The sad decline of Bobby Jindal

Perhaps the most embarrassing thing about the Trump phenomenon for conservatives is that it seems to confirm every caricature of the conservative movement that progressives make. That conservatism is not at all motivated by a belief in principles such as limited government, but by anger, resentment, and white identity politics, and that it is somehow in essence anti-intellectual. In a sense, it’s understandable that Jindal is now backing Trump, since, even as Trump embodies that caricature, Jindal seems to have come to believe it’s true.

After writing that the GOP needed to “stop being the stupid party,” Jindal changed tack, and seemed to believe that his ticket to the presidency was to run the most aggressively stupid campaign he could imagine. As a student, Jindal wrote a memoir on healthcare policy arguing that Catholic ethics required a healthcare system that provided universal coverage, even though as a conservative he believed such coverage should be provided along free-market lines. The best conservative ObamaCare alternatives cover as many people as the Affordable Care Act, while improving efficiency, consumer choice, and innovation. But all of a sudden Jindal blasted those plans as “ObamaCare-lite” and boosted his own politically suicidal and morally indefensible plan, which basically involved taking away people’s ObamaCare and replacing it with, essentially, a middle finger.