Maybe the smoke-filled room system worked

So it’s quite possible that the pessimists on the right are perfectly correct in their insistence that a conservative candidate will never be able to win another national election. But we’re not there yet. Nominating a candidate that for whatever reason half the electorate despises and upon whom they’ve already had their say is not a winning ticket in 2024; a Trump loss will prove nothing except that more people hate him than love him. The damage the more deranged Trump partisans have already done to Ron DeSantis in their hopeless quest to “reinstall” the former president may be terminal, although we won’t know until actual voting begins in the primaries next year.

Perhaps one solution, then, is to abandon primaries altogether and return to the days of the smoke-filled rooms, during which the pros and cons of each candidate can be weighed and judged by party elders and officials; after all, the U.S. was never meant to be a plebiscitary democracy, and a system that produced Lincoln and Grant ought not to have been discarded so lightly, especially when it has since given us Romney and McCain.

[Maybe, but I’m not sure that’s a cure either. Who elects the electors in that case, and would that be any different? Maybe, but I’m a bit pessimistic. Michael’s main point about intellectual grounding is well stated and clearly the best answer, as Michael himself makes clear. Too much of conservatism these days spends its time chasing celebrity or the Big Shortcut to Power, rather than do the hard work of philosophical structure and organization. — Ed]