A headline in the Washington Post – “The Democratic Establishment strikes back in the Acela primary” — emphasizes a dynamic that shapes this presidential primary season. When it comes to the Right, we have a political movement that carries around a political party but doesn’t necessarily think much of it; when Bill Buckley ran for office, he ran as a Conservative, not as a Republican, his real opponent being not the Democrat in the race but the Republican, John Lindsay. The Democrats are the opposite: a political party that carries around a portfolio of ideological tendencies and interest groups. Your Sandersnistas and Occupy types may have their temper tantrums, but they never do anything that would seriously damage the power or the cohesion of the party. They did so in the past, their radicalism getting ahead of their calculation, and that’s one of the reasons why Democrats have their “superdelegate” process, an antidemocratic measure upon which Republicans must be looking with some considerable degree of envy.
The thing about mass movements, though — and conservatism became mass movement somewhere along the way — is that they are fairly easy to distort and to hijack. It may or may not be the case that mass electorates cannot follow issues, but it unquestionably is the case that they do not do so. For conservatives, that has left us with a mass movement in which the touchstones are not issues or positions but celebrities. Donald Trump isn’t meaningfully conservative on any issue of any consequence (including, do note, immigration), but he has Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter in his corner, and for many people who think of themselves as conservatives and who vote in Republican primaries (at least this time) that is enough. Celebrity at the moment plays the role on the right that immigration politics plays on the left: We conservatives sometimes sneer when a progressive starts a sentence, “Well, as a gay disabled immigrant woman of color . . . ” but we have our version of that in the form of celebrity tribes: Mark Levin conservatives, Ann Coulter conservatives, Rush babies, etc.
Both of the parties are in decline as institutions, with the Republicans promising to reach the morgue first, a consequence of the party’s never having been as important to the Right as the Democratic party is to the Left. With such formal institutions in decay, what is filling the vacuum (and what will fill it more fully in the future) is celebrity, and celebrity that grows less and less attached to values, principles, ideology, philosophy, etc., by the day. The reason Donald Trump couldn’t run as a Democrat has almost nothing to do with his policy positions, but with his pop-culture affect. He’s the wrong flavor of cotton candy, though they do not object to cotton candy categorically.
But the candidacy of the game-show host who currently commands the nation’s attention may very well end up being a relatively mild indicator of what comes next.
We like to joke about Kanye 2020. We shouldn’t joke about that. In the so-called Acela primary, the Democratic establishment reasserted itself, and Republicans went enormously for Trump.