Two dozen interviews about the 2016 race with unaligned GOP donors, financial executives and their Washington lobbyists turned up a consistent — and unusual — consolation candidate if Bush demurs, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie doesn’t recover politically and no other establishment favorite gets nominated: Hillary Clinton.

The darkest secret in the big money world of the Republican coastal elite is that the most palatable alternative to a nominee such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas or Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky would be Clinton, a familiar face on Wall Street following her tenure as a New York senator with relatively moderate views on taxation and financial regulation. “If it turns out to be Jeb versus Hillary we would love that and either outcome would be fine,” one top Republican-leaning Wall Street lawyer said over lunch in midtown Manhattan last week. “We could live with either one. Jeb versus Joe Biden would also be fine. It’s Rand Paul or Ted Cruz versus someone like Elizabeth Warren that would be everybody’s worst nightmare.” Most top GOP fundraisers and donors on Wall Street won’t say this kind of thing on the record for fear of heavy blowback from party officials, as well as supporters of Cruz and Rand Paul. Few want to acknowledge publicly that the Democratic front-runner fills them with less dread than some Republican 2016 hopefuls. And, to be sure, none of the Republican-leaning financial executives are so far suggesting they’d openly back her. But the private consensus is similar to what Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein said to POLITICO late last year when he praised both Christie — before the bridge scandal — and Clinton. “I very much was supportive of Hillary Clinton the last go-round,” he said. “I held fundraisers for her.” People close to Blankfein say the same calculus applies to a Jeb Bush-Hillary Clinton race as it would to a Christie-Clinton contest. “Those would be two very good choices and we’d be perfectly happy with them,” a person close to Blankfein said. Blankfein is a self-described Democrat, but his comments about Christie and Clinton reflect the ambidextrous political approach that many Republicans and Democrats on Wall Street take.

Leaving aside the ludicrous bombast by Politico that this is the “darkest secret n the big money world of the Republican coastal elite” — many of us have been writing on the one-party system that the federal government truly is for years now, as any reputable journalist with access to a search engine surely knows — what we have here is a clear indication of where we are in our trajectory toward European socialism, which is really nothing of the sort: that is, the end game is a social welfare state with declining levels of “income inequality,” but it one run by a permanent ruling elite, policed by its bureaucracies, with citizens turned dependent subjects, and the beneficiaries of this “fundamental transformation” being those in power colluding with those in industry and finance to form the perimeters of liberal fascism, itself a form of corporatism, cronyism, and aristocratic government architecture that is often camouflaged with rigged elections (whether through voter fraud, the illegal immigrant / dead vote, gerrymandering, or control over campaign money by the Party hierarchies (see, eg., Cuccinelli, Ken), and control of the messaging by a mainstream media that has become an arm of the government) and a mirage of market capitalism that is undermined entirely by governmental interference, corporate welfare, and attacks on the middle class and small business that serve to reduce competition and dissuade risk taking, and with it, innovation.

None of this is new. This is statism, and statism leads to tyranny of necessity. The signs have long been there, with a recent study concluding that on compromise legislation, the movement is of policy is 95% to the left.

Call it the long march.

Today’s GOP establishment realizes that, win or lose, they will benefit financially from a powerful centralized government. And the introduction of the TEA Party into the political arena has upset the charade that we have an adversarial system in any serious sense. This is what so frustrates the Boehners and McConnells, who exist to cut deals, to lose more slowly, to stand for nothing other than their own entrenched power and influence.

We are their enemy. The left, as much as they are to be despised for where they wish to take us, at least have the courtesy of occasionally dropping the mask. The GOP establishment, alternately, is busy trying to rebrand conservatism to comport with Jeb Bush’s / Mitt Romney’s ”center-rightism,” which 50 years ago would have been aligned quite closely to LBJ’s Great Society agenda. They wish to hijack “conservatism” and marginalize constitutionalists as “extremists.”

I no longer suffer GOP apologists lightly. They are pernicious, and a very real danger to an already crumbling constitutional republic.

Wearing a flag pin in your label and mouthing platitudes that sound vaguely conservative but lack the tell of conviction is no longer a workable camouflage. And in truth, Wall St and the statists have us boxed in. Should conservatives stay home, assuming the media and the establishment Republicans can force feed us a Bush or Christie, Hillary wins. And because she’s both an ideologue and a power realist, she’ll happily play ball with corporatists and crony capitalists in exchange for finishing off the Cloward-Piven strategy to wreck our country from within.

In Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s fictional socialist Utopia, the federal government becomes the country’s biggest employer, its bigger lender, its biggest “charitable donor,” etc. And so eventually it just subsumes the large corporations it original colludes with and cuts out the middle man.

Seems he was prescient. History shows that the romanticized Utopia Bellamy envisioned, when proponents of his brand of socialism grabbed the reins of power, turned into a Dystopian nightmare, with misery among the subjects the only form of “equality” that remained.

Well, that and mass graves.

So what’s not to like, right?