And now for the good news…

The crisis in the Republican Party is even worse than it looks

Josh Barro, Business Insider

Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for president, and this alarms ideological conservatives for several reasons:

1. They think he will lose badly to Hillary Clinton, perhaps so badly that Republicans lose control of both houses of Congress.

2. They are afraid that he will damage the brand of the Republican Party, making it harder to win future elections.

3. They believe that he lacks the temperament and character to serve as president.

These are all good reasons to be alarmed, but there is also a fourth reason for alarm that is perhaps the most alarming of all for conservatives: His nomination could signal the death of orthodox conservatism as one of the two main forces in American public policy, since he is running away with the nomination despite being exposed as a nonconservative.

Trump is the candidate who finally figured out how to exploit the fact that much of the Republican voter base does not share the policy preferences of the Republican donor class, and that it is therefore possible to win the nomination without being saddled with their unpopular policy preferences.

He will not be the last candidate to understand this.

(Continued here.)