After Trump's rise, will conservatives be Plato or Diogenes?

Plato, it is said, confronted Diogenes as the great Cynic philosopher washed his greens for dinner. “If you had humored Dionysius”—the tyrant of Syracuse who had called Plato as an adviser—”you wouldn’t be rinsing greens now.”

Diogenes answered him, “And if you rinsed greens, you wouldn’t have been a slave to Dionysius.”

With Donald Trump becoming the presumptive Republican nominee for president, the party’s leaders have had a choice to make. They can embrace the unpalatable Trump for the sake of the party’s good and their power within it, or they can accept being marginalized in the party and perhaps disempowered in the government for the sake of principle. They can humor the demagogue and maintain the attendant privilege, or they can stand aloof and content themselves with eating greens. Despite numerous, often quite explicit statements that Trump is a dangerous and unacceptable standard-bearer, more and more of them are deciding their appetite for greens is rather limited after all.