In my most recent column, I wrote about the so far unsuccessful effort to bring in retired Marine general James Mattis as a Republican candidate for president, in place of the presumptive nominee, Donald Trump. I noted that Mattis says that national security matters are a “mess,” and that he doesn’t seem inclined to clean up the mess that President Obama has made.
But the Mattis bubble is indicative of another mess, too, of the domestic variety. When one of my law school buddies got named as managing partner of his law firm, he responded to my congratulations by pointing out that lawyers don’t put a 40-year-old man in charge because the firm is doing well.”
Likewise, the search for a general as savior is not an indication that things are going well for the Republican Party, or for the United States as a whole.
The Republicans began their primary season with what looked like a very strong field. But Republican primary voters didn’t warm to most of the candidates, mostly because they’ve been promised things and then let down by the Republican leadership again and again in the Obama era. (The ineffectuality of many GOP leaders has led some conspiracists within the party to speak darkly of blackmail and NSA spying, paranoid-sounding speculation that won’t be relieved by the Dennis Hastert affair.)
But whatever the reasons, real or imagined, the GOP leadership promised a lot to win votes, then didn’t deliver very much. On immigration in particular, it seemed that the establishment favored the donors over the voters to an extraordinary extent.
So the voters rebelled and backed Trump, who said things about immigration that no other candidate was willing to.
Now the GOP establishment, still not quite willing to back Trump, faces a dilemma. It can back Ted Cruz — who isn’t Trump, but who is actually likely to be more effective at dismantling Washington’s special interest/K Street structures, and who might actually shrink the federal government gravy train — or it can look elsewhere. Hence the move to bring in Mattis.
The effort to bring in Mattis as a savior for the GOP is based on several key assumptions: First, that Mattis might do it; second, that if he runs, he’ll get enough votes to win (or, if he runs as an independent, enough electors to throw the election into the House); and third, that if he’s president, he will be less of a threat to the powers-that-be than Trump or Cruz.
All of these are doubtful. Mattis doesn’t look very interested in running. He’s not very well-known among voters (Eisenhower, a similar choice, was much more famous). And if he wins, he might not be as manageable as they think.
But when you choose desperate strategies, it’s because the normal plans have failed. The GOP primary hasn’t turned up candidates that the establishment likes because, to put it simply, the establishment stinks. Voters have realized this, and are engaged in their own (perhaps equally desperate) search for alternatives.
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Had the GOP’s legislative and political giants not overpromised and had they made more efforts to enact the things they promised, they wouldn’t be in this situation. (Had Marco Rubio not been foolish enough to endorse an immigration plan backed by Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer, he might be the front-runner now). Had GOP voters been tougher on those leaders sooner, things might not have come to this pass.
So the GOP is desperately looking for a general to save them. But what worries me is that, as the country faces increasing problems, this may go from a perfectly legitimate (if desperate) electoral gambit to something else. When, as polls consistently show, the public has vastly more confidence in the military than in civilian government, perhaps the search for generals as saviors may go farther.
That sort of thing seldom ends well. But, as with parties, nations turn to generals for salvation when their existing leadership looks incompetent and corrupt, which is pretty much how ours looks now. It’s time for our political leaders to raise their game, before things take a worse turn.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.
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