Donald Trump steamrolled to more victories over his more established contenders for the Republican Party presidential nomination Tuesday night.
Wall Street Journal columnist and former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan said she was seeing the shattering of a once-great national party.
Canadians saw this movie a generation ago, as civil war broke out in the Progressive Conservative Party. By the time it was all over, more than a decade later, the party of John A. Macdonald, Canada's first prime minister, was gone, replaced by the Conservative Party, or more accurately the Harper Conservatives.
It's happening to the Republicans in much the same way and for many of the same reasons Canada's right-of-centre coalition fell apart.
The demise of the Progressive Conservatives came about in the late 1980s. Brian Mulroney had finally seized power and put the Pierre Trudeau era down permanently, but Mulroney's base was in Montreal and Toronto, not in Western Canada. Western Conservatives quickly came to despise Mulroney as Trudeau in all but name, just another smooth-talking elitist lawyer from Quebec who had all the time in the world for Bay Street and no time for Main Street. The disdain ran both ways, as Mulroney couldn't be bothered with those noisy Western hillbillies and told them that their only right-of-centre choice was him.
In America, the Washington and New York political and corporate power base in the Republican Party has been taking its rural, working class and evangelical Christian bases for granted for decades, also giving them no choice but to vote for the toe-the-line Republican candidates chosen for them from on high. The Tea Party threatened that old model and made substantial gains at the state and congressional levels but the national party apparatus remained squarely in the hands of the controlling interests.
Like Donald Trump, Preston Manning was dismissed by the Ontario political, corporate and media establishment for his populous brand of conservatism and his intolerance. Manning, in more polite but no less discriminatory language, had no problem fuelling anti-French and anti-aboriginal sentiments in Western Canada to build his base, along with a heaping dose of Western alienation.
Like the Mulroney Conservatives, modern Republicans have no one to blame but themselves for the demise of their party. Starting in the 1990s under Newt Gingrich, they became a group of petulant children whose only platform was to oppose everything Bill Clinton and then Obama wanted to do and to blindly support every dumb idea George W. Bush had, without listening to their grassroots supporters.
There are two main differences between what happened in Canada 25 years ago and what's happening today in the U.S. Manning was an unknown who needed to form a political party to change things. Trump, cashing in on both his fame and his wealth, is storming the gates singlehandedly, a one-man wrecking crew of American conservative values as they've been known since Reagan.
Secondly, and more significantly, Manning was a Western Canadian speaking for a Western Canada on the move, growing in economic and political clout but stifled by the stuffy Laurentian elite back east. Trump, on the other hand, is a New York billionaire speaking for a huge swath of American voters entirely unlike him, those left behind by an economy that shed millions of jobs in the service sector, in manufacturing and in construction since 2008. This group of people has seen their spending power decrease each year since Obama took power and their belief in the American dream shattered.
These folks like Trump because they want to be Trump.
They, too, would like to be wealthy and famous, with the power to call anyone who doesn't agree with them "losers" and to thumb their nose at the traditional elite. Trump's hutzpah and his cult of personality has crossed geographical, religious and even racial lines. If Trump goes toe-to-toe with Hillary Clinton for the presidency this fall, that message may resonate across political lines as well, as working-class Democrats find in the Donald the middle finger they've been dying to give New York and Washington.
Trump is now pounding on the gates, as Manning did a generation ago in Canada. Except Manning never held the levers of power because he couldn't sell himself or his message outside of the Western provinces. Trump, however, enjoys national support because he knows what he's selling and how to sell it.
And America appears to be in a buying mood.
