Trump is sending message to GOP, but who’s listening?

The Donald Trump phenomenon is a great gift to pundits because it can be analyzed and criticized in so many different ways. But two shorthands seem particularly useful.

First, Trump is essentially using the Republican primary to run a third-party campaign, not a right-wing insurgency.

Second, Trump’s appeal is oddly like that of Franklin Roosevelt, in the sense that he’s a rich, well-connected figure — a rich New Yorker, at that — who’s campaigning as a traitor to his class.

These two elements of Trumpism are intimately connected.

In American politics, the two-party system has long served as a check on pure democracy, a means of elite control. So long as there are only two competitive parties, the people who run the parties will exercise disproportionate control over which ideas find representation.

Certain ideologies and worldviews get marginalized. The libertarian who wants to cut defense spending, the anti-abortion voter who favors a bigger welfare state, the immigration skeptic who wants to keep Social Security exactly as it is ... all these voters and many others choose the lesser of two evils every November, because neither party’s leadership has any interest in representing their entire worldview.

This narrowing can be good for the republic. Elites can have wisdom that populists lack, certain ideas deserve suppression and multiparty systems are more likely to hand power to extremists or buffoons.

And when the two-party system is functioning at its best, party leaders can integrate compelling third-party ideas, or even reorient a party entirely to react to a public discontented with its options.

But it has been more than four decades since the last such reorientation, and two decades since the last time a third-party candidate saw his ideas even co-opted by the major parties.

Which is where Trump comes in. He can wax right wing on immigration one moment and promise to tax hedge fund managers the next. He’ll attack political correctness and then pledge to protect entitlements. He can sound like Pat Buchanan on trade and Bernie Sanders on health care. He regularly attacks the entire Iraq misadventure in a way that neither mainstream Republicans nor Hillary Clinton can plausibly manage.

And he’s coming at all these issues, crucially, from a vantage point of privilege — which his critics keep highlighting as though it discredits him, when in reality it lends his populism a deeper credibility.

It’s precisely because he isn’t a blue-collar outsider that he may seem like a credible change agent: Because he knows Wall Street, and because he doesn’t need its money to campaign, it seems like he could actually fight his fellow elites and win.

He won’t, of course, but it matters a great deal how he loses. In a healthy two-party system, the GOP would treat Trump’s strange success as evidence that the party’s basic orientation may need to change substantially.

In an unhealthy system, the kind I suspect we inhabit, the Republicans will find a way to crush Trump without adapting to his message.

In which case, the pressure The Donald has tapped will continue to build — and when it bursts, the GOP as we know it may go with it.