The Coming Conservative Crack-Up

Are we presently witnessing a conservative crack-up in slow motion?

Establishmentarians Jeb Bush and, his fallback, Marco Rubio are not doing well in the present GOP primary. In the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, 55% of Republican primary voters support a candidate who has never held elected office. It is customary for Republican voters to say that they want to elect an outsider, but there is something different in the air this campaign season: they just might mean it this time. Money — even dark money —as well as the infamous Bush network might not be enough this time around to secure the GOP nomination this time around.

We are already witnessing tremors of the coming conservative crack up in the contretemps between populist Bill O’Reilly and George Will. The business-friendly, educated “Gray Poupon” Republicans are starting to avert their gazes from their populist, suds-drinking talk radio-listening former comrades. As Trump rises, bringing up bilious echoes of bigotry and hedge-fund bashing populism, the Republican Establishment is having mini-conniptions. “Every sulfurous belch from the molten interior of the volcanic Trump phenomenon injures the chances of a Republican presidency,” sniffed George Will. Trump, quite frankly, is the candidate of conservative talk radio, not the Chamber of Commerce.

Although this is not the first conservative crack up since the modern conservative movement was founded by William F. Buckley during the Cold War, it just might be the most severe. In 1990, John Judis wrote in The American Prospect:

The conservative movement that began emerging in the mid-1950s, particularly with the founding of William F. Buckley’s National Review, was a novel creation that bore at best a family resemblance to the older American right and to British and European conservatism. It produced a new synthesis in American politics, blending militant anticommunism and opposition to the welfare state with nostalgia about America’s rural and small-town past. It incorporated some parts of the older right, including its opposition to the New Deal and Soviet communism and rejected or suppressed others, including the older right’s isolationism, nativism, and anti-Semitism.

This article was called “The Conservative Crack up,” and it was written during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Anti-communism was the glue that held the conservative movement together. During the 90s there were minor fissures along the usual fault lines and factions of the movement. “Neo-isolationsim” surfaced in the post-Cold War period and, during the second Persian Gulf War in Iraq, conservative Robert Novak and paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos openly broke with George Bush and the neoconservative vulcans.

This conservative crack-up is not based on foreign policy. The coming conservative crack-up is class based, so more organic than intellectual. If Ben Carson is the candidate of choice for the evangelicals, then Donald Trump is the candidate of the blue collar worker. “Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 39% of the white working class backs Mr. Trump, twice his share of white college-educated voters,” writes William A. Gallston in the WSJ. “Fifty-five percent of his supporters are white working class, compared with 35% for the rest of the Republican field and only 32% for Mr. Carson.”

The various factions within the modern conservative movement are coming apart as a result of the earthquake that is the Trump movement. After decades of nominating moderate, Chamber of Commerce-friendly types like Romney and McCain and both Bushes Younger and Elder, the prospect of the GOP nominating Trump has Establishment panties in a twist. Could Donald Trump win the Republican nomination over and against the Establishment? If he does— even if he comes close and doesn’t actually win — a conservative crack up will almost certainly ensue. Be afraid, be very afraid.