The Republican establishment is frantic over Trump. Trump has called the political establishment’s bluff. He has made an end run around their vetting process. This is a replay of Goldwater’s nomination in 1964.
The Republican establishment took a dive in that election. It threw the election to Johnson. Now a major neoconservative theorist is recommending the same strategy.
Robert Kagan is a Republican, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton, a “nonpartisan” Brookings Institution staff member, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of Yale’s secret society, Skull & Bones. He is probably the #1 neoconservative theorist in foreign policy. He is part of a family of Kagans who share his views. You can read about him on Wikipedia.
He is at the top of the CFR’s academic establishment. He has recently written a column in which he calls for the creation of a third party as a way to stop Trump. He wrote this in the liberal Beltway Washington Post.
Thus so far the collective Republican reaction to the great question of our time: If Donald Trump wins the nomination, will the party support this would-be authoritarian to inhabit the nation’s most powerful office? To watch Republicans and conservatives wrestle with this question is to understand how political parties die and how democracies give rise to authoritarian rulers . . .Consider that Trump is displaying these flashes of bullying authoritarianism while he is still courting us. Imagine when he no longer needs to court anyone, when he has amassed a large enough popular following to win the White House. We are supposed to believe that at that point, after a campaign in which his devoted throngs have cheered every threat and insult — against judges and newspapers and speakers of the House — he is suddenly going to become Calvin Coolidge?
Trump’s supporters obviously aren’t worried about any of this. But what about those in the Republican Party who do worry about Trump? Shouldn’t they be willing to do whatever is necessary to prevent him from winning the presidency, including voting against him in the general election, if that proves to be the only way?
Yes, there are now woefully belated efforts to block his nomination. But what if these fail, as is quite likely? Are Republican leaders prepared to take the next necessary step?
What is the necessary step? To take a dive in November. To let Clinton win.
This, from a man who was previously one of her advisers.
The party’s bigger problem is that it remains enslaved by the same Manichaean mistrust and intolerance that helped give rise to Trump in the first place. And yes, the other party suffers from that ailment, too. It has displayed its own derangement syndromes, and much of what ails the U.S. political system can be laid at the doorstep of the Democrats. But at the moment the other party is not in the process of nominating a Trump. It is the Republican Party whose failings now threaten the well-being of American democracy. Can party leaders now rise above the party to save it? . . .
