One way or another, the Trump Train has changed Republican politics forever. But one thing is already certain: The conservative movement has become the establishment.
It is now the part of the GOP with countless institutional levers of power, trying to foist its policies on an unhappy base.
Consider the presidential race: One of its favored candidates, Marco Rubio, is also by everyone's reckoning the establishment candidate. And he's fighting a war with an insurgent candidate, Trump, who is by no means a traditional conservative, having supported single payer health care, said nice things about Planned Parenthood, and flirted with the KKK.
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And if that scenario isn't clear enough, think about this: The speaker of the House is now a Tea Party darling, because more moderate candidates like Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy lost elections or just couldn't get the votes.
This is it. This is the moment that movement conservatives have been waiting for for decades. They're now the establishment.
The problem is that now they have to act like it.
There are many explanations for the Trump phenomenon, but one of them has been the fecklessness of those who hold the institutional levers of power in the Republican Party. Usually, there's a smoke-filled room where the candidate is picked. Conservatives have kicked everyone out of the smoked-filled room — but they forgot to move in.
Aimless, directionless, and unhappy, the Republican Party was ripe for takeover by a slick demagogue enabled by a faithless media.
And conservatives have spent so much time, rightly, thinking of themselves as scrappy rebels, that they're ill-suited for the new reality.
Now, instead of figuring out how to fight guerilla warfare against a scornful establishment, it has to figure out how to manage the future direction of the party — and the country — while throwing enough bones to an unhappy base to keep everyone happy, or at least tolerably unhappy.
The Republican Party's base is made up in part of churchgoing evangelicals who are by and large reliable conservatives, but also in part of angry, white working-class men who dislike the left and have culturally conservative instincts but have no particular truck with conservative ideals. And like a president backing down from an ugly Supreme Court confirmation fight or signing off on funding for Planned Parenthood, they've disdained those voters who are part of their coalition.
This base sometimes asks for impossible or just outlandish things. But it also has some legitimate grievances. The party spent all of 2012 telling its base it cared more about "job creators" than its own voters and spent no time looking for win-win solutions, such as policies based on conservative principles, but aimed at the working class. A party works when its establishment is not just a boss, but a steward, one that seeks to govern by giving everybody as much as it can.
And it also must run elections. It needs to fill the smoke-filled room. It needs to figure out who — Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, or John Kasich — is going to beat Trump, and make it very, very, very clear to everyone else that if they don't drop out and endorse their pick, and spend every minute campaigning for the non-Trump candidate, their future in the Republican Party is over.
It's now the establishment. I know it feels weird, and it's definitely not playing out the way everyone expected. But now it's time to act like it.
