Maybe Ted Cruz and John Kasich looked at the numbers and just gave up. Or more likely, Republican grandees decided that short-circuiting the final primaries would deprive Donald Trump of the oxygen of campaigning, thus buying a few quiet weeks to regroup. Instead, the party’s slowly widening fracture is now a gaping, unbridgeable chasm. The Bushes, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and Lindsey Graham can hold their collective breath until they pass out; their condemnations only strengthen Trump’s grip on the news cycle and further embolden his most ardent supporters. This is a candidate who understands only one language: brute animal dominance. Trump has won. A generation of unimaginative and entitled Republican careerists have lost. Period. It’s Trump’s campaign, Trump’s nominating convention, and—for now at least—Trump’s Republican Party. That makes it all the more important to recognize that, while Trump is a captivating celebrity, his electoral appeal—at least thus far—remains narrow. His support cannot be called a movement; he merely stretches the edges of the permanent resentment faction—mostly white, mostly male—that has figured continuously in our political scene, in various guises, since the George Wallace campaign of 1968. Often, the resentment faction votes Republican, egged on by Roger Ailes’s Fox News and smart GOP operatives of the Lee Atwater/Roger Stone school, backed up by enthusiastic dog-whistle politicking from mainstream Republican officeholders like Reagan and the Bushes. Sometimes, if the dog whistles aren’t loud enough, the resentment faction stays home, as it largely did in 2012. Occasionally, it aligns with a protest candidate like Ross Perot. But it’s always with us. For the full article click here
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