I don’t think of myself as someone who scoffs at people. But it’s gotten pretty hard not to do a whole lot of scoffing at the Republican establishment as it grapples with the rise of Donald Trump. And that brings me to Michael Gerson’s column in The Washington Post last week, What Are Anti-Trump Republicans To Do? Here Are Four Options. It’s pathetic in so many ways, but the blunt stupidity is this: it doesn’t mention the one thing that the anti-Trump Republicans have consistently said they will do: support Trump. And we know Republicans: they will support Trump because it is axiomatic: anyone calling themselves a Republican is better than anyone calling themselves a Democrat.

But I was most taken with his idea of getting a representative of “civil rights Republicanism” to run as a third party candidate. Who are these rare creatures that make up so much of the Republican Party? You would think that if there were even a decent number of them, there would have been a presidential candidate to represent them. You know: like Bernie Sanders came into the Democratic nominating contest because there were a lot of liberal (and even socialist) Democrats? But not one person decided to go after this brand of Republican — probably because it is largely or completely a myth.

That’s not to say that Michael Gerson doesn’t have a candidate in mind. It’s the candidate that all Republicans keep in their back pockets to fight off the charge of racism and sexism: Condoleezza Rice. She’s black! She’s a woman! She’s a Republican! The Republican Party is therefore not a grand bastion of hatred and ignorance used in support of the rich and powerful. No, Condoleezza Rice proves that isn’t the case because, after all, she was a powerful member of a Republican administration that’s sole claim to (positive) fame is that the week after 9/11, George W Bush didn’t set up concentration camps for every American Muslim.

Note that Michael Gerson was part of that very same civil rights loving administration. That’s the same administration that brought back systemic torture to our federal government. And what did Michael Gerson have to say about that? He said that an explicit ban on torture (which was a bi-partisan thing as recently as 1988 under Ronald Reagan) might be admirable, “But holding this view is not an option for those in government…” Because, you know, you can defeat the Nazis without torture, but not any old threat that comes along today that the Republican Party can demagogue!

Of course, Michael Gerson isn’t proposing himself as this civil rights Republican who will save us all. I’m all in favor of saints without being one. The problem is that Condoleezza Rice supports torture too. So it turns out, she’s just an African American woman who happens to be your typical Republican. As I recall, that includes being incompetent at both her jobs in the Bush White House, but that is a subject for another day.

I’ve picked torture because it is the most obvious example of the Republican Party’s lack of commitment to civil rights. It’s not that I’m unaware of what Michael Gerson is really getting at: he wants a Republican who will talk like civil rights were fixed in 1965. This is a game that people in the Republican establishment like to play. They like to pretend that they are high minded. They are all Edmund Burke in their minds. (Not that Burke was ultimately anything but an apologist for the power elite.)

But most of the things that Trump has said that have so outraged the likes of Michael Gerson are a good deal less horrible than things Michael Gerson’s old boss and his mythic civil rights Republican Condoleezza Rice actually did. As Glenn Greenwald noted yesterday in a brilliant article, Trump is gauche, but not in any categorical way worse than the Republican establishment (and much of the Democratic establishment too). I thought this was particularly apt:

Yes, Michael Gerson thinks it would be better to support people who actually ordered torture than to support a man who talks about it in such an open and vulgar manner. The truth is that the only thing that separates these supposed civil rights Republicans and the bigots who support Trump is style. It would seem that if the Republicans are to become the party of “civil rights,” all they have to do is send about half their voters to finishing school.

I didn’t watch much of the Republican debate last night. From what I heard, it was like the one before: basically a street brawl. What I did see showed that the non-Trump candidates really don’t understand their party. They keep hammering away on Trump from the right, as though the Republican base really cares about the ideology of the party. I would think after all these months, everyone would understand: Trump is a conservative to the base because he is a jerk. He struts around like a dictator, and they love it. To them, he is an “every man” because they too would act that way if they had billions of dollars.

But what is perhaps most notable is that it isn’t just the Republican base. According to all the candidates — most especially Rubio — Trump is completely unacceptable. Yet Rubio will support Trump if he is the candidate — so will they all. Similarly, Mitt Romney came out with a big anti-Trump speech. But ultimately, his argument was not that Trump would be a terrible president; his argument was that Trump would be a terrible nominee. I’ve argued from the beginning that the establishment’s problem with Trump is only that they think he’s unelectable — not that he’s a bigot and an authoritarian.

During the debate, Marco Rubio was asked about the lead poisoning in Flint, “Without getting into the political blame game here, where are the national Republicans’ plans on infrastructure and solving problems like this?” He gave no answer other than that the government ought to have some role in the situation. Otherwise, all he talked about was how the Democrats were politicizing the issue and he pushed this straw man argument that Democrats were saying that the Republicans set out to poison the people of Flint.

Let’s be clear here. The argument that Democrats are making is that the Republicans just didn’t care. They did dangerous things to save money. And when they were alerted to problems they ignored them. You could say the same thing about global warming or dozens of other things. This is because the lead poisoning of Flint exists in a larger narrative that the Republican Party is against any kind of infrastructure spending or any kind of spending at all for the common good. “The free market will fix all problems!” Nowhere in Rubio’s answer was there any acknowledgement that decades of Republican ideology has brought us children in Flint and many other places who have brain damage because of lead poisoning.

Establishment Doesn’t Understand Republican Base

The main attacks that Rubio and Cruz made on Trump were of the kind, “Trump would do things that might stop the children of Flint from being poisoned!” That isn’t a winning argument for the Republican base. They don’t care about Trump’s heresies, just as they don’t care about Reagan’s. They love the show. They love the idea that America is all powerful — largely because the base knows just how non-powerful it is. The audience applauded when Rubio said, “I don’t think that someone woke up one morning and said, ‘Let’s figure out how to poison the water system to hurt someone.'” Because the Republican base isn’t primarily made up of awful people. But the Republican establishment acts as though it were.

The Clean Water Act was enacted under Richard Nixon in 1972. But “moderate” Marco Rubio can’t even bring himself to make a clear argument that we must keep our water clean. Instead, he talked about how horrible it was that Democrats were saying things that Democrats are not saying. According to the establishment, the second worst thing that could happen to the party is that Donald Trump would become the nominee; the worst thing that could happen is that it would lose the election.

There is a huge divide in the Republican Party. The establishment should have learned by now that the Republican base just isn’t that into its policies. It was always the belligerence and the racism. It was never the tax cuts and lead-filled water.

Peter Beinart is a liberalish writer who makes me wonder about our country. He was born into his job. He had the right parents, went to the right schools, and then, of course, New Republic hired him because he was liberish writer who could depend upon to be a war cheerleader that Andrew Sullivan so loved. That doesn’t mean he’s stupid. Not at all, in fact. Intelligence is mostly a matter of environment, and Beinart has had a great environment. I’m just saying that he wouldn’t be a contributing editor at The Atlantic and no one would have published his mediocre books. I’m saying that he might be writing for struggling daily if he had been raised by retail clerks from the central valley.

But he does write interesting articles from time to time, like his article on the new new left. So I was excited to see he wrote an article, Why Liberals Should Vote for Marco Rubio. The base argument is that if you live in a state where you can vote for any party, you should vote for Rubio. I thought, “Great idea! Because Marco Rubio would be a terrible candidate!” But alas, that is not the argument that Beinart is making at all.

Peter Beinart’s “Common” Sense

One thing you can count on from Peter Beinart is that he will give you the common wisdom of the pundit elites. And that’s what we get here. We are supposed to believe that Trump is such a threat to America, that we must support Rubio. It’s funny that Beinart dismisses Trump being more liberal on the Iraq War, given that Beinart himself was very much in favor of the Iraq War until it all fell apart. He had to write a whole book about why he was wrong. But I guarantee that he hasn’t learned a damned thing, as I discussed before.

Peter Beinart argues that we should want Rubio over Trump because “Rubio respects the Constitution, and in particular, the Bill of Rights. Trump does not.” First, that isn’t at all clear. Should Trump win the presidency, he is going to learn what all new presidents learn: he doesn’t have as much power as he thinks he has. Governments are a whole lot more than their leaders. So how did Hitler take total control of Germany? How did Mussolini take total control of Italy? Both men had their own private militaries. Is Trump going to destroy the Bill of Rights with a barrage of nasty tweets?!

Oh, and Trump says the things out loud that the other Republican candidates only imply! Oh, what a difference that has made in our country! All those African Americans who are blown away by police each year don’t have to hear the n-word first! Yes, this is a good reason to support Rubio. Because it is clear that… Wait, it actually doesn’t make any sense at all.

But one thing is certain, according to Peter Beinart, “Once Trump is nominated, America will have crossed a line.” Really?! If that’s true, it’s an arbitrary line. He wrote, “A man who does not respect Constitutional limits and who preys upon vulnerable minorities will lead one of the two major parties.” I would say that applied to Ronald Reagan and there were plenty of liberals at the time who said the same thing. Each iteration of Republican gets worse. But if Trump is a new model, he’s Republican 3.01, not Republican 4.0. Beinart is basically saying that the Nazi Party would have been better in a fundamental sense, if they hadn’t said bad things about Jews, but still rounded them up and worked them to death.

The truth is that I basically agree with Peter Beinart’s conclusion. It’s just his logic that makes no sense. I think Marco Rubio is a political lightweight. He’s only reached the heights he has because he’s good at sucking up to the right people. I would look forward to seeing Rubio and Clinton on the stage in a debate. No reasonable person could see them together and conclude that Rubio is fit to run this country. Trump, on the other hand, is light on his feet. He is charismatic. Under the right circumstances, he could win.

But Peter Beinart’s idea that Rubio would be a better choice for America is one of the stupidest arguments I’ve heard in the last couple of years.