IN EUROPEAN politics a useful distinction is sometimes drawn between the “clean right”, a group which can include pretty flinty conservatives, and the “dirty right”, meaning those who cross the bounds of democratic decency, whether with race-baiting, threats of political violence or snarling challenges to the rule of law. That distinction has proved powerful in its day. In the French presidential elections of 2002, the main parties of left and right united behind an unprincipled machine politician, Jacques Chirac, to defeat his opponent, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a brutish demagogue. Parisians fondly remember the posters that popped up, urging: “Vote for the crook, not the fascist”.

Donald Trump, front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, is of the dirty right. He showed that when he called for a blanket ban on Muslims entering America, and advocated both the use of torture and the punitive killing of terrorists’ families, a war crime. He whips up crowds by lamenting that he cannot punch protesters in the face. He accuses the Mexican government of sending rapists to America, and promises to round up and deport 11m migrants who are in the country without papers (though, like Caesar weighing lives in the Coliseum, as president he would let “good ones” back in). In a television interview on February 28th he declined three times to disavow statements of support from a veteran leader of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), murmuring that he needed to “research” that white-supremacist group. Bringing history full-circle, the ageing Mr Le Pen sent word from France that, if American, he would vote Trump.

After months of near-silence, many conservative grandees suggested that Mr Trump had crossed a line. Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, called his KKK response “disgusting” and “disqualifying”. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a rival presidential contender, offered a rebuke that blended principle with calculation: Mr Trump’s equivocation was not just “wrong”, he explained, “it makes him unelectable”.

Yet nobody is reviving the spirit of France in 2002, when parties united to keep a bad man out of power. At the time of writing a single Republican senator, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, has declared that if Mr Trump is his party’s nominee, he will back an independent conservative. Many more Republicans have said, queasily, that they will back whoever the party nominates. Others are not even that squeamish. On February 26th Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey endorsed Mr Trump, calling him the strongest candidate against Hillary Clinton. During his own, ill-fated presidential run, Mr Christie called the tycoon’s proposed Muslim ban “ridiculous”. Now he is “proud” to back him. Members of Congress have begun to endorse Mr Trump, and their numbers will grow.

There is a temptingly simple explanation for this embrace of Mr Trump: that the Republican Party is a consciously racist project, from top to bottom. The backlash against Mr Trump’s half-dalliance with the KKK suggests something more complicated. History matters, for one thing. Nothing scars modern Europe as deeply as memories of fascism, Nazism and collaboration with the Holocaust: many nerves jangle when strutting authoritarians question the loyalties of religious minorities or suggest that undesirable outsiders should be rounded up. In America, nothing casts a darker shadow than slavery and racial segregation, so that overt anti-black racism is uniquely taboo. When Mr Trump seemed to test that taboo, lots of Republicans were sincerely horrified. Even Mr Trump knows he went too far: he now says he misheard questions about the KKK and spurns their support.

Dismayingly, attacks on Muslims and Mexicans do not set Republican nerves a-jangle to the same extent. In the 2015 American Values Survey, a large poll, 76% of Republicans said that Islam is at odds with American values. Many grassroots conservatives would call a Muslim entry ban an act of self-defence against terrorism, not bigotry. As for immigrants, 80% of Trump voters told the same survey that they are a “burden” rather than a source of strength for the country, by taking jobs, housing and health care.

At the same time, an unhappy America is more divided than ever along partisan lines. Many Republican politicians think of Mrs Clinton as actively wicked. They see a patriotic duty to keep her out of the White House, not least because the next president will choose at least one Supreme Court justice, after the death of Antonin Scalia. Some hope that Mr Trump may prove malleable. Others suspect that his views will doom their party, but don’t know how to win without his voters.

Pandering as contempt

There is one more explanation for all the bigwigs and pundits rationalising Trump-support, while considering themselves good people who deplore racism. Mr Trump’s critics, they contend, show snobbish contempt for the tycoon’s voters—notably older, often less-educated whites who feel left behind by wrenching social and economic changes. One congressman backing Mr Trump, Tom Marino of Pennsylvania, uses a term much in vogue just now, calling Trump voters “the unprotected”. It comforts Trump-endorsers to think they are standing up for underdogs, but they are letting themselves off too easily. Other Republicans seeking the presidency endlessly promise to protect anxious Americans, with everything from air strikes on Islamic State to curbs on work visas. Mr Trump stands out for the savagery with which he vows to frighten, punish and hurt those who he says are doing America down. That’s not protection, but vengeance.

Conservative grandees preparing to back Mr Trump are arguably the worst snobs of all. For they know that he is making promises to his supporters that are both nasty and impossible to keep. Like every tribune of the dirty right, Mr Trump thinks his voters are dupes: that is why he panders and lies to them without a qualm. If Republican bigwigs have shame or sense enough, there is still time—just—to disown him.