On the same day as the Michigan, Mississippi, and Idaho primaries, New York Times columnist David Brooks published a cri de coeur on behalf of the moderate Republican establishment. Starting with an eyebrow-raising metaphor, Brooks compared the Republican primary electorate to a barfly on the prowl at closing time. Intoxicated by “strong and nasty Trump cocktails,” Republican voters start to think Cruz looks pretty attractive. “Have your standards really fallen so low so fast?” Brooks pleaded. “Can you remember your 8 p.m. selves, and all the hope you had about entering a campaign with such a deep bench of talented candidates?”

Well, Republican primary voters apparently had their beer goggles firmly in place on Tuesday. In Michigan and Mississippi, they apparently found some Trump Vodka in an abandoned warehouse and fixed martinis all night, delivering Trump resounding victories. For good measure, the Donald took the Hawaii caucuses as well. Cruz held his own, winning in Idaho and finishing a respectable second in the other three contests, allowing him to build on his delegate count.

It only gets worse from there for the GOP establishment. Marco Rubio, the candidate your sober self would allegedly be happy to take to dinner with the parents, suffered an ignominious series of defeats, the latest humiliation for a campaign that’s fast becoming a legendary trainwreck. The candidate that many observers (including myself) expected the party to eventually rally around earned a grand total of zero delegates from the American heartland. John Kasich didn’t do as badly, but the fact that he finished behind both Trump and Cruz in Michigan firmly established him as a candidate who, in a wild best-case scenario, uses a favorite-son win in Ohio to present himself as the establishment candidate of choice in a contested convention.

So things went about as badly for Brooks and the moderate establishment as they could have. But the larger argument of his column is also worthy of examination. In singling out Trump and Cruz as the villains the Republicans must slay if they hope to regain respectability, Brooks is in deep denial about the state of his party—a denial that is shared by Brooks’s center-right brethren.

Brooks has a story about the fight over the Republican presidential nomination that has become a common one. Trump has no longstanding commitment to the Republican Party; does not even make a pretense of knowing anything about policy; breaks from party orthodoxy on issues like trade; mobilizes racial and ethnic resentment in a way that is too loud and overt for elite Republicans; and is thus unacceptable. But Ted Cruz’s straightforwardly radical conservatism isn’t acceptable either: