If Hillary wins, we’ll have chosen our leaders for the rest of our lives

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, N.J.,Wednesday, July 6, 2016. (AP)

Now only the election remains. In the two weeks that are left, we’ll hear more from WikiLeaks, in spite of U.S. government pressure to shut it down in order to protect Hillary. And Trump will release a few more policy ideas, like his welcome plan to reign in K Street lobbyists. But we’re in end game and we can begin to make out the outlines of the election, and beyond that to the kind of government we’ll see in the future.

I don’t know who will win, but let’s say it’s Hillary. In that case we’ll have elected the head of America’s natural governing party. We’ll have chosen our leaders not only for the next four years but for the rest of our lives. It won’t matter if from time to time the Republicans hold one branch of Congress, given the way in which Obama has shown how a Democratic president can rule as an autocrat.

And why will the Democrats keep the White House? Because the Republican Party of the NeverTrumpers, the party of a narrow right-wing ideology, will have died. It had a good run for 160 years but everything has to come to an end, and the GOP is no exception. But it’s not Hillary that will have killed it, nor Trump either. Instead, its last gasp was the Romney debacle of 2012.

In 2011 George Will told us that if they lost the election the next year they should get out of the business. He was right, and the 2012 election was the last chance for a party that was faithful to conservative principles but didn’t much care for the American people.

In 2011 George Will told us that if they lost the election the next year they should get out of the business. He was right, and the 2012 election was the last chance for a party that was faithful to conservative principles but didn’t much care for the American people.

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 primaries was simply the last nail in the coffin. And the divide between the different wings of the Party is so great that it’s unlikely that anyone can put it together again. What we’d be left with is a one-party state, with the Republicans playing the role of designated loser -- the Washington Generals to the Harlem Globetrotters.

That’s not going to make everyone on the left happy. As a first order of business, expect the Democrats to betray the Bernie Sanders left, by a party now firmly allied to Wall Street.

Don’t believe the condemnations of corporate greed. Believe instead the private speeches Mrs. Clinton gave to Wall Street bankers, as revealed by WikiLeaks.

When it comes to writing effective financial regulations, she said, “The people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry.” Some on the left will complain about this. Most will be only too happy to join in the gravy train.

For the rest, however, expect a party that governs like Mexico’s PRI in the bad old days: complacent, corrupt and quick to partner with anyone who has lucrative offices to trade or money to pay.

Compared to the rest of the First World, we have a less than sterling reputation for political integrity today, and things wouldn’t get any better were the Clinton Cash machine to move into the White House.

Corruption is the silent killer of the economy, and we’d all be paying for it.

Expect further a party that will move to silence anything that looks like the germ of an opposition, especially those subsidiary institutions that Tocqueville so admired.

Today, one in six patients is cared for in a Catholic hospital, but we can’t permit that to continue, given what Democratic insider John Halpin calls that religion’s “severely backward gender relations.” Expect the same fate for Mormon hospitals and adoption agencies, blessed by a Supreme Court with a more progressive understanding of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

We’ve seen how, under Obama, government departments such as the IRS and the EPA suppressed political opposition, and how a compliant FBI winked at Mrs. Clinton’s misdeeds. Can anyone doubt that we see much more of that, with her in the White House?

We’d doubtless have some new campaign finance reforms, from the person who took the Citizens United movie personally. It was all about her, after all, and it’s not surprising that she’ll want a newly-formed Supreme Court to revisit our free speech jurisprudence.

We’d not be seeing the kind of reforms that might rein in crony capitalism, however, the barriers to the revolving door between the Hill and K Street that Trump has proposed. Instead, we’d see a purely partisan attack on the scandal of Republican money in politics, and criminal prosecutions of political enemies.

And, after all of that, we’d also observe some of the more vocal NeverTrumpers discovering the hidden virtues of Democratic rule. Others would voice their surprise at how things turned out. But that will come a bit late.

After all, they asked for it.