Why?, part 2

 In my last post, I wrote about the rise of Donald Trump.  In this post, I'll consider his return after being defeated in 2020.  This question hasn't gotten much attention, because people just assume that he has an unbreakable hold on the Republican "base."  I don't think this is true (see this post), but in a sense it doesn't matter, because Republican elites never tried to break it.  Although Trump did have opponents for the 2024 nomination, they rarely ventured to criticize him, until Nikki Haley in the waning days of her campaign,  

The third Republican debate (Nov 18, 2023) began with a question from the moderators:  "Speak to Republican voters who are supporting Donald Trump. why should you and not him be the Republican nominee to face Joe Biden a year from now?"  Ron DeSantis started by criticizing the Biden administration.  He then turned to Trump:  "He owes it to you to be on this stage and explain why he should get another chance. He should explain why he didn’t have Mexico pay for the border wall, he should explain why he racked up so much debt."  Nikki Haley also started by talking about the Biden administration, and then said "Everybody wants to talk about President Trump. Well, I can talk about President Trump. I can tell you that I think he was the right president at the right time. I don’t think he’s the right president now. I think that he put us $8 trillion in debt and our kids are never going to forgive us for that." Vivek Ramaswamy criticized the "Republican establishment" and the media, but didn't mention Trump.  Chris Christie spent most of his time talking about the general state of the world, but finally got to Trump:  "Anybody who’s going to be spending the next year and a half of their life focusing on keeping themselves out of jail and courtrooms cannot lead this party or this country, and it needs to be said plainly."  Tim Scott criticized the "radical left" but didn't mention Trump.  The final question of the debate was "I’ll ask you each to please use your closing statement to focus on any topic you didn’t have time to address and why you and not former President Trump would be the party’s best choice to tackle these important issues."  None of them mentioned Trump, although DeSantis did work up the courage to say "I’ll be a nominee that will be able to win the election."  That is, none of them made much of a case against Trump, and none of them (except DeSantis in a veiled way) raised the obvious issue:  that he had lost the 2020 election, and lost by a pretty large margin, to a weak candidate.  Or going back farther, that he had trailed another weak candidate by 3,000,000 votes in 2016.   There were other obvious lines of attack that they missed--he not just failed to get Mexico to pay for the border wall, he didn't build a border wall.  

I've also noted that Trump jumped out to a lead in endorsements as soon as he announced, and his lead grew as the race picked up.  So Republican officials put up very little opposition to his return.  Why?  One factor is that increased partisanship means increased focus on party unity:  being seen as divided is bad for a party, and breaking with the party, even to take a popular position, doesn't help an individual candidate as much as it once would have--Democrats may like you more than they did before, but they'll still vote for the Democrat.  So Republican officials hoped that Trump would just fade away once he was no longer the center of media attention.  A second factor is that American conservatism has an oppositional tradition.  In European countries, conservatism was aligned with the establishment--monarchy, aristocracy, established church--which didn't exist in the United States.*  American politics didn't really get aligned on a left-right basis until the 1930s, when the right was in opposition.  Also, a substantial part of conservative support came from Southern whites--the side that was defeated in the Civil War.**  So conservatives see themselves as insurgents rather than part of the establishment, and this sense has become stronger over the last few decades.    Republicans who were opposed to Trump didn't see it as their job to stop his return--it was the job of Democrats and "liberal elites."  For example, in October 2024, Bret Stephens had a column about how the Democrats were in danger of "falling short in a race against a staggeringly flawed, widely detested opponent."  If they did, the "main culprit" would be "the way in which leading liberal voices in government, academia and media practice politics today."  But that raises the question of why the Republicans nominated "a staggeringly flawed, widely detested candidate."  Stephens didn't address that question in his column, but I think he did in previous columns, and once again it was the fault of the liberals:  indictments and other attempts to discredit Trump drove Republican voters back into his arms.  In any case, some prominent conservatives made that argument and, as far as I know, none have offered an alternative explanation.  

*Seymour Martin Lipset made this point in his writings of the 1950s and 1960s.

**Conservatives didn't necessarily support white supremacy, but white supremacists appealed to conservative values of individual property rights and state and local government autonomy.