They are failing their voters in a fundamental way.
For many years now, an important segment of the Republican electorate has been increasingly frustrated with the elites who lead our core institutions. The political outlook of these voters has come to be defined by that frustration — a sense that people with power and privilege in American life routinely abuse that power and privilege for personal gain and ideological advantage, that they lie to the public, look down on everybody else’s ways of life, and actively threaten the religious and cultural foundations of American society. Calling out that elite corruption and fighting back against it has become for this growing group of voters the most important purpose of their political engagement, and so their first and foremost demand from people seeking their vote. These aren’t the only Republican voters, and their concerns aren’t all the party cares about, but they have become more and more important.
Their frustration is justified in many respects. Wealth and status in modern America are often distributed in accordance with a system that, among other examples of its obnoxious self-regard, calls itself a meritocracy. It admits people to elite institutions of higher education on the basis of dubious and increasingly manipulated measures of aptitude, then forms those people in accordance with a progressive worldview, and then empowers them in a host of elite institutions without also imposing on them respectable standards of responsibility or character. There are worse ways to make elites, of course, but this one has serious problems and perhaps above all it tends to create a leadership class implicitly hostile to the character and culture of the bulk of the larger society and blind to the weakness of its own claims to legitimacy. Combatting the causes, elements, and implications of this system of elite formation and corruption is an important and valuable cause, especially if it is done in the name of a reasonably well articulated ideal of the traditional American way of life. It can make for a plausible organizing principle for a political movement at home among the factions of the American Right.
But as is often the case with populist movements, the frustration at the heart of this enterprise is rooted in a mix of reality and fantasy. Some of its complaints — economic, cultural, political, intellectual, historical, and otherwise — reflect genuine abuses, inequalities, and policy mistakes that have exacted serious costs in the middle and lower educational and economic tiers of our society while mostly advantaging the upper tiers. These are the kinds of things that a political program could try to redress in various ways. But some of its complaints are based in an excessively sinister set of assumptions about the motives of American elites, in unfounded assertions about the actions of those elites, or in fevered conspiracies of abuses of power without a basis in fact. These kinds of complaints can’t be redressed through acts of governance because the problems they describe aren’t real, and so politics can only take them up rhetorically — by voicing them or somehow acting them out. These two sorts of complaints are often intertwined in complicated and confusing ways.
It is the task of leaders in populist eras, and especially leaders within populist movements, to distinguish these different kinds of complaints from one another as clearly as possible. They need to offer ways to use political power effectively to address those complaints that are rooted in reality. And they need to push to the side or disperse the power of those complaints that are rooted in fantasy, so that they don’t render populist movements pointless, ridiculous, or dangerous.
But such leaders always confront the temptation to do the opposite: to elevate and champion fundamentally imaginary complaints while ignoring concerns that reflect difficult societal realities. You get credit just for talking about the conspiracies when other politicians won’t, you don’t really have to do anything about them (indeed, you can’t do anything about them), and you can always fan even greater frustration when others deny or ignore them. This is easier than governing, which is inherently unsatisfying.
This is a characteristic failing of populist movements. In government (although not always in politics of course), a failure to deal with reality is debilitating and self-destructive. In some important respects, dealing with reality is what governing consists of. Choosing to live in a fantasy world often means giving up on having real influence over the course of the real world. You can use powerful institutions as stages upon which to perform for an audience that wants to see an act, but you cannot use them as means of governing if you are not willing to separate fact from fiction.
For this reason, populists are often not very good at using power, even if they are good at obtaining it. This has obviously been true of Donald Trump. Most of the failures of his administration can be understood as forms of choosing fantasy over reality and so failing to use the power at his disposal in a constructive way or using it instead in a destructive or corrosive way. In the wake of the Trump era, the Republican Party will need to find better ways to address the concerns of its populist voters (along with ways of broadening its appeal beyond those voters), and so it faces the challenge of separating fact from fiction and using power effectively.
Some early signs on this front are obviously worrisome. The post-election political spectacle has put the question of reality and fantasy front and center. A meaningful number of Republican voters are frustrated because they believe widespread fraud in key states stole the election for Joe Biden. They are wrong about this. In fact, the election was relatively close and yielded a mixed result without much evidence of serious fraud. Trump lost fairly narrowly but clearly in a series of swing states and so lost the presidency, but Republicans improved their standing in the House of Representatives and lost just a few seats in the Senate in a year when they had more seats at risk. No inquiry into fraud has turned up anything of note, and claims to the contrary have all melted away under scrutiny; most were never even made in court because they couldn’t even reach the level of assertions. The election therefore leaves Republicans with some major opportunities to pursue, but also with a Democratic president to deal with.
Republican politicians could deal with these facts, and so look for ways to use the power they possess to pursue the opportunities they have to advance their voters’ interests and expand their future electoral appeal. Or they could pretend the lies too many of their voters have accepted are true and put on a show for those voters, to both justify and intensify their frustration and outrage. And some Republicans in Congress have clearly chosen the latter course — an easy but corrosive populism, rather than a hard but constructive populism.
President Trump himself has obviously encouraged them in this course. He is deeply fluent in the fraud conspiracies, and seems genuinely to believe them — as he has often shown himself incapable of separating fact from fiction too. We now also know that he has tried to get state officials to steal votes for him even as he claims the Democrats stole them away. He is intent on talking a different reality into being and demands that others accept it. To abide and encourage the election-fraud conspiracies is to affirm the web of lies he has been spinning, and the Republican politicians who have chosen to do that know full well that this is what it means.
To knowingly pretend a lie is true is, simply put, to lie. Doing that carefully enough to let you claim you’re only raising questions only makes it even clearer that you know you’re lying. Lying to people is no way to speak for them or represent them. It is a way of showing contempt for them, and of using them rather than being useful to them. This is what too many Republican politicians have chosen to do in the wake of the election. They have decided to feign anger at a problem that cannot be solved because it does not exist, and this cannot help but make them less capable of taking up real problems on behalf of their voters. And in any case, it makes them cynical liars.
Pointing to Democrats who have done the same in the past is incriminating, not exonerating. “Barbara Boxer did it too” is not an argument for very much worth doing. And the notion that they’re only doing it to make sure their voters’ voices are heard is an admission of derelict leadership.
Political leaders have a role to play in our system of government that is not simply an expressive or even representative role. Our system does not trust leaders, but it also does not trust the public. It looks to each to restrain and direct the other. Political leaders have an obligation to be honest with their voters and to serve those voters’ interests by connecting their legitimate grievances with the hard realities of governing. They need to choose to address real problems and ignore fake problems. By choosing not to do that, too many Republicans are choosing to fail their voters.
The cost Republicans will pay for this failure will not necessarily be a political or electoral cost. This kind of cynical performance art is not bad politics right now. And Republicans are pretty well positioned to prosper electorally in the coming decade. Our system grants some modest but meaningful structural advantages to the country party (which for now is the Republican Party) over the city party, demographic changes don’t seem to be playing out politically as the Left imagined they would, and the Democratic Party risks doubling down on a nasty combination of radicalism and elitism that isn’t likely to sell well in American politics. Our parties will probably stay pretty evenly matched, but close calls are likely to break for the GOP for a while.
For that very reason, however, it is important that Republicans learn how to govern more effectively and use political power. If the Right is likely to continue to do well in politics, it should get better at governing, and that cannot help but mean getting better at dealing with reality, including those realities that some voters don’t want to face.
The election was not stolen, and the vice president doesn’t get to choose the next president. There isn’t anything Congress can do to change that. But Congress could do some things to protect religious liberty, to lift some of the burdens weighing on Americans struggling to raise children, to push back against the radicalization of higher education, to take the threat of Chinese power more seriously, to help Americans yearning for meaningful economic security or more stable employment, to make more opportunities available to Americans who don’t go to college, to secure our borders and improve the immigration system, and in other ways to help more Americans lead dignified lives in a decent and prosperous free society. Legislative action can’t simply achieve any of these things, but it could meaningfully help, even while a Democrat is president. And politicians who knew how to operate as legislators and (when a Republican is elected president again) executives could also more effectively restrain and reverse some of the worst excesses of the Left. Working toward those ends would make for a stronger electoral argument, too, with the potential to broaden the Republican coalition in the coming decade. But as long as Republican politicians choose to spend their time acting out futile fantasies while letting their capacity for governing atrophy, they are failing the voters they say they want to serve.
And they are failing their voters in a more fundamental way, too. By lying to these voters in order to benefit from their outrage, Republican politicians are living down to the view these voters have of our country’s leaders — precisely the view those politicians claim to channel and share. They are affirming too many voters in their low opinion of American politics, and they are leaving them doubtful that the incoming president is legitimate and that our larger system of government is too.
No amount of macho fighting talk can cover up this simple fact: To play along with the president’s lies about the election is a profound failure of leadership, a dereliction of responsibility, and a disgrace.