The MAGA Wing Is Weaponizing Party Loyalty against the Loyal

Representative Jim Jordan and his allies have made explicit what was previously only implied, though all but universally recognized, as the MAGA Right’s biggest tactical advantage over the Republican Party’s more conventional conservatives. Those Republicans who have little or no use for the party as an institution are weaponizing the loyalty to it among those who do. And by taking their fight against Republican loyalists to the streets, they’re forcing the GOP’s remaining institutionalists to renounce their allegiances.

For his part, Jordan is playing good cop — at least, he was this weekend. The Ohio congressman is making calls to the holdouts, cutting deals, and smoothing ruffled feathers to the point that many who steadfastly resisted his candidacy for the speakership are falling in line. But that effort has been paired with a compelling campaign of public blackmail, in which members are threatened with the wrath of the GOP base if they fail to acquiesce.

A feature of this campaign that so irritated the members against whom it was deployed is what looks to be an alliance, designed to shame the holdouts, between Jordan’s allies and Fox News primetime:

This is one of the subtler moves in the full-court press to cajole and coerce Jordan skeptics to keep their objections to themselves — that is, if they know what’s good for them. “In efforts to close the gap, lawmakers and activists close to him have taken to social media and the airwaves to blast the Republicans they believe are blocking his path to victory and encourage voters to browbeat them into supporting Mr. Jordan,” the New York Times reported. MAGA types like Representative Anna Paulina Luna and Matt Gaetz are throwing decorum overboard by singling out their colleagues for condemnation in social media and summoning a mob to reinforce the implied conclusion that this leadership election is a career-defining vote.

The demand that Republican members subordinate discretion and internal cohesion within the party to the threat posed by the prospect of an angry mob was exemplified by a statement from Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts. “Everyday Americans love him,” he said of Jordan, “because he knows what time it is in America.” It’s unclear if, in Roberts’s formulation, love of country qualifies one as an “everyday American” or if all true “everyday Americans” love Jordan. Either way, the real America “knows what time it is,” which is another way of demanding that all the consideration of trade-offs and competing priorities be subordinated to the exigencies of this moment.

This tactic will not put grievances within the Republican coalition to rest. It will sow the seeds of lasting resentments, particularly among the Republican lawmakers whose names you don’t know because they reliably put the interest of the party and the country above promoting their personal brands. “Enough of the secret elections behind closed doors!” demands the esoteric Representative Thomas Massie in an appeal to America’s most partisan voters to engage with what the Constitution defines as a job for the House of Representatives alone. This can no longer be a deliberative process because Jordan’s allies are demanding that the GOP dispense with deliberation in favor of a coronation.

The seriousness of the times we’re in surely does weigh heavily on the GOP’s more responsible members. Their desire to meet the demands of this moment is being used against them by those who feel no similar compunction. All the while, the bonds of party unity are ever more quickly fraying as the nihilism of the Right’s loudest voices becomes ever harder to stomach. Those bonds will not hold forever.