Trump and the Establishment

I don’t like or approve of Donald Trump. He strikes me as an arrogant, blustering,  rude, and thoughtless character. He is wrong on some important issues, not as nearly uniformly wrong as Hillary Clinton, but still wrong.  I certainly wish any of several of the other candidates had gotten the nomination instead. If my state  appears  to be safe from the Democrats’ nominee, I probably will vote for Gary Johnson in November.  However, I am amused by the reaction of prominent members of the Rockefeller/Bush/New York/DC/ ”Establishment”  section of the Republican party to the fact that they did not get their way this year. These are the same people who have consistently told others, such as  libertarians and principled conservatives, to brace up, get over frustration over not getting nominees who agree with their ideas, and support the party’s  candidate for president as an alternative superior to what the Democrats are selling. One might guess that their notion of the desirability of unity is limited to unifying around whatever and whomever  they prefer.

Since they are telling everyone Trump is both a bad choice to govern and a bad choice politically, it is interesting to look at how they and their candidates have done in the last few decades first in terms of governing and then in the matter of political success and astuteness.

  Given Rockefeller’s unpopularity among Republicans, Nixon was their approved choice in 1968. His administration gave the country affirmative action quotas, wage and price controls, the EPA, the first oil “crisis”, and concessions to the Soviets, continued the disastrous war in Vietnam for several years, and ended with his leaving office over a scandal.  The elder George Bush, after winning election for Reagan’s third term, raised taxes, disparaged Reagan’s policies as insufficiently kind and gentle, failed to keep Iraq from invading Kuwait,  gave us the ADA, and mismanaged much of the aftermaths  of our victory in the Cold War and of the war in Iraq.  George W. Bush increased government spending and deficits  significantly,  gave us the TSA, the Patriot Act, and  TARP, approved torturing prisoners and spying on American citizens, squandered the opportunities presented by having Republican majorities in both houses of congress, and led the country into long and futile wars and attempts at “nation building” in the Middle East.  A case can be made that each of these three was less bad for the country than the Democrat who ran against him, but it would be hard to argue that any of them was good for the nation.

Members of the establishment made a political decision  in 1964 to oppose and sabotage the candidacy of Barry Goldwater, both at the convention and afterwards. With their help Johnson won in a landslide, and carried along enough leftist Democrats into the congress to allow him have his way on the various programs and laws of the Great Society.  Goldwater probably would have lost to Johnson anyway, but might have kept it close enough  to leave Republicans in congress able to block some of that if he had not been torpedoed by people in his own party.  Four years later the establishment’s choice  Nixon  was in the end a political disaster for the Republicans.  Their  choice in 1976, Gerald Ford, bumbled through an ineffective campaign and lost to Jimmy Carter. The establishment’s  candidates in 1980 lost the nomination  to their opponent Ronald Reagan who, despite their warnings and  misgivings, won two landslide elections and became one of the most important and successful presidents in American history.  Their choice  Bush senior was elected in 1988 on Reagan’s coattails, but was sufficiently inept politically that he lost as an incumbent in 1992 despite having once had an approval rating over 80%. The establishment  served up Bob Dole in 1996 who lost to Clinton in a race that never became close and then gave us George W. Bush who managed to win two very close elections against two wooden and unappealing opponents but whose political failures and ineptitude paved the way for Obama and the large majorities the Democrats enjoyed in the congress after his election.  After that came John McCain who campaigned tepidly and  lost to Obama, and Mitt Romney who campaigned tepidly and could not defeat Obama even after people had had the chance for four years to learn what the man was like.

There are many  good reasons for skepticism about Trump, but the record of his opponents in the  Republican establishment at picking qualified candidates or making astute and effective  political decisions is not among them.