thought, is that we don’t have to keep having these arguments anew in every generation, like a megachurch in the midst of a succession crisis or coping with a superstar pastor’s theological drift; rather, we can treat past teaching as essentially reliable, and indeed treating past teaching as reliable is essential to what being Catholic means.
.. If the early church got marriage and divorce wrong, in other words, why are we so confident it got its dietary rules right?
.. Even read charitably, it seems shot through with an envy of the Anglican communion’s longstanding attempt at letting seemingly contradictory propositions jostle semi-permanently under the same ecclesiastical roof.
.. I am not saying that you can’t be a Christian if you believe that Jesus got important things wrong, that his human nature exposed him to errors and mistakes and misapprehensions that found their way into his teaching. I have a certain respect, indeed, for contemporary writers who are willing to grasp that nettle: I didn’t write on it when it came out, but I admired this piece by Brandon Ambrosino last year for the forthright way it dealt with the “what would Jesus think about homosexuality” question by simply arguing that not only Paul but Jesus himself had a contingent and limited-by-his-times view of sexual ethics, and that contemporary believers need to transcend the limitations imposed by Jesus’s human side — because Jesus’s divine side would want us to.
Inside the Secret Meeting Where Conservative Leaders Pledged Allegiance to Ted Cruz
Cruz this week surged to the top of several polls in conservative-friendly Iowa, and a string of soon-to-come endorsements should only help to cement that standing. A decision was made before the vote that members would roll out their endorsements individually rather than issuing a collective statement. This approach, they decided, would help create a perception that the conservative movement was uniting behind a candidate organically while dispelling images of political horse-trading occurring inside smoke-filled rooms.
.. Cruz blew the audience away
.. And Rubio, whom many had discounted entirely because of his immigration-reform advocacy, was surprisingly effective, leading some in the room to reconsider their dismissiveness of his candidacy.
.. Dobson, in particular, had been warning the group since summer that Rubio’s participation in the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” bill revealed him to be a weak-minded puppet of the political establishment.
A Donald Trump Nomination Would Fundamentally Change the GOP
It’s possible we are at the beginning of another political recalibration based on national identity. Already center-right parties in Japan and Russia and Israel have lurched in a nationalist direction. And where nationalists do not enjoy outright control, as in Hungary and Poland, they split the center-right coalition, as in France, the U.K., and Germany
.. Trump’s nationalism has far more in common with the conservatism of Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front, than with the conservatism of Ronald Reagan. Support for a “Muslim ban” is par for the course among European nationalists — by calling for it here all Trump has done is confirm how closely American politics resembles European politics. Reagan was an immigration advocate who signed the 1986 amnesty law.