gracchusdixit

When the polls close tomorrow in the dozen “Super Tuesday” states, we may well know who the Presidential nominees of the Republican and Democratic parties will be.  Whatever the outcome, it is safe to say that things aren’t turning out the way they were supposed to.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton was from the get-go presumed to be the inevitable nominee of her party.  Although her nomination is still more likely than not, especially after her recent win in South Carolina, it is no longer certain.  Bernie Sanders, Vermont’s unapologetically “socialist” Senator, has quite improbably turned out to be an effective and canny competitor.  Even if he loses, he will have given Hillary a run for her money that no one, least of all she herself, anticipated.

On the Republican side, the situation is more astonishing—and bizarre.  Defying all predictions by those who are supposed to know these things, Donald Trump seized the lead from the day he jumped into the race and has never relinquished it.  Like a world-class prize fighter, he has pummeled one opponent after another into oblivion.  Only Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich remain.

Although Kasich did well in New Hampshire, his chances of going on to win the Republican nomination are only fractionally greater than zero.  He has been trying to cast himself as a sensible, can-do alternative to the extravagant excesses of “the Donald.”   Unfortunately, for Kasich at least, Trump’s supporters seem to relish their candidate’s extravagance and appear quite ready to forgive him his excesses.

Ted Cruz, alas, is even smarmier than Trump—something that is hard to imagine.  Manipulative, devious, and self-serving, he is loathed by nearly everyone who isn’t a member of his immediate family.  Even the evangelicals he has courted so assiduously deserted him in South Carolina, calling into question the fundamental premise of his candidacy.  If he can’t win his home state of Texas, he will be finished, and even if he hangs on there, the viability of his candidacy will be tenuous.

Marco Rubio has become the current fair-haired boy of the establishment—if a decidedly brunette Cuban can be called “fair-haired”—and he may pick up a win or two tomorrow.   Nonetheless, he is trailing far behind Trump in his own state of Florida.  If he loses there, the jig will be up, and Rubio’s brief moment in the sun will fade into oblivion like a guttering candle.

All in all, the Republican race now appears to be Donald Trump’s to lose.

In the face of this once far-fetched possibility, there have been two, sharply divergent reactions from the so-called Republican establishment.

The reaction of the intellectual establishment—the pundits and pontificators in the media, the experts and academics employed by right-wing think tanks, the members of Congress who think of themselves as the keepers of the conservative ideological flame—has been dismay bordering on panic.  It took months for the intellectual establishment to realize that none of the candidates it once deemed to be “serious” had an even remotely serious chance of winning the nomination.

The reaction of the donor establishment—the wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbyists who for decades have been pulling the strings behind the scenes—has been precisely what you’d expect from such people.  As they always do when confronted with anything that threatens their economic interests, the rich have decided to toss principle overboard and hedge their bets.  A few are backing Rubio, but most are sitting on their hands—as well as their bank accounts—waiting for a winner to emerge.

All of this raises the obvious questions: What on earth happened to the Grand Old Party?  How did it happen that the inmates took over the asylum?

There are as many theories about this question as there are theorizers.  Some point to Trump’s celebrity and years of exposure on television.  Others think it’s all about immigration, which the so-called Republican “base” abominates but the establishment has been slow to oppose.  Still others believe the Republican Party is being victimized by a wave of populist anger that afflicts the country at large.  There is some truth in all these propositions.

The ultimate truth, however, is much simpler.

The truth is that the political and economic ideology of the Republican Party—and to Republicans, politics and economics are much the same thing—is a flop.

As a matter of principle, that ideology—called “laissez faire” on this side of the Atlantic and, with almost laughable irony, “neoliberalism” on the other—has always been a fairy tale.  The idea that the “free market” and “free trade” would somehow create general prosperity, that lower taxes on the rich would magically “trickle down,” that deregulation and union-gutting would unleash a tidal wave of innovation rather than a whirlpool of greed and profit-seeking, was preposterous on its face.

The “free market” is, and always has been, an intellectual fiction, conjured up by utopian theorizers like Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.  There is no “invisible hand” ensuring efficient and honest outcomes.  There is no “equilibrium” in which markets inevitably correct themselves.   For all the entrepreneurs and innovators the so-called “free market” creates, it spawns just as many crooks and con men.

The big-money power brokers on the right have always known this.  A few are sincerely delusional, believing their privilege and luck to be entirely the result of their own virtue and hard work.  Most, however, are simply ruthless, using the raiment of the “free market” to cloak the nakedness of their personal greed, knowing that it benefits no one else but themselves.

Since such people are not fools, they have systematically tried to distract voters from the grim reality of their economic agenda.  The distractions began in the late 1960s, with Richard Nixon, were perfected in the 1980s by Ronald Reagan, and have continued ever since.

To distract voters from the disappearance of decent jobs, from diminished wages and stagnating incomes, from the evaporation of what used to be called “the American Dream,” the power brokers on the right redirected the angry energy of their electorate toward other, easier targets:  the federal government, welfare, abortion, gays, immigrants, and anyone who isn’t white, Christian, or a card-carrying member of the NRA.  These “dog whistles” allowed the Republican establishment to channel and manipulate the anger of its electorate for the better part of a generation.

Donald Trump has upended all that.  His supporters don’t care a fig about the fairy tale of the “free market”—about the elimination of the capital gains tax, estate taxes, corporate taxes, or any other taxes.  In a world of diminished expectations and dramatic economic inequality, they are demanding their share of the dramatically smaller pie that has been created by the ideology of the Republican Party.

The piper has come to Hamelin Town, and his name is Donald Trump.