The Republican party is cannibalizing itself.
As the primary season has dragged on (and on and on), an intuition that the Republican Party was shooting itself in the foot has become remarkably clear.
Let's not mince words—the current iteration of the Republican Party has been held hostage by the reactionary forces of the Freedom Caucus, and the party can't unite enough to fight back its extremist wing. Nowhere has that been more evident than this election cycle.
It's expected that Donald Trump would be selfish and self-aggrandizing. It's not much of a logical leap to see Ted Cruz acting that way, too. By all accounts and by virtue of his own actions, he's an individual that is overcome with ambition and power. I mean come on, most Republicans hate him. Former Speaker John Boehner called Cruz "Lucifer in the flesh."
Trump is a political outsider and demagogue. Cruz is a Freedom Caucus member. Both of them have behaved as one would expect—selfishly ambitious.
But the moderate wing of the Republican Party...they should be better than this. There was no excuse for the staggering number of Republicans that tossed their hat into the presidential ring (17, in case you lost track). Is the Republican Party so fractured that we needed seventeen different people to express all the different opinions?
No. The answer to that is no.
Some of the candidates had good experience and records to run on (Walker, Kaisch, Bush, Graham). Others, not so much (Carson, Fiona, Jindal). Regardless of their credentials, the end effect was the same--they cannibalized each other while Trump rose to the top.
Think about what happens when you go to the grocery store and there's two thousand different types of Oreos there. It's kinda hard to pick one! The more choices we have, the longer we take to make one.
Trump took full advantage of this. While the moderate, establishment Republicans were busy fighting amongst themselves for the Republican Base, Trump consolidated the angry, outsider vote. The moderate vote, split between 16 other choices, was inconsequential. I'm convinced that the angry, reactionary wing of the Republican Party doesn't outnumber the moderate wing--not when the moderate vote isn't split 16 different ways, at least.
Perhaps the Republican Party could learn something from the Democratic Party. They have two main candidates; the "establishment" Democrat and the "reactionary" Democrat. They offer different viewpoints, and the party has a clear choice as to which path they want to go.
Don't get me wrong, I think that healthy competition is good. If a candidate has a platform that is significantly different than everyone else in the race, they should run. This election cycle, for the Republicans at least, has been anything but healthy, and most everyone in the race believed the same basic things. If they had quit attacking each other and talked about their platforms, maybe they would've realized that.
It seems like working together is a completely foreign concept to the Republican Party.
Even now, with the party throwing the kitchen sink at Trump to try to stop him from reaching 1,237 delegates, they can't bring themselves to work together.
Kaisch and Cruz have an "alliance," splitting up the remaining states amongst themselves depending on who has a greater chance to win...but they won't tell their supporters to vote for the other guy!
Kaisch, for example, is pulling out of Indiana. He will no longer campaign there. He's basically giving up in that state. There's no point in his supporters voting for him--he won't win. If he and Cruz were really working together, Kaisch would tell his guys to vote for Cruz. But he won't!
It's this type of attitude that has doomed the Republican Party this election cycle. There is no personal sacrifice for the good of the party. There's only selfish ambition, even if it means handing the presidency to Trump or Clinton.
If that happens, Republicans will have no one to blame but themselves.
