Rubio and Trump tangle in Detroit. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty)

The Reagan coalition is long gone, replaced by Chamber of Commerce hegemony.

Last night’s debate underscores this truth: The GOP is disintegrating.

When the front-runner for your party uses the national debate stage to discuss the size of his Anthony Weiner, you have a problem.

When that same man affirms that he will order U.S. soldiers to commit the horrifying war crime of deliberately slaughtering the wives, children, and elderly noncombatant relatives of ISIS, you have an even worse problem.


The mind boggles.

On a more prosaic level, it is also true: When a solid conservative like Ted Cruz emerges as the leading opponent to Trump, and the GOP establishment stubbornly refused to coalesce around him, you have both a political and a moral problem. Especially after the GOP’s preferred horse lost not only in Iowa, and not only in New Hampshire, but in South Carolina. Marco Rubio’s innovative 3, 5, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 1 strategy is right on target. Meanwhile Kasich is living in his own egocentric fantasy land as the Democrats’ favorite Republican. (I give him a D-minus for his answer on religious liberty last night, as I explain here.)


Right now, many conservatives are reacting to the #NeverTrump movement by pointing to the horrors of Hillary Clinton and urging conservatives to avert their eyes from Trump’s constant parade of horribles. Join together as Republicans to beat Horrible Hillary, they say, or lose the Supreme Court for a generation.


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There is a lot to be said for that point of view. I am still mulling it all over.


I do not know that I can ever bring myself to vote for a man who boasts about his private parts in public and vows to kill innocent women and children, even if I don’t believe him. (I would have included Trump’s refusal to disavow the KKK, except Trump claims that he did not hear the question properly and that he had disavowed Duke before and clearly did so afterwards repeatedly, including on last night’s stage.)

It may just be as simple as that.


Disgust is not a reason, but it is an emotion that points to something important, something not to be dismissed by utilitarian cost-benefit analyses. But on reflection, underlying my own doubts about this rallying cry is another question I now have: Is the GOP worth saving?

#share#I joined the Reagan coalition in the GOP as a young woman, as a social conservative who cares about life and marriage, as an economic conservative who cares about limited government and economic growth and opportunity for all, and as a constitutional conservative who understands that, as the old liberal Felix Frankfurter reminded us years ago, “the history of liberty is largely the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.” Sustaining the structure of the Constitution is essential to the rule of law.

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But let us face this fact: That Reagan coalition has already broken down within the GOP, and not because of Trump. In truth, Trump has (like Romney before him) adopted the social-conservative positions of the GOP on life, at least, and has even half-heartedly endorsed the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA). He is the only candidate to name the kind of judge he would appoint, two solid judicial conservatives in Sykes and Pryor.

Trump is surging, in large part, because the standard pro-business message of the GOP hasn’t resonated with voters and nobody seems to give a darn. Libertarians, as Ron Paul just noted, really have nothing to choose from between Hillary and Trump, while social conservatives still have late-term abortion and defunding Planned Parenthood.

The really grave fissure in the GOP, and the one that has catapulted Trump to power, is the chasm that has emerged between Chamber of Commerce Republicans and the rest of us. Hat tip to Ben Domenech for noticing this important insight from Angelo Codevilla:

America is now ruled by a uniformly educated class of persons that occupies the commanding heights of bureaucracy, of the judiciary, education, the media, and of large corporations, and that wields political power through the Democratic Party. Its control of access to prestige, power, privilege, and wealth exerts a gravitational pull that has made the Republican Party’s elites into its satellites.


From my front-row losing seat in the gay-marriage wars, I saw this emerge time and time again: the capacity of the Left to affect GOP elite opinion, to punish and stigmatize gay-marriage dissenters, and to get the GOP to shut up and back down, while polls still showed a majority of Americans on our side.

Now, when the battle is against the Left’s massive new effort to redefine the traditional understanding of marriage as hatred and bigotry, to be punished by the government as such, you can see the dynamic even more nakedly at work.

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Mitt Romney has stepped forward to tell us that Trump is an unacceptable nominee and a “phony” and a con artist. This is the same Mitt Romney who campaigned as a life, traditional marriage, and religious-liberty supporter during the primary and then refused to speak about these issues in the November election, which he lost. This is, even worse, the same Mitt Romney who (along with John McCain) did the Left’s bidding in publicly urging Jan Brewer to veto an innocuous religious-liberty bill (which would have had little or no impact on gay rights).

I wrote about what this meant in 2014:

Gov. Jan Brewer’s collapse in Arizona is very important. . . . Here is what happened. Christian conservatives tried to use their “back strategy” of quietly passing legislation through a very conservative legislature. The legislation in question was not particularly new or radical, many other states have Religious Freedom Restoration Acts with similar language. Gay rights advocates decided to prove they could stop legislation like this deep in the heart of the reddest of all red states. And they won. First they defined the bill as an antigay pro-discrimination measure. Then they got credible GOP leaders to validate this framing — John McCain and Mitt Romney. They did this in a matter of hours. I doubt either McCain or Romney got a thoughtful analysis of the legislation and its meaning. They got [that] they did not want to be “antigay” and they got props for being on the right side of history. And it was enough. Let us not turn our eyes from what this means: by their capacity to use the mainstream media to define what an issue “means”—progressives got the conservative movement to fold with credible and major GOP figures. They can do this.

And today, as history marches on, Chamber of Commerce business interests are doing the Left’s dirty work, leading the fight against conscience protections for gay-marriage dissenters. And the GOP is caving massively.

#share#Take just two examples in the last week. A solid majority of Americans believe that when gay rights conflict with religious liberty, religious liberty should win, including 59 percent of independents and even 32 percent of Democrats. This was the finding of a July 2015 AP-GfK poll of 1,004 adults, which asked, “In cases where there is a conflict, which do you think is more important for the government to do?” 39 percent of respondents answered, “protect the rights of gays and lesbians” and 56 percent said, “protect religious liberties.”

But in Georgia, the Republican governor, Nathan Deal, facing an avalanche of calls and emails and rallies on behalf of a state FADA bill that would prevent the government from punishing gay-marriage dissenters, instead announced that he takes, exactly and explicitly, the opposite side, according to the Atlanta Constitution-Journal:

In stark terms, the Republican said he would reject any measure that “allows discrimination in our state in order to protect people of faith,” and urged religious conservatives not to feel threatened by the ruling. He also called on his fellow Republicans pushing for the measure to take a deep breath and “recognize that the world is changing around us.”


Lie back, dear believers, and think of how great the Republican party is.

And in South Dakota, the Republican governor just vetoed legislation that would make sure girls and women have privacy rights in bathrooms and locker rooms, including in public schools.

The old Reagan coalition is dead, destroyed not by social conservatives but by business interests and the GOP elites.

When the people get a chance to vote directly, even liberal Democratic strongholds like Houston find nobody likes this idea. But the Chamber of Commerce wins points with the progressives for doing their dirty work on an issue that is hardly core to their business interests. They don’t worry that the Republican party will respond in a way that hurts their interests, while they are terrified of the Democrats.

At their behest, GOP elites are willing to fold and do the Democrats’ dirty work. That means liberals don’t even have to take the hit for imposing this on the American people, since it is now a bipartisan endeavor.


The old Reagan coalition is over, hacked in two by the ability of the Left to hurt the interests of GOP elites and the unwillingness of the GOP, institutionally, to fight.

Trump is the symptom, not the cause. What we do next is a hard question. But let’s first face the truth of where we are: The old Reagan coalition is dead, destroyed not by social conservatives but by business interests and the GOP elites.