This Rush Limbaugh transcript is a very rich document, and requires more than one post by me, but let us focus on the distinction that Limbaugh makes between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Limbaugh admits that Trump is no conservative, but there are no conservative choices among the two major-party nominees. Limbaugh is correct, but this points toward two institutional weaknesses within conservatism.

The first weakness is that the loudest propagandists for smaller/limited/constitutional government did not play the roles of relentlessly attacking bigger-government demagoguery. Back in the 2000 campaign, John McCain had attacked George W. Bush from the left on taxes and other issues. I remember Limbaugh accusing McCain of “party borrowing” — using Democratic votes to win the primary when he knew those Democrats would come home in the general election.

George W. Bush was nobody’s idea of a small-government conservative, but he had never endorsed single-payer health care and Planned Parenthood. So he had that going for him. In this election cycle, the broadcast media treated Trump (a far less orthodox candidate than any who had seriously competed for the GOP presidential nomination since at least John Anderson) with either friendly neutrality (in the case of Limbaugh) or obsequiousness (in the case of Hannity). A principled conservative didn’t win the GOP nomination partly because the allegedly conservative broadcast media did not stand on conservative principle.

The second and, I think, more important weakness is that the political expression of conservatism has grown too abstract. It is interesting that Limbaugh contrasts Donald Trump’s child-care and family-leave proposal with Ted Cruz’s proposed 10 percent flat tax.

Say what you want about Trump, but the normal, everyday voter can name a bunch of Trump policies. He is for building a wall. He is (or was) for deporting all illegal aliens. He is (or was) for banning Muslim immigration. He is for punishing American companies that move production overseas. You can hate those policies or love them, but there they are. Cruz’s distinctive proposals were not nearly as well known or understood. The irony is that, if the public had better known and understood Cruz’s tax proposal, Cruz might have done worse in the contest for the nomination.

The problem is perhaps clearest on health care. Cruz loudly supported repealing Obamacare. Fair enough. When Cruz was asked what would happen to the people who lost their health insurance as a result of the repeal, Cruz said some stuff about tort reform, and about health-savings accounts, and about buying insurance across state lines. Strip away the rhetoric and his basic message was that people who lost their Obamacare health insurance weren’t going to be voting for Cruz. Trump’s answer that we weren’t going to let people “die in the streets” was better politics and better ethics. Cruz later worked in some rhetoric about waitresses and truck drivers, but it was disconnected from the rest of his message and from any agenda that might appeal to those wage earners.

My guess is that Trump probably would have been nominated even if the Limbaughs and the Hannitys had relentlessly pummeled him. The opportunism of the broadcasters was less destructive than the indifference of the politicians.