An exchange with a Republican delegate observed on Facebook today, July 15, 2016:*

Melanie Sturm to Tom Krannawitter

Professor Krannawitter, I’m interested in your historian’s view on the #FreeTheDelegates movement that is gaining momentum.

Should delegates in Cleveland overturn the democratic primary process by selecting someone other than Donald Trump, is there justification? Are there historical precedents for such “anti-democratic” behavior in America?

Tom Krannawitter

I’m at my son’s baseball tournament, Ms. Melanie Sturm, so I have to be brief.
Bottom line: It’s hard to imagine a brand with less credibility than “Republican.”

Suppose the convention ditches Trump for some “conservative.” Maybe a Ted Cruz. Or pick any other.

Would such a move attract the vote of one liberal or one Democrat?

Would such a move cause millions of registered Republicans who voted for Trump in the primaries to ditch the Republican Party?

I don’t think most Republicans realize how close their party is to evaporating politically and disappearing forever. But reflecting on the questions posed above help illuminate that reality.

The Republican Party today really has become what the Whig Party was in the 1850s: It stands for nothing except being a power-hungry opposition to the Democratic Party.

If one doubts this, just consider: Pick any issue, and one finds prominent Republicans on both sides — big gov’t, small gov’t, pro private property, plunderers of private property, pro-independent regulatory agencies, anti-regulatory agencies, high tariffs, low tariffs, pro free trade, anti free trade, pro-Constitution, no idea what the Constitution is or means, etc, etc, etc.

In principle, that is identical to the Whig Party as it became increasingly irrelevant to the most pressing problems of the day.

Melanie Sturm

I get your disfavor of the Republican Party and share it, alas. But do we delegates (and I am one) throw our hands up in surrender?

With such a weak and dangerous democrat nominee, isn’t there an urgency to save the nation from President Hillary, thereby starting the process of reviving the Republican party by nominating someone who is willing and able to defend the principles (especially equality under the law) upon which it was founded? Wouldn’t Abraham Lincoln want that?

If conscience-voting delegates can replace Trump with someone whose character and governing experience contrasts with Clinton, isn’t that the first step on the road to reviving the party? Someone who could attract voters who say she is untrustworthy and who are repelled by her banana republic-like monitizing of public service? Someone who could argue that the American ideal that no one is above the law must prevail in this election?

We are where we are, and there’s no turning back. I infer from your comment that the “party is over,” so it may well not matter what delegates do in Cleveland. But I ran (and won) on a platform to help the Republican Party* recover its bedrock constitutional and economic freedom principles so it can better represent its voters. That’s why I support the #freethedelegates movement and hope we prevail, despite the anticipated backlash to what’s perceived as an anti-democratic and unfair “coup.”

That’s why I’m reaching out to you for some historical perspective (and argumentation) because this convention could be among the nation’s most historic….that’s the goal for which I’m hoping and ?.

Tom Krannawitter

Serious question Melanie Sturm: How does what you propose differ from what conservative think tanks, conservative magazines, conservative policy organizations, and the rest of the conservative movement have been doing the last seven decades?

Stated differently: What is the conservative movement? What does conservatism mean? And what is the relationship, if any, between the conservative movement and the Republican Party?

Melanie Sturm

It differs a lot because it’s action, not talk. Nominating someone who can unite (most) of the party and make a compelling case against Clinton and for constitutionalism is very different from the hot air vented by the movement you call “conservative.”

Also, notice I didn’t use the world conservative. It has been sullied and twisted out of all recognition. That’s why I’m using terminology like “equality under the law” because it is widely understood and accepted as an American ideal.

Tom Krannawitter

Will someone “unite (most) of the party and make a compelling case against Clinton and for Constitutionalism” with speech? How does that differ from what you call “hot air?”

Further, where are we to find someone who has mastered the ideas of the Founding, the ideas of freedom, and knows how to market those ideas effectively to modern Americans who don’t know about those ideas nor do they think they care?

Melanie Sturm

The “non-hot-air” action would be a vote by the delegates for an open convention and then for a nominee other than trump.

It’s my premise — and you are free to disagree — that 2-term governors like Scott Walker, Nicky Haley or Mitch Daniels would be far better than Trump at uniting the party and making the arguments for freedom and constitutionalism, based on their records (while not perfect).

And yes, I think enough of the general electorate detests Hillary that a quality non-Trump nominee could prevail.

Tom Krannawitter

Ms. Melanie Sturm, please help me understand: More votes were cast in Republican primaries for Donald Trump than any other 2016 Republican Presidential candidate.

In fact, I believe Donald Trump received more primary votes than any Republican Presidential candidate ever — in the entire history of the Republican Party, going back to its origins in 1854 and its opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Trump received something like 13.5 million popular primary votes, if memory serves, a number no Republican has ever matched or exceeded in any primary election for any race, ever.

And you are suggesting that replacing the candidate for whom 13.5 million (mostly) Republicans voted, with a candidate you think is superior (who’s not much different than any run-of-the-mill conservative, whether we use that label or something else), will UNITE the Republican Party?

I truly need help understanding how an un-democratic substitution of a democratically chosen Presidential nominee will unite a political party that has almost no public credibility and is already dissolving.

Melanie Sturm

With the “conscience clause” losing in the Rules committee tonight, this may well be a moot discussion. Also, to be clear, the two options — bind the delegates to Trump or unbind them and let them vote their conscience — both have potential downsides for the party and the nation. You describe the downside to the second, but there’s a potential downside to the first too.

My son is at space camp in Huntsville, Alabama where the running joke is: “If Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are in a fatal car accident, who lives? Answer: America.” According to a new AP/Gfk poll, eight of ten Americans don’t merely prefer one candidate to another, they are actually scared of one or both of the candidates.

But to answer your points, while it’s true that Trump got a record 13.4 million votes in the primary, Hillary got 15.9 million. It’s also true that Trump’s 44% plurality of support by the end of the primaries is the weakest showing of a Republican nominee in modern history — Romney had 52%, McCain 48% and Bush 61%. In other words, in 2016 more votes were cast for someone other than the presumptive nominee than ever before, yet according to the RNC rules, Trump still got a disproportionate 62% of the delegates. The primary system is clearly not working….a subject for another day.

Also, the reason more votes were cast in 2016 in the Republican primaries is because a record number of Democrats voted in them, and because the primary season lasted into May, bringing out more voters in states that were irrelevant in prior election years, like Indiana.

Finally, I’m going to attempt to venture into your wheelhouse: The Founding Fathers rejected the notion of “vox populi, vox dei.” As James Madison wrote in Federalist 10, one advantage of a representative republic over direct democracy is that representation may “refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.”

Hence, the duty of a delegate is not simply to reflect public opinion (or be a rubber stamp on a beauty contest), but to find a way to “refine and enlarge” it, by aggregating the diverse views of the people into a final judgment that serves their interests better.

So according to Madison, the delegates are within their rights — indeed have the moral obligation — to nominate someone who they think can win in November, which is afterall the real role of the convention.

What I’m suggesting is that allowing the delegates to vote their conscience is not only honorable, it’s consistent with our founding values. If delegates think Trump is the right choice, they can still vote for him and should he win a majority, he has all the more legitimacy. But if they do not think he’s the right choice, they should not feel morally bound to vote for him. The delegates responsibility above all else is to the well being of the Republican party, and having a viable Republican party as a counterpoint to the Democrat party is in the national interest.

Tom Krannawitter

There’s much to be said in response to your comment, Melanie Sturm. But rest assured, in Federalist #10 Mr. Madison most certainly was not talking about delegates of a private organization to its national private convention.*

Also, one ought to read #10 as well as all the early essays in light of the later essays in The Federalist Papers — which is where one finds the gritty, hard teaching of self government. Based on what Madison argues in #57 alone — regarding citizens who allow their chosen agents in government to pass laws that apply to citizens while exempting the agents in government — Americans are no longer suited for the experiment of mixing freedom and self government.

The Federalist Papers were written for a people who had a century and a half of personal experience living and dying by the own efforts, without any parental or nanny or shepherd or “leader” figure around to offer (allegedly) free stuff.

Our situation today is strikingly different. Which is why we must think, speak, write, and act differently if freedom is to have a future in the United States of America.

Tom Krannawitter

In this case, the teacher who provides the most illumination is not Madison. It’s Tocqueville.

Tocqueville predicted with incredible prescience exactly what would happen in the modern hyper-Christian-egalitarian-democratic world when claims of superior wisdom bump up against the irresistible, relentless, flattening heavy presses of “democracy.”

Melanie Sturm

I respect your scholar’s take Tom Krannawitter on the trends that brought us to this moment, and your disdain for the consequence – a hollowed-out Republican Party. I share your frustrations and have catalogued them over the years in my Think Again column.

I think it’s remarkable — and a commentary on our dramatically unsettled electorate — that such an outsider and Republican Party critic is a national delegate to the party’s convention where I also won election as a committee member.

Now I’m struggling with my #1 goal: how best to avert a Hillary Clinton presidency, which would accelerate the lamentable “fundamental transformation” of America, chiefly by proving that Americans no longer uphold the tenet of equality under the law.

Giving Americans a better choice than the even more disfavored Trump – recognizing all the downsides of replacing him at the convention after a vote of no-confidence — is one way to avoid the “Clinton Crime Family” back in the White House.

I thank you for this dialogue, which has been instructive to me.

Tom Krannawitter

Melanie Sturm, to be clear: Hillary Clinton is a deeply immoral, wicked human being.

Even worse: her pathologies are not confined to the personal sphere, and she’s no petty criminal. When she harasses others, controls others, works to make the lives of others worse, steals, lies, or ignores people who desperately need her help, she does all of that by using government’s monopoly on legalized force.

The very thing that is supposed to keep people safe and protect persons and private property — government! — Hillary Clinton uses to harm persons and steal personal property.

Which is worse: A man who sexually harasses and abuses and possibly rapes women? Or the woman who protects that man by destroying the lives of those victims — using every government power, formal and informal, at her disposal! — simply so she can continue her own political ambition of controlling other human beings?

I don’t know the answer. I know only that they’re both very bad.

I, however, do not view Hillary Clinton as the beginning or cause of a new bad trend in the United States. I see Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and other prominent American socialists as a symptom of the political pathology originally called “progressivism” that emerged from American colleges, universities, and churches more than a century ago. A small number of academic and theological experts offered to give people free stuff in exchange for total control over their lives, and many of the people accepted the offer. That’s how FDR came to be elected President not once, not twice, not three times, but four times.

So this process has been at work for a long time now. It’s fruits are the millions of citizens who think themselves to be sophisticated if they can provide additional justifications to demand more government power and regulatory control over our lives. The result of progressivism is an American population who believe firmly that only increased government supervision of our lives follows any discussion of education, health care, medicine, technology, poverty, the environment, guns, or even government corruption and cronyism.

Think about it: Even when the subject is government officials taking bribes and accepting crony deals to help some Americans by hurting others, what’s the American response? Further government restrictions on what citizens may say and how citizens may spend their own money — rather than criminalizing the immoral, unjust actions of those in government!

We have much work to do. If you can keep Hillary Clinton from the levers of government power, I’m sure the gods of freedom will smile on you for your effort. At the same time, Hillary Clinton is neither the beginning nor the end of the American tragedy of free people freely choosing to give away their freedom.

And if my teaching has any influence, that tragedy will be dramatically interrupted by a great freedom revival. That is my goal.

Tom Krannawitter

This might be the end of the Republican Party.

And let us remind ourselves of two important facts:

A political party is a wholly private organization. A party is no part of the Constitutional design of government, nor does a party have any constitutional standing.*

Also, if this be the demise of the Republican Party, and if that demise involves Mr. Donald Trump, then it also involves the more than thirteen million Americans who voted for him in primaries.

I understand there was much crossover voting. I get that. Still, many Republicans voted for Trump. Many. And why did they do so? Look to the Republican Party ever since the New Deal and the history of the conservative movement during the same time period, and there you’ll start to find answers.

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* Italics mine.

Useful Republican quislings are missing the big picture – the big TV picture that is – coming to screens everywhere a month from now. The lead stories will be the Cleveland riots, and the betrayed Republican demographics, in that order. The convention will be reported in the worst possible light the media can economically provide, and those lead stories are already scripted and practically in the can. All that remains is to stage the show.

Meanwhile, the Republican quisling intelligencia obsess on their higher purpose of ferreting out the ideal candidate that they somehow overlooked through all of the primary festivities. This is denial on a grand scale – a scale unfortunately matched by the Left, who perpetuate denial about major destructive human behaviors such as abortion, nihilism, socialism, and jihadism.

The Right seem intent on proving to the world an equal capacity for denial in order to compete with the Left, where the Right should be planning to prevent the riot, and affirm their own voting base who’ve already expressed a candidate preference.

Those would actually be bona fide responses to the problem set presented by the Left in this election cycle – responses that could build trust in Republican leadership and expose the poverty of Leftist alternatives.

But Republican leadership has, evidently, already concluded that televising a Republican war zone complete with a rebel faction of betrayed loyalists all over the country would be more in their interest.

One has to wonder if the screenwriters for this fiasco live in Denver. Stay tuned….