Commentary
It is one of the most bitter and tragic ironies of our contemporary politics that the leadership of one of America’s two major political parties, the Republican Party, utterly despises that party’s very own voting base.
The GOP elite’s scorn for its own voters has, at this point, been a long time in the making. The trend accelerated during the 2009–2011 rise of the Tea Party, a grassroots movement fueled by constitutionalism and anti-elite populism. The crustier elements of the Republican establishment ran as far away as possible from the Tea Party, and the 2012 presidential coronation of private equity plutocrat Mitt Romney effectively killed the movement. Four years later, the Republican establishment fought tooth-and-nail against presidential candidates Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the two candidates who most vociferously condemned the establishment’s myriad shortcomings; as an unsurprising corollary, Trump and Cruz fetched the most primary votes that cycle from actual rank-and-file Republican voters….