Donald Trump's acceptance of the Republican presidential nomination is being accompanied by a great deal of handwringing on the part of many center-right elites. But if Trump's nomination is really the disaster that such elites claim—which is hardly a self-evident truth—they don't need to look far for its cause. For Trump's nomination is the result of elites' failure in four key ways.
1. Failure to listen to the citizenry
For years, the Republican electorate has been frustrated by the party's refusal to fight for much of anything. Worse, the GOP's elected representatives sometimes choose to fight against their own constituents, ignoring voters' concerns in the apparent interest of being well-received at D.C. cocktail parties. Just last week, in the wake of a crime uptick and the brazen murder of Dallas police, House Republicans inexplicably announced their intention to put “criminal-justice reform” legislation up for a vote after the August recess. This soft-on-crime “reform” is a key item on President Obama's 2016 wish list, and the Republican House's willingness to be accommodating is the kind of political and policy calculation that leaves one's head spinning.
But when it comes to failure to listen to the electorate, nothing—or at least nothing this side of Obamacare—compares to efforts to pass open-borders immigration “reform.” After Obama's re-election, essentially all of the Democratic Party and much of the Republican Party tried to ram “comprehensive reform” down the throats of an unwilling citizenry. At a time when the percentage of the U.S. population that is foreign-born has actually surpassed (see table 2) the percentage during the great waves of immigration in 1880 or 1920—and amid deliberate efforts to minimize the importance of assimilation—elites continue to deny the problem of illegal immigration and claim that anyone who opposes it is racist, xenophobic, and generally unenlightened. And voters—especially Republican voters—have had enough.
2. Failure to heed the Founders' warnings about direct democracy
More than four decades ago, the Republican Party adopted a presidential-selection process that was conceived of by the left-wing of the Democratic Party. That process is essentially direct democracy in action. There is no effort to “refine and enlarge” public opinion. There is no filtering process. There is no opportunity to reach consensus. Indeed, the candidate who was probably the closest to a consensus candidate in this year's GOP field, Scott Walker, was the first one out under this horribly flawed system. It is no surprise that a process that was adopted with very little forethought and that relies on direct democracy hasn't served the party, or the country, well.
Jay Cost and I have proposed a nomination system based on the process that was used to ratify the Constitution. It would empower the grassroots, reinstitute a meaningful convention, promote consensus, and cure many of the other ills of the current selection process. But until the GOP adopts such an overhaul, or something in that spirit, its presidential-selection system will continue to produce the sort of dissatisfying results that the Founders would have expected from a process that relies on direct democracy. As James Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 10,” such a process “can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction.”
3. Failure to make the big-picture case
Of the 17 candidates who sought the Republican presidential nomination, none made the case on big-picture issues—with the exception of Trump. The eventual victor emphasized the need to secure our borders against illegal immigration, while arguing in favor of trade deals that focus more on the well-being of American workers. What big-picture issues did any of the other candidates run on?
The governors mostly looked in the rearview mirror and talked about their records in their states. Sen. Marco Rubio ran on electability. Sen. Ted Cruz ran on conservative purity. (If Cruz had run on Obamacare, championing a conservative alternative, he might well have won.) Indeed, aside from Rubio's efforts to advance Obama's immigration agenda, what big-picture issues can easily be associated with any of Trump's opponents? Whose campaign really emphasized Obamacare, the national debt, or fidelity to the Constitution?
4. Failure to back the viable challenger
Most of the NeverTrumpers were supporters of Rubio or, to a lesser extent, Jeb Bush (both of whom were among the leaders in not listening to the American people on immigration—see point No. 1). Even when it was painfully obvious that Cruz was the only candidate who could potentially stop Trump, they refused to throw meaningful support behind the challenger.
To be sure, there were a few exceptions, most notably Bush himself and Lindsey Graham (both of whom endorsed Cruz), but the general refusal to boost the Texas senator was clear. After Cruz won in Wisconsin and seemed poised to likely wrestle the nomination from Trump, the NeverTrumpers either stayed on the sidelines or else backed the hapless John Kasich campaign, to Trump's benefit.
In truth, the NeverTrumpers were really #NeverTrump, #NeverCruz, #AlwaysRubio. When they likely could have stopped Trump, they didn't even try.
Summing up elites' failures
In each of these four ways, center-right elites enabled Trump's win. If they don't like the result, they should look in the mirror. Republican representatives failed to listen to voters. Republican National Committee members adopted a direct-democracy-based nomination system inspired by the left wing of the Democratic Party and then failed to scrap it across decades of mostly mediocre nominees. Republican presidential candidates failed to focus on big-picture issues. And Republican pundits and influence-peddlers didn't back the chief challenger when he was potentially poised to take the lead.
As all of this suggests, the problems in our politics lie more with the elites than with the citizenry. Among everyday Americans, there is a refreshingly strong sentiment—fueled by eight years of Obama and the statist disaster that is Obamacare—in favor of our founding principles. This sentiment was most evident in the rise of the Tea Party. But conservative-leaning elites have generally failed to channel these salutary sentiments toward productive ends.
To be sure, conventional wisdom holds that the Tea Party isn't having much effect on this election. But consider this: The three eventual presidential candidates who spoke at the January 2015 South Carolina Tea Party Convention, perhaps the nation's largest, were Ben Carson, Cruz, and Trump. Collectively, these three won almost three-quarters—72.5 percent—of the GOP primary vote.
A clearer rebuke of insider elites is hardly imaginable—and the rebuke is well-deserved.