Doug Jones

Jeff Sessions had more than just Donald Trump against him in his bid to win back his old Senate seat. He was also facing a Republican party that has been destroyed and remade — in Alabama as elsewhere — severing old relationships and affections. Contrary to what almost all of President Trump’s critics and a great many of his supporters believe, however, the new GOP is not simply Trump’s party. It’s a party that still includes most of the old interests, only newly networked and re-routed. The party is like an ingot that’s been melted down and recast, still the same but no longer familiar. As far as voters were concerned, the same could be said of Jeff Sessions himself. Sessions was a senator for 20 years.

When America’s educated elite imagines what the Republican party will look like after Donald Trump, whether he’s defeated next year or leaves office in 2025, they think in terms of the past. The Grand Old Party will once more be the party of Mitt Romney and the Bush dynasty, those formerly reviled figures now celebrated by the center-left as decent Republicans in contrast to Trump. They are the obvious and inevitable alternative to him. Aren’t they? If you don’t have Mr Hyde, then you must have Dr Jekyll. If you topple Saddam Hussein, then you obviously get a tolerant, pluralistic liberal democracy. America’s educated elite is not really in truth well-educated at all, and it has the moral sophistication of a Star Wars movie.