Trump driving our GOP into the abyss

With Donald Trump now clearly in the lead and a contested GOP convention more likely, the Republican Party is headed into the abyss. The dogs of war have been unleashed against the forces of honesty, civility and democracy.

The national consensus in support of religious freedom and the rule of law has proved weaker than we thought, as millions vote for a man who encourages anti-Muslim bigotry, endorses torture, and vows to pay the legal bills for supporters who assault protesters.

This is the darkest time in American political life in many decades. When, in a recent debate, every Republican candidate vowed to support their party’s nominee even if Trump prevailed, it may have marked the collapse of the two-party system.

When asked after Tuesday’s primary if that pledge still held, defeated candidate Marco Rubio said “it’s getting harder every day.” But he still failed to repudiate Trump.

Yet just as conservatives have called on all Muslims to disavow radical jihadists, every conservative and every Republican ought to disavow the mendacious, anti-democratic and bigoted orange strongman.

Republicans from Abraham Lincoln to Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan must be spinning in their graves as their party descends into chaos.

Finally the Republican establishment is flailing to find a way to forestall the implosion of their party.

They are awfully late in getting started, and later yet in recognizing their own culpability for allowing the deterioration of their party’s adherence to its own basic principles.

There is really nothing Republican about Trump; he actually represents the tradition of the caudillo — the strongman dictator who believes his intelligence and charisma makes him uniquely qualified to bypass democratic processes and rule with an iron fist.

What’s most disturbing about his rise in popularity is that he taps into a toxic strain of our national culture that most of us didn’t even want to acknowledge. That toxicity has been fed by rising inequality, an astonishing lack of basic civic education, and the muck of racial resentments that was stirred by the election of President Obama.

The result is a descent into a new genre of politics as celebrity-based reality television, embodied by a Showtime series called “The Circus,” which presents the presidential campaign as a variant of the Real Housewives of wherever, or perhaps the Jerry Springer show.

We may hope that the Republican establishment will build on the glimmer of hope represented by Gov. John Kasich’s win in Ohio and find the will to repudiate its extremist elements, and return to the mainstream of American political discourse.

In the meantime, the only respite is to turn from MSNBC or Fox news to the Comedy Channel or HBO, where clever people still find humor in this tragedy.

An example: John Oliver’s description of The Donald as “an ill-fitting suit filled with chickens coming home to roost.”

This story was originally published March 17, 2016 at 5:01 PM with the headline "Trump driving our GOP into the abyss."