How Does the Party Decide if it Can't Make Up it's Own Mind?

You could say that the theory that the party decides has taken a real hit in this election.

http://www.amazon.com/Party-Decides-Presidential-Nominations-American-ebook/dp/B002TYZMBW/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1458296064&sr=1-1&keywords=the+party+decides

Chris Hayes made the point last night that parties are not democracies but private clubs. This was regarding the question of whether Trump will be the nominee.

I actually don't think the party decides theory has done so bad if you look at the Democrats. They were able to beat back Bernie Sanders very effectively. That's what parties are supposed to be able to do.

In 2012, the congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein wrote a column for the Washington Post diagnosing what they saw to be the central problem in modern American politics.

"The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics," they wrote. "It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

"When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges."

"The op-ed hit like a bomb. Mann and Ornstein were institutionalists with wide respect in both parties — Ornstein, in fact, worked (and still works) for the conservative American Enterprise Institute. For them to call out one party as "the core of the problem" in American governance was to violate all the rules of polite Washington society. Their diagnosis was controversial at the time, to put it lightly."

"It is obviously correct now."

"This week, it became clear that the Democratic Party will nominate Hillary Clinton — a politician about as mainstream in her beliefs and methods as you will find in American politics. It also became clear that the Republican Party is overwhelmingly likely to nominate Donald Trump — a man who is, by any measure, "ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of [his] political opposition."

"To put it differently, the Democratic Party, for better or worse, is practicing politics as usual. The Republican Party is embracing what David Brooks calls "antipolitics": leaders with "no political skills or experience" who are "willing to trample the customs and rules that give legitimacy to legislative decision-making if it helps them gain power."

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/3/17/11254506/republican--democratic-parties-garland

The takeaway is that the Dems are a functioning, healthy party and the GOP is not.

So we have to revise the party decides theory a little: a healthy party decides.

The GOP is not a healthy party. You can tell this by the fact that it can never make up its own mind about anything. That was the problem with the Boehner years and it's the problem with this campaign.

Regarding Trump it's like every other problem before the GOP: it can't make up its mind.

There is the stop Trump movement. But if you listen to them, you already see why it won't work:

"A secretive group of Republican operatives and conservative leaders convened Thursday morning for more than three hours to discuss ways to unite the right against Donald Trump, with a presentation about the feasibility of mounting a third-party challenge as well as extensive deliberations about whether a coalition of anti-Trump forces could prevent the billionaire mogul from securing the party's presidential nomination at the July convention in Cleveland."

"It's certainly not too late," Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) said as he left the session. "You could get another party on the ballot. A candidate could be picked as late as August. … It would have to be a movement conservative.”

"I was there to listen," Franks, a supporter of Trump rival Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), added. "I am worried about the kind of damage that Trump could cause to our party. … As a conservative, I can’t trust Donald Trump to do the right thing. However, I can trust Mrs. Clinton to do the exact wrong thing. Therefore, if it comes down to a one-on-one contest, I would vote for Trump."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/03/17/gop-operatives-conservative-leaders-meet-to-thwart-trump/

How do you both vow to stop Trump and to vote for him in the same sentence? As Robert Costa noted last night on Chris Hayes, a lot of the real opposition Trump is getting is from movement conservative types. 

Their outrage is that he has stepped all over their ideological sacred cows and gotten away with it. For years, these conservative pundits and ideologues have had the power to decide who is a True Conservative and who isn't. Kind of like Bernie tried set himself up as the True Progressive who decides who is and isn't a TP. 

But with the rise of Trump that's been totally upended-ie, the Glenn Becks, the Erick Ericksons of the world. Trump has take away all their power.