IT'S NOT EASIER TO ABOLISH THE PEOPLE AND ESTABLISH A NEW ONE.

Dan "Baseball Crank" McLaughlin weighs in on the continuing tussle among traditional Republicans who want the Trumpian populists to get back in line.

In particular, if a strategy of waging these fights in the primaries is unsuccessful, it necessarily follows that an organized movement to abandon Trumpist candidates in the general election will also fail to persuade primary voters. At the end of the day, the problem with this or that election may be the candidates, the party establishment, the donors, the mainstream and ideological media, or simply the circumstances; but if the direction of the party persists over time and is validated repeatedly in party primaries, then the problem is with the voters. Jonah, in fact, acknowledges that dynamic when discussing why Bill Kristol’s approach to fusion with the Democrats won’t work: Kristol’s approach to Democratic Party elites cannot overcome the messages that Democratic politicians get from Democratic voters.

Call me old school, but I think of the voters as principals and the parties as agents, and if Democrat politicians are most responsive to messages from the wokest, or most dependent, if you will, of their voters, and Republican politicians are most responsive to messages from voters relatively new to Republican voters, then maybe it's time for those party professionals who keep losing to change their message and their appeals.  "We talk a lot about the value of majority rule in a democracy, and we talk a lot about political principle, but you can never have a pure commitment to both, because majorities do not have principles; or at any rate, any principle shared by a majority is unlikely to be contested."  I call that the aggregation problem of democracy, but in that aggregation problem there might be more than one way to obtain a governing majority of agents for some majority or near majority of the principals, who, recall, are the voters.

The way out of illiberalism within the Republican Party will have to come from listening to the party’s own voters, persuading them anew of the merits of the liberal order, and giving them a fair share of what they want rather than holding them hostage.

As to Jonah [Goldberg’s] broader concern about the relative priority of cleaning up our own side versus fighting the other side: I confess that I do continue to see illiberalism within the Republican Party as a survivable event and a reversible process; illiberalism within the Democratic Party has already won, and empowering it tends to produce permanent harm. Ask yourself how many liberal and progressive victories in the courts, in the culture, or in the budget are ever reversed.

It takes time, and sometimes the Democrats have to see how the administrative state doesn't work. Consider Edward Kennedy on airline deregulation or Harley Staggers sunsetting the Interstate Commerce Commission or the end of welfare as we know it, at least for a while.