“The Old-Time Conservative Religion Doesn’t Seem To Fire Up The Congregation”

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The Paul family had become a de facto none-of-the-above box on GOP ballots, the happy recipients of the base’s increasingly loud “no” to the status quo. In the fractiousness of the current election cycle, Sen. Rand Paul was supposed to see his hodgepodge of unorthodox views rewarded with serious consideration atop the ticket. In a 2014 article I questioned at the time, the New York Times Magazine essentially prophesied it.

Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. In 2015, Paul has found his waiting pockets picked by Trump and Carson, the new standard-bearers of no standards, whose bigotry, paucity of policy and inanity provides the party faithful with an ever-more-forceful rebuke to its leadership. Not even Rick Santorum and the sweater-vest wing of the party is out there enough to get in on the action. The voters, disappointed repeatedly by the core, want to go as far away from it as possible.

Maybe that’s all this strange contest is, not some cult of personality working its voodoo on brains softened by Reality TV. Not even a sharp shift to the hard right. Perhaps it’s just “no.”

In a Politico Magazine article, Michael Lind traces the decline and fall of the modern American conservative movement, thinking that perhaps Trump’s rise is somewhat more nuanced than just mere negation. The opening:

There is an air of desperation out there on the GOP campaign trail. It’s impossible not to sense it in the kinds of things being said by teetering establishment Republican candidates like Jeb Bush and John Kasich, both of whom started off the last debate virtually pleading with base voters to come to their senses about Donald Trump, who is barely identifiable as a conservative by any standard measure of ideology. Not to mention Ben Carson, whose views sound like a grab bag of life philosophies. “I want you to know I’m fed up. I’ve about had it with these people,” a flustered Kasich told a rally in his home state of Ohio this week. “What happened to our party? What happened to the conservative movement?”

It’s an excellent question. And maybe it’s time we stopped blaming the lack of traction experienced by establishment conservatives like Bush, Kasich, and Chris Christie on things like personality and debating skill, and started talking again about that thing known as “the conservative movement.” Maybe the real problem is less Jeb’s awkwardness, or Kasich’s personality, or Christie’s New Jersey bravado, than an issue that runs much deeper. The establishment candidates in this year’s Republican primary nomination campaign are out there reciting all the formulas that worked for Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes—supply-side tax cuts and more military spending. Yet the old-time conservative religion doesn’t seem to fire up the congregation, many of whose members have become idol-worshippers of strange new gods like Trump and Carson.

Why isn’t the old-time conservative religion working to fire people up any more? Maybe the reason is that it’s really, really old. So old it’s decrepit.•

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