Yet this is a strange standard for a political party. The GOP campaign feels a little like an exercise in what the great social scientist Edward Banfield, in his classic study of a backward town in Italy in the 1950s, deemed “amoral famialism.”
Banfield described how each family’s focus on its own narrow interest made it impossible to build social trust. The rule was, “Maximize the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all others will do likewise.”
Certainly this has been Donald Trump’s M.O. throughout his business career — where he has extended no undue consideration to anyone outside the charmed circle of his family — and his politics has some of the same hallmarks.
The Trumps are reckless with the dignity of their supporters. They forced loyalists to go through ridiculous contortions to insist that there was no plagiarism in Melania’s speech, until finally issuing a mea culpa.
If his family has thrived at the convention, a party stalwart like Paul Ryan has struggled to fit in. The Speaker of the House gave an adorable speech from a warm-and-fuzzy alternate reality where Republican voters had endorsed latter-day Jack Kemp-style Republicanism this year.
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