Will Donald Trump follow through on his promise to boycott Thursday's Fox News debate? Will he instead proceed with his own media event?
Will the number of Fox News' viewers really plummet from 24 million "to, you know, 2 million viewers," as predicted by Trump campaign "manager" Corey Lewandowski? By now does Roger Ailes regret having written You Are the Message, a grinding 200-page instruction manual on (relish the irony) how to "be yourself" — something which Trump took up straightaway, but to which Ailes himself has been a bit slow on the uptake?
I don't know and, except for the appropriate shareholders, few should care. For one's entertainment dollar is smartly invested in the much larger spectacle of a major political party having gone to absolute hell. Trump's boycott of, or eleventh-hour participation in, Thursday's debate is but a single line in the riveting historical tome of the GOP's self-immolation. This dog of a party has finally caught the car. The NY Times:
"Obviously we would love all of the candidates to participate," said Sean Spicer, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, "but each campaign ultimately makes their own decision what’s in their best interest." The tepid response was the latest instance in which the party has tried not to antagonize Mr. Trump, even as he engages in behavior that many Republican donors and operatives and some committee members consider destructive.
For decades the Republican Party has danced this symmetrical ballet of top-down/bottom-up and bottom-up/top-down radicalization; it has tried not to antagonize the base even while persisting in antagonizing the base — all in the increasingly difficult struggle to turn out the withering demographics of white-ethnic prejudice and religious bigotry. The decaying establishment has fed and then refed the base the vilest yet most emotionally satisfying of know-nothingisms as a political platform, which has only made the base hungry for more. The cultivated base demands it, and so the party obliges — because it must.
Modern Republicanism has been a decades-long and dangerous experiment in unsupervised populism. It's an electoral microcosm of everyman democracy coddled by elitist demagoguery, both of them fueled by richer and richer grades of outward-directed antagonisms. Now the establishment itself is captive to the greatest demagogue since Democracy's Huey Long. FDR could always outflank Long by moving to the left, which he did in 1935. The GOP establishment, however, possesses no room on its right to outflank Trump, for it gobbled that up in its decades-long propitiation of populist fanaticism.
So now it must issue no more than a "tepid response" to virtually any sordid act by Mr. Trump, so as "not to antagonize" him.
In this hellish spectacle of GOP's immolation, the dog has finally caught the car — although we on the sidewalks can no longer tell which is which.