The Republicans are gone. They're now the re-born Know-Nothings

Yes, the Republican party died last night. The Party of Lincoln is now the Party of Trump- which is to say that it is no longer the Republican party at all, but the Know-Nothings brought up from hell and reborn.

Many of my friends are trying their best to rationalize voting for Trump as if nothing could possibly be worse than Hillary Clinton. But something can be. What is worse is losing our souls. What is worse is throwing in with an abomination like Donald Trump,  becoming time-servers and ideological eunuchs, out of a naive belief that there is anything we can trust Trump do or not do as president that we could not trust Hillary Clinton to do or not do-  or that, if Trump is elected, the conservative movement which, however badly damaged, would survive to oppose her would even be there anymore.

However we may kid ourselves that only a little has changed in the last 24 hours,  the fact is that everything has changed. The loser of the Indiana primary- and the race for the Republican nomination-  is, in the last analysis, the conservative movement Bill Buckley was instrumental in building.  It would be going too far to say that it is dead. But it no longer has a home in the Republican party, which is now the party of an alien ideology against which it fought valiantly n its early years.

Any hope of the conservative movement surviving the Trump putsch  depends on it divorcing itself from the party of Donald Trump and standing apart as itself, determined to remain true to itself with or without the party which has proven unworthy to encompass it.