- In the decades before Trump, the Republican Party stood for an idea: character before policy. To Mitt Romney, John McCain, the Bushes and Ronald Reagan, personal character and moral integrity were paramount. They stood for the idea that you can’t be a good leader or a good nation unless you are a good person and a good people.
lol
(Were I to edit the title a la kleinbl00 I would probably call it, "In which David Brooks forgets that Richard Nixon, Lee Atwater, Roy Cohn, Roger Stone, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Oliver North, et al. are Rupublicans")
WHICH IS IT, MR. BROOKS? WHICH IS IT? You can't in one breath say "Trump destroyed the morals of (my favorite) party" and in the next breath say "criticizing the morals of people who voted for Trump is 'triablism'"! [Trump's election shows that] it doesn’t matter if your leader is a liar, a philanderer and a narcissist. It doesn’t matter if he is cruel to the weak and bigoted toward the outsider.
[Clinton self-righteously portrays the election as] us enlightened few against those racist many; us modern citizens against those backward gun-toting troglodytes.
The thing about Trumpism that Brooks and his I'll ilk don't understand is that Trump is the Republican that rank and file Republicans have been waiting for since at least Nixon. It's never been about policy. If it was about policy they would all have been voting Democrat. It is now and always has been about race. Full stop. The Brookses and frums and Stephenses of the world are the ones who don't get it, not the average voter. NYT tries so hard to offer a conservative perspective, but they don't realize that there really is only one single conservative perspective and that's aggrievemet and racialism.
Republicans love to point at Goldwater without acknowledging that he was a fucking racist whose platform was adamantly opposed to civil rights legislation and that what gained them the South was LBJ arguing that blacks are people, too. I know some people (goobster) like to believe there was an era of principled Republican behavior but it's the exception, not the norm. Republicans have hated poor people since Harding.