RUTHFULLY YOURS

Marco Rubio’s speech suspending his campaign after his crushing loss in the Florida primary was a requiem for an entire style of Republican politics.

Rubio represented an upbeat, opportunity-oriented vein in the GOP that ran through George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism back to the late supply-sider Jack Kemp, who practically made a civic religion out of optimism and inclusivity.

Donald Trump has grabbed this Kempian tradition by the collar and frog-marched it from the room with all the delicacy of one of his security guards ejecting a troublesome protester from a rally.

Kemp, a former pro quarterback who was a congressman from Buffalo for years, was the chief proponent of the Reagan tax cuts. To read the recent biography of him by journalists Fred Barnes and Morton Kondracke, Jack Kemp: The Bleeding-Heart Conservative Who Changed America, is to be struck by Kemp’s touching naiveté by the standards of the 2016 GOP race.

Kemp eschewed personal attacks and opposed negative campaigning. He believed “the purpose of politics is not to defeat your opponent as much as it is to provide superior leadership and better ideas.” And the central idea was, always and everywhere, tax cuts.

Kemp wanted the GOP to be a “natural home of African-Americans.” He favored openhandedness on immigration. He cared deeply about the plight of the urban poor, and about what he called — long before Jeb Bush — “the right to rise.”

In foreign policy, he was a friend of freedom and stalwart advocate of human rights.

Kemp influenced the debate and a generation of conservatives, but his own flaws as a highly undisciplined candidate and the monomania with which he hewed to his ideas limited him as a candidate at the national level.

But Kempism lived on in George W. Bush, whose compassionate conservatism was latitudinarian on immigration and sought to win over minorities by softening conservatism’s edges.

Bush’s foremost domestic achievement was an enormous tax cut, and his Freedom Agenda was a Kemp-like advocacy of human rights on steroids.

Like the eye of a hurricane, Donald J. Trump almost magically keeps himself at the very center of attention, no matter what chaos surrounds him. This phenomenon and the relentless and exhausting drama of the Democratic and GOP presidential primaries largely have kept the eyes of the world off Hillary Clinton and the increasingly ominous developments in the E-mailgate scandal. Despite the former secretary of state’s impressive ballot-box victories, her ethical woes multiply.

The number of classified e-mails on Clinton’s private computer server totals 2,115. At her initial March 10, 2015, news conference on this fiasco, Clinton claimed that “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.” Actually, “no” such e-mails actually exceed by 99 the number of years since the birth of Christ.

If the first reports on this intelligence catastrophe indicated that Clinton’s server contained two thousand one hundred and fifteen classified e-mails, the Duchess of Chappaqua would have left her press conference in the back of a squad car.

Clinton’s server held at least 22 e-mails that are too Top Secret to be made public, even if redacted. Moreover, the Washington Post reports that Clinton’s server contained 104 dispatches in which “officials have determined that material Clinton herself wrote in the body of email messages is classified.”

The Post quoted a former senior functionary who is angered by today’s public display of e-mails that were sent securely and expected to remain quiet.

“I resent the fact that we’re in this situation,” the official said, “and we’re in this situation because of Hillary Clinton’s decision to use a private server.”

There is a line from John Adams of which conservatives, particularly those of a moralistic bent, are fond: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.” The surrounding prose is quoted much less frequently, and it is stern stuff dealing with one of Adams’s great fears — one that is particularly relevant to this moment in our history.

John Adams hated democracy and he feared what was known in the language of the time as “passion.” Adams’s famous assessment: “I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either.” Democracy, he wrote, “never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.”

If you are wondering why that pedantic conservative friend of yours corrects you every time you describe our form of government as democracy — “It’s a republic!” he will insist — that is why. Your pedantic conservative friend probably is supporting Ted Cruz. The democratic passions that so terrified Adams have filled the sails of Donald Trump.

At some point within the past few decades (it is difficult to identify the exact genesis) the rhetorical affectation of politicians’ presuming to speak for “We the People” became fashionable. Three words from the preamble to the Constitution came to stand in for a particular point of view and a particular set of assumptions present in both of our major national political tendencies. Molly Ivins, the shallow progressive polemicist, liked to thunder that “We the People don’t have a lobbyist!” She liked to call lobbyists “lobsters,” too, a half-joke that she, at least, never tired of. Dr. Ben Carson likes to draft “We the People” into his service. Sean Hannity is very fond of the phrase, and so-called conservative talk radio currently relies heavily on the assumption that the phrase is intended to communicate: that there exists on one side of a line a group of people called “Americans” and on the other side a group called “the Establishment,” and that “We the People” are getting screwed by “Them.”