The Permanent ‘Anti-Establishment’ Racket

There is no more comfortable racket in today’s conservative movement than being permanently “anti-establishment.” Building things and running things is hard work. Posturing yourself as forever in opposition to whoever is in power in your own movement is easy. It’s like being a permanent teenager, always surly and complaining about authority, never having to actually make dinner and pay the mortgage. I had little patience for that sort of thing from other teenagers when I was one of them, and I have a lot less patience for hearing it from people in their 60s and 70s now.

Oh, sure, there are always problems with the people in charge, and there’s a noble role to be played in keeping them from getting too comfortable. But the point of democratic politics is to win elections, gain power, and use it. That is so even if your goal in gaining power is to dismantle a particular power so the next fellow can’t use it. So many of the “anti-establishment” types on the right these days are like anti-monarchists who would rather keep complaining about the new king than do the work of building a republic. There’s always money in it.

That’s the trouble with firing Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy got things done, some good and some bad, and left some things unfinished, and we can argue about that. I would argue that McCarthy was, even if half-heartedly, steering the caucus in the direction of complying with many (though not all) of the procedural demands made by fiscal conservatives such as Chip Roy for fixing the budgeting process. That explains the difference between Roy and Gaetz: In January, Roy sided with Gaetz in holding out for concessions, but he broke with him on this vote, even while continuing to be publicly dissatisfied with some of McCarthy’s strategic choices. That’s because Roy is trying to work within coalition politics to obtain concrete objectives — the very things Gaetz is not doing.

But just setting the whole GOP conference back to square one, and giving the Democrats an escape hatch from a month of terrible publicity about the Bidens, the economy, the border, Bob Menendez, Jamaal Bowman, etc. — to what end? It’s all just juvenile fear of having responsibility. That’s the real divide in the party these days, far more than ideology. The people who want to use power are happy with what the state parties have been doing at the state level in places such as Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Texas, and even Virginia. The Matt Gaetz types prefer the status quo in Washington, where failures are repeated endlessly as proof that things are rigged so send me money to keep fighting it. It’s perfect that Gaetz is simultaneously supporting the Trump presidential campaign, which is really a legal defense fund disguised as a presidential campaign, and which will satisfy its backers so long as Trump wins the nomination, regardless of whether it keeps Joe Biden in the presidency.

Sure, there are elements of the permanent political and financial establishment that conservatives rightly dislike. But you’re never going to get to a utopia where there’s no ruling class — that great delusion that has haunted the left side of the political spectrum since the French Revolution, and gave us Communism. The Founding Fathers understood that societies had a “natural aristocracy,” and they focused instead on how to check its power, increase turnover within its ranks, and ultimately, give it incentives to respond to the people. All of this requires the acquisition of power; checks and balances don’t work if one side’s power collapses. You may dislike a Republican House that’s not run as you would prefer, but is it better than hobbling the one branch of the elected government run by Republicans, with the inevitable result of ceding more power to the Biden White House and Chuck Schumer’s Senate? Did you notice what Democrats have not been doing: trying to behead their own party leadership? They may in fact be too committed to Joe Biden for their own good, but at least they recognize that party-line support for their leadership once it has been selected strengthens the power of every faction and interest within the party.

Like it or not, political parties need a leadership class. It’s a good thing for Republican grassroots to demand that leaders be responsive, and it’s a necessary thing on occasion to have some real bloodletting with the elected leadership to send a message, as the Tea Party movement did in a lot of primaries in 2010 and 2012. It’s worth burning the party down and starting over only if there is immediately at hand a better vehicle with which to oppose the Democrats and their agenda. Because guess what? While you’re playacting at teenage rebellion, they’re seizing your house.