(Sipa via AP Images)
Day Three of Donald Trump's convention has come and gone, and we have already seen two unplanned disruptions the likes of which hadn't visited the GOP since its uproarious Goldwater Convention of 1964. On Monday afternoon, Ted Cruz's delegates booed and shouted so loudly after they lost their fight to change the convention rules that the party chairman left the stage and the proceedings ground to a halt. Last night, as it became clear that Cruz would not conclude his speech to the delegates with a Trump endorsement, Trump's delegates all but booed him off the stage.
Maybe this is what happens when Republicans abruptly shift course, as they did in '64 and as they're doing today. When the GOP takes a radically new direction, all hell breaks loose.
In '64, a party that had been dominated by moderate Eastern elites, friendly to civil rights and even resigned to living with unions, personified by such big-spending governors as Nelson Rockefeller (of New York), George Romney (Michigan) and William Scranton (Pennsylvania), was upended by the triumph of Barry Goldwater. The Arizona senator had voted against the Civil Rights bill earlier that year, railed against government and unions, cozied up to Southern segregationists, and declined to denounce far-right conspiracy theorists who believed that many of the nation's leading centrists were actually Communist agents.
But it was Goldwater's delegates who made the convention truly memorable, howling at every mention of the establishment, Washington, and intellectuals, and exhibiting a visceral, menacing hostility to the media. (NBC's John Chancellor was shoved off the convention floor by irate delegates, some of whom said the networks were spreading Moscow's line.) Delegates voted down a measure declaring the party's support for the Civil Rights Act, and a Rockefeller's resolution to denounce extremism. As Rockefeller spoke to the convention, the delegates erupted in boos and catcalls-much as they did last night when Cruz pointedly declined to support Trump.
Cruz's heresy came in a cause a good deal less noble than Rockefeller's. He obviously calculated that if Trump loses, he'll be the candidate best positioned to pick up the pieces, the guy who stood on principle-unlike Marco Rubio, Scott Walker and other losing White House hopefuls who knuckled under. (Jeb Bush and John Kasich also declined to endorse, but they're not likely to seek the presidency again.)
Cruz's is a risky calculation in two ways: First, he may have estranged so much of the party's base that he undercut his future prospects. Second, Trump may win, in which case Cruz would do well to seek another line of work. On the other hand, Cruz is still a hero to many in the party's ultra-right wing, though this year's primaries have made clear that what the right craves most is the tough talk and thuggishness that Trump provides.
Cruz's decision not to endorse likely wasn't purely a matter of calculation, however. In the course of the campaign, after all, Trump tweeted an unflattering photo of Cruz's wife and accused his father of involvement in President Kennedy's assassination. These are the kinds of things that just might deter a guy from endorsing the perpetrator for the office of president.
The similarities between '16 and '64 aren't confined to the spontaneous disruptions.
These are the two conventions in which an air of barely suppressed violence, of sulfurous hatred, suffused the proceedings. The Goldwater delegates were raging at the three-decade run of the New Deal Order, which persisted straight through the presidency of Republican Dwight Eisenhower, at the media and intellectual elites who furthered its values, and at the African Americans who were claiming rights previously reserved for whites. The Trump delegates are raging at the displacement of working-class and petty-bourgeois whites (white men, particularly) from their place at the center of American politics and identity (never, however, at the center of American power-that was never a working-class or petty-bourgeois affair), and at the intellectual and media elites who are favorably disposed to the immigrants, minorities and women who are doing some of the displacing.
Convention speakers who've attacked the media have won a huge response from the delegates, but attacking the media has been the surest GOP applause line all the way back to '64. What's new this time around is the vehemence of the attack on the Democrats' presumptive nominee, the kind of violent rhetoric that, mercifully, has surfaced only occasionally in American political history: the GOP's '64 convention, the George Wallace presidential campaigns, the rhetoric of the South in the years leading up to the Civil War. That's the language, the violence, that Donald Trump has brought back to American politics in 2016, and we'll learn tonight whether it will be text or subtext as he accepts his party's nomination for president of the United States.
