George Will: If Trump wins the nomination, prepare for the end of the conservative party

Two days later, Trump, who rarely feigns judiciousness, said: “It has not been proven that he’s killed reporters.”1

Well. Perhaps the 56 journalists murdered were coincidental victims of amazingly random violence that the former KGB operative’s police state is powerless to stop.

But by his embrace of Putin, and by postulating a slanderous moral equivalence — Putin kills journalists, the United States kills terrorists, what’s the big deal, or the difference? — Trump has forced conservatives to recognize their immediate priority.

.. One hundred and four years of history is in the balance. If Trump is the Republican nominee in 2016, there might not be a conservative party in 2020 either.

David Frum: The Great Republican Revolt

These populists seek to defend what the French call “acquired rights”—health care, pensions, and other programs that benefit older people—against bankers and technocrats who endlessly demand austerity; against migrants who make new claims and challenge accustomed ways; against a globalized market that depresses wages and benefits. In the United States, they lean Republican because they fear the Democrats want to take from them and redistribute to Americans who are newer, poorer, and in their view less deserving—to “spread the wealth around,” in candidate Barack Obama’s words to “Joe the Plumber” back in 2008. Yet they have come to fear more and more strongly that their party does not have their best interests at heart.

..It was these pessimistic Republicans who powered the Tea Party movement of 2009 and 2010. They were not, as a rule, libertarians looking for an ultraminimal government. The closest study we have of the beliefs of Tea Party supporters, led by Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist, found that “Tea Partiers judge entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients. The distinction between ‘workers’ and ‘people who don’t work’ is fundamental to Tea Party ideology.”

.. Against all evidence, both groups interpreted the Tea Party as a mass movement in favor of the agenda of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. One of the more dangerous pleasures of great wealth is that you never have to hear anyone tell you that you are completely wrong.

.. Last February, three of the party’s most important moneymen—the fast-food executive Andrew Puzder, the health-care investor Mike Fernandez, and the national finance chair of Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, Spencer Zwick—publicly urged the GOP to push ahead toward more-open immigration. “America should be a destination for hardworking immigrants from all over the world,” said Puzder, an advocate of importing more low-skilled laborers to meet the needs of his high-turnover industry. Zwick said that any presidential candidate who wanted to be taken seriously had better “be in a similar place” to Jeb Bush on the immigration issue.

.. Instead of 2013’s “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Liberalization,” Cruz and Christie are urging “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Enforcement.” True, Cruz’s carefully selected words on immigration leave open the possibility of guest-worker programs or other pro-employer reforms after a burst of border enforcement.

.. Severed from a larger agenda, however—as Mitt Romney tried to sever the issue in 2012—immigration populism looks at best like pandering, and at worst like identity politics for white voters.

.. Remember that Republican voters care more about aligning government with their values of work and family than they care about cutting the size of government as an end in itself. Recognize that the gimmick of mobilizing the base with culture-war outrages stopped working at least a decade ago.

The G.O.P.’s Problem with Threat Inflation

In the long run, threat inflation—the exaggerations that encourage paralyzing fear—may be far more harmful than monetary inflation. There’s nothing new in this idea. Nearly a decade ago, in Political Science Quarterly, a Mississippi academic, Jeffrey Cavanaugh, discussed how the warnings of a “Red juggernaut,” the manipulation of opinion during the Vietnam War, and reports about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction swayed voters. It took Donald Trump, of all people, to put the recent Mideast wars in perspective, when, sounding for a moment less interested in the racism and bigotry he’s pushed in recent days, he said that “we’ve spent four trillion trying to topple various people that, frankly. . . . if we could’ve spent that four trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems, our airports and all of the other problems we’ve had, we would’ve been a lot better off.”