Daniel Larison at The American Conservative remembers what we ought never forget:
People that now panic about incipient caudillismo and the dangers of a nationalist demagogue didn’t care when Bush expanded the security state, trampled on the Constitution, or launched an unnecessary war of aggression, and people that yawned at the steady expansion of government and creation of new unfunded liabilities under Bush are now supposedly alarmed by Trump’s lack of fidelity to the cause of limited government. They correctly identify many of Trump’s flaws, but refuse to acknowledge the fact that the party was already killed (or at least severely wounded) years ago during the disastrous Bush era. It was that period of incompetence and ideologically-driven debacles that shattered the GOP, and for the last seven years the vast majority of die-hard Trump foes have refused to recognize that and have chosen to learn nothing from it. They lost to Trump, but the part they can’t accept is that they deserved to lose because of their role in enabling the GOP’s past failures. Now they’re touting their abandonment of the wreckage they helped to create as if they deserve applause for running away from their own handiwork. If it weren’t so serious, it would be quite comical.
This is one of the many things that worries me about Trump’s baffling GOP takeover: that the Republican establishment types, as historically amnestic as the rest of the body politic, will blame Trump for the chaos he’s wrought upon the Party, and not the very establishment who readied this bitter harvest. They’ll write this election off as a freak accident, the result of bad timing or sour national mood or misinformed voters, and mend not one bit of the destruction from the Bush years.
In reality, though, they were toast in 2012, after Obama won re-election. I wondered then if the GOP would react to a decisive defeat with a reformist self-reckoning or with more of the same denial, delusion, and demagoguery.
We now have our answer. Ain’t no way they’re winning my vote this year.
If Clinton and the Democrats manage not to screw up this golden opportunity for victory (which I’m not terribly bullish on, given Clinton’s baggage and Trump’s irrational success), they too will have a reckoning and a choice to make. Bernie Sanders didn’t get this far on a whim, and what he represents to people isn’t going to disappear. In fact, in another Goldman Sachs Clinton administration, it’ll only get stronger. Who will be 2020 or 2024’s Democratic Trump? (Maybe Trump again, given he’s actually a Democrat?)