gracchusdixit

In scarcely more than 24 hours, we will be treated to the second episode of what has become America’s latest and best-loved situation comedy: the Republican Presidential debates.  This time, the emcee will be CNN, and the setting will be the Reagan Presidential Library in California.  No place could be more fitting, for if anyone must be laughing in his grave right now, it is Ronald Reagan—or rather, his ghost.

Although Reagan’s ghost now presides as the unofficial patron saint of the Republican Party, it is easy to forget that the man himself didn’t start that way.  Much like “the Donald,” he began as a figure of fun and ridicule, dismissed as a second-rate actor in second-rate movies, and not to be taken seriously by serious people.  When it was no longer possible to ignore his mystifying but undeniable popularity, the “serious” pundits and prognosticators were left to huff and puff in bewildered disbelief.  He couldn’t possibly win the Republican nomination; he couldn’t conceivably become President.  That was the verdict pronounced by the keepers of conventional wisdom thirty years ago.

Today’s huffers and puffers are reprising the same script, thirty years later.  They simply cannot bring themselves to believe that Donald Trump’s candidacy is anything more than a passing aberration, a temporary confusion between fiction and reality.  They insist that an “establishment” candidate will eventually emerge, swept to victory on a wave of big-money donations and political “facts on the ground,” which say that Trump can’t win a national election against a candidate of substance.

Accurate or not, the trouble with this familiar plot is that Republican primary voters don’t seem to care.  Indeed, none of the candidates they have embraced thus far even remotely fits the script.

It’s not just “the Donald”.  Right behind him is Ben Carson, a loony ex-neurosurgeon whose idea for reforming our ludicrous tax code is to replace it with Biblical tithing.  Not far behind Carson are the somewhat less loony but equally “anti-establishment” figures, Carly Fiorina and Ted Cruz.  Fiorina’s conspicuous claim to fame is that she very nearly wrecked Hewlett -Packard, which lost 75 percent of its market value during her tenure as CEO.  Cruz is a transparently self-absorbed demagogue, loathed by his own Republican colleagues no less than by everyone who isn’t to the right of Benito Mussolini.  None of this has stopped their rise.

Neither has it stopped the armchair experts from predicting the long-awaited resurrection of more “plausible” candidates, like the once presumptive front-runner Jeb Bush, or the still presumptive Latino vote-getter Marco Rubio, or that household name from Ohio, John Kasich.

Perhaps the experts will be proved right tomorrow night.  Trump may stumble.  Maybe Jeb Bush will finally get up off the mat and land a knock-out punch when they exchange their inevitable blows.  Perhaps Marco Rubio will at last show some spine and summon up the wits to say a coherent word.  And maybe, just maybe, John Kasich will once and for all explain to the rest of us why so many political pros seem to think that he would be a formidable candidate.

But somehow I doubt it.

The truth seems to be that, whether you like him or not, whether he wins or not, Donald Trump has turned conventional wisdom on its head.  To the chagrin of big-money donors who have grown accustomed to buying elections by bombarding the public with propaganda, he has surged in the polls without spending a penny on advertising.  To the dismay of political consultants and strategists whose livelihoods depend on their expensive expertise, he shows every sign of winning  the early primaries without employing any of them to run a traditional “ground game”.   To the horror of all who cling to notions of political decorum, not to mention common courtesy, he has violated every rule of both without suffering a jot.  On the contrary, every time he breaks those rules, his “fans” reward him for it.

No wonder the pundits are stumped by Trump.

To those pundits, I would only say this: apart from its extravagance, there is nothing about the Trump phenomenon that is any way new.   On the contrary, he is the very embodiment of a long and venerable American political tradition, in which promises pass for policy, sizzle supplants substance, prejudice trumps principle.

It was the quintessential American writer Mark Twain who said:  “All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.”  Mark Twain would not have been stumped by Trump.