Krauthammer on the threat to the GOP

The ‘Establishment’ Nonsense

CK is an ideologue and his version of conservatism is the neocon one: Wall Street interests will dominate at home and The War Party will dominate abroad.

A party office holder, elective or not, might have thought that a threat to the party would be a threat to its officials to win and hold offices.

The priests and publicists of the conservative ideology (or "ideologies") see things otherwise.

The threat to the GOP posed by the Trump insurgency is not that he’s anti-establishment. 

It’s that he’s not conservative. 

Trump’s winning the nomination would convulse the Republican party, fracture the conservative movement and undermine the GOP’s identity and role as the country’s conservative party.

. . . .

The Iowa results clarified the dynamic of the Republican race. 

There are only three candidates in the race and, as I argued last week, each represents a different politics. 

The result is a three-way fight between Trump’s personalized strongman populism and two flavors of conservatism — Marco Rubio’s more mainstream version and Cruz’s more uncompromising take-no-prisoners version.

In the present article he understates the differences between Rubio, a War Party man and a deal maker, and Cruz, less globalist and a bomb-thrower.

Not to mention that Rubio is constitutionally eligible for the presidency while Cruz is not.

This prediction offers what seems the most likely scenario.

We can now read the Iowa results as they affect the Republican future. Trumpian populism got 24 percent, conservatism (Rubio plus Cruz) got 51 percent. 

There will be a spirited contest between the two conservatives over who has the better chance of winning the general election and of governing effectively. 

But whatever the piques and preferences of various “establishment” party leaders, there’s no denying that either Rubio or Cruz would retain the GOP’s fundamental ideological identity. 

Trump would not.

This, too, rather regrettably.

What Iowa confirms is that whatever beating the “establishment” takes during this campaign, Republicans are choosing conservatism over Trumpian populism by 2 to 1. 

Which means their chances of survival as the party of Reagan are very good.

Last week, CK commented on his 'druthers.

He had this to say.

Cruz is a genuine conservative — austere, indeed radical, so much so that he considers mainstream congressional conservatives apostates. 

And he finds Trump not conservative at all, as he is now furiously, belatedly insisting.

That means Cruz is a bomb thrower, a pro-government shutdown, pro-debt default kind of guy.

He and his like have been repeatedly cheered on to smash the state by such voices of true blue conservatism as George Will, Pat Buchanan, and of course CK, himself.

Our author continues.

My personal preference is for the third ideological alternative, the reform conservatism that locates the source of our problems not in heartless billionaires or crafty foreigners, but in our superannuated, increasingly sclerotic 20th-century welfare-state structures. 

Right, the source of our problems is that Granny can still afford cat food on her Social Security budget, and can still afford prescriptions under her Medicare plan if she cuts all her pills in half.

But she can't afford to see her doctor or be hospitalized for anything at all because she has no savings (her 401k went belly up) and on Social Security alone she can't afford the premiums for a Medicare Advantage plan to cover the whopper physician and hospital costs Medicare alone still leaves the old and the desperate.

Their desperate need for reform has been overshadowed by the new populism, but Speaker Ryan is determined to introduce a serious reform agenda in this year’s Congress — boring stuff like welfare reform, health-care reform, tax reform, and institutional congressional reforms such as the return to “regular order.” 

Paired with a president like Rubio (or Chris Christie or Carly Fiorina, to go longshot), such an agenda would give conservatism its best opportunity since Reagan to become the country’s governing philosophy.

My own preference would be that Trump win the GOP nomination, thus loosening conservatism's grip on that party and hastening the return of Eisenhower-Nixon Republicanism, and then lose to Hillary in the general election.

I say Hillary because, though Bernie wants to strengthen both Social Security and Medicare for all the elderly while she does not, I fear his Quixotism would undermine both and perhaps Obamacare as well, and maybe discredit the Democrats in the eyes of a public far more centrist than he is.