Well … damn. Some guy at Vox is busy pointing-out that Albert Mohler et. al. aren’t — What do you know? — kingmakers after all.
You can’t be a kingmaker if you don’t actually command voters
That’s put religious conservative leaders in an awkward position. Some, like Falwell, were already on board with Trump’s New Rightism — or at least appalled by the unequivocal support for abortion that they associate with Hillary Clinton.
Many of them have followed the lead of the voters and endorsed Trump, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Ted Cruz was a latecomer to the Trump Train, but has campaigned on his behalf; Vander Plaats, meanwhile, says he’s voting for Trump but stresses he’s “not going to be a lapdog,” sounding more than anything like some of the highest-profile Democratic endorsers of Bernie Sanders.
Right. After all, I was on that months ago.
The evangelical leadership are not kingmakers. The next time any of these hot dogs presumes to go to somebody like Mitch McConnell, say, and tell him he has to do this or do that if he wants the evangelical vote, McConnell is going to laugh in his face. Good. Laughter is all they deserve from grown-ups.
The Evangelical Right is dead as a political influence; their support for Trump has revealed who they actually are and, as in the case of Trump himself, decent people have seen enough. Cartoon characters like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz will continue to make an appearance at the Values Voters summit, and Tony Perkins will continue to be able for a while to summon reporters, but the coverage will be deeper in the newspaper and eventually become a footnote everywhere except at Web sites like Life News.
They have committed suicide, and they’re done. They have showed with Donald Trump that their values and principles actually amount to no more than tarted-up malice.
The more interesting question is this: Can a pragmatic, realistic, forward-looking Burkean Conservatism be restored on what remains of the Republican Party? If the few men of character in its leadership had responded properly when the Access Hollywood tape leaked a few weeks ago, that might have been possible. Now that opportunity is gone forever, and the whole party is almost certainly going to go down in flames with the Trump dirigible.
We need a new conservative party.