The infamy that was the Capitol riot on January 6 was at least partly instigated by a Republican president, who hyped the forthcoming events of that day (“Be there, will be wild!”), fed his crowd of supporters with lies about the imminent overthrow of lawful American governance, and advanced the notion that the vice president could prevent — or at least delay — Joe Biden’s becoming president. A section of the rabble sought to disrupt a Senate proceeding led by the Republican majority leader and overseen by the Republican vice president.
After an affray that left five dead, it seems hopeless to counsel against a civil war within conservatism. We are still cleaning up the literal filth and repairing the literal damage from an act of fratricidal political violence.
Writing in Commentary, Noah Rothman outlines the present and oncoming battle as one between Republican institutionalists, who are, largely, worthy guardians of their offices and the Constitution, and conservative populists, who are, on the whole, cynical opportunists and wreckers. The populists run primary campaigns that inflict no-hoper loons on the party, like Christine O’Donnell — the one who wasn’t a witch, you may recall — or the hapless Todd Akin. Or sometimes the populists win a seat, like Ted Cruz’s in the Senate, and then embark upon a political strategy that is ruinous to their party’s fortunes and the chance of good governance in order to burnish their own reputation as a destroyer. Rothman writes: “For over a decade, conservative populists waged an insurgent conflict against the GOP’s more institutionalist elements. But, contrary to the popular myth, the much despised ‘establishment’ erred on the side of deference to the new vanguard.”
Trying to expel the conservative populists is a strategy with a variety of appealing features. For many, the past ten years have been a headache. There has been the ideological challenge of populism — with its emphasis on containing immigration and reducing America’s role in certain foreign conflicts. And the embrace of conservative populism, and Donald Trump in particular, has traded away the reliable suburban voter for the less reliable populist, often a marginal voter in a safely Republican district. These losses and gambles present real and ongoing financial and electoral consequences for the Republican Party.
Indeed, the “establishment” should not cede an inch to wreckers who go so far as to subvert constitutional governance, spread conspiracy theories, or try to inflame hatreds. But talk of a Republican and conservative civil war is premature and probably wrong. Republicans cannot predict the outcome of an internal bloodletting and may find the conflict unresolvable.
The lines between establishmentarians and populists are often unclear. For example, in the 2020 primary battle between former senator Jeff Sessions and Tommy Tuberville, which one was the populist and which was the establishmentarian? Sessions had the credentials of an ideological populist: a foe of immigration with a somewhat Jacksonian foreign-policy disposition. But he was also a guardian of Senate traditions, and as attorney general under Trump he was unwilling to do anything he deemed unethical, recusing himself from the Russia inquiry because of a Justice Department rule against department officials’ investigating campaigns they had worked for. Tuberville, a replacement-level Republican committed to all the pre-Trump orthodoxies, was a Trump loyalist to the point of backing baseless claims of election fraud.
Is Sean Hannity a populist because he was a Trump loyalist? Or is he an establishmentarian because he’s an eternal fixture in the right-wing media firmament and if Liz Cheney were president he’d support her almost as much? Who has the power to eject him anyway? Last time I checked, it was Fox News and Premiere Networks, not Mitch McConnell.
Much of the “fighting” in a Republican civil war would, in reality, just be the usual undignified media slap-fights between various magazines and websites, talk-radio hosts and Twitter accounts. In other words, a competition for contracts, sinecures, and prestige. The multiplication and ever finer segmentation of the conservative audience, a product of technological and business trends, guarantees that nobody has the power to truly prevail. And besides, the interpersonal and commercial rivalries are likely to crowd out any substantive debate. Much of the slap-fight will continue at a low level even without our dignifying it as a war or pretending that it will determine the soul of the Republican Party.
In fact, conservative media have often been the problem. With their ratings-driven bias toward sensationalism and conflict, conservative mass media can falsify the relationship between Republicans and their voters. The media tempt politicians toward stunts and faked last stands, and the attention these stunts receive is confused with approval. The dynamic has led establishment Republicans and populists toward both a less real and more symbolic form of politics. This is what induces otherwise intelligent men like Senator Hawley to denounce the usurpation of the legislature’s role by the courts in Bostock v. Clayton County but, instead of offering legislation, to use the denunciation as merely another basis for a fundraising pitch or an email blast.
It is precisely this empty-calorie diet of political entertainment and stimulation that caused the Republican establishment to underreact to Donald Trump’s baseless claims of fraud and shambolic attempts to change the election result. To people accustomed to politics as fakery, Trump was just engaged in one more distasteful stunt. Just a stunt, that is, until they had to be evacuated under threat of the Q horde. Reality TV is fake, so a reality-TV presidency couldn’t have real consequences, could it? Well, the tagline for the original reality-TV show was that we’d “find out what happens . . . when people stop being polite . . . and start getting real.”
It got real in the Capitol: real deaths, real smashed windows, real compromised security, and real feces on the floor.
The dangers of populism cannot be managed by resistance alone. If a sufficient number of voters sufficiently hate what the Republican establishmentarians have to offer, they will make a noisome protest. They will send more Marjorie Taylor Greenes and more Donald Trumps, as is their right.
What Republicans need if they are to reconcile their factions and mollify the passions of their voters is competent political leadership and responsible representation. They need leadership that is willing to take hard votes and govern, not just put up meaningless fusses. Where Republicans get this — in statehouses like Florida’s or Tennessee’s — no civil war is necessary. The governors have mildly populist reputations, and there is no destructive populist rebellion.
But there are places where the Republican Party doesn’t have effective leadership. In states like Arizona the party has devolved into two camps. On one side are the grandstanding moralists of the establishment, on the other are the cynically provocative populists. The two sides have made themselves worse and more irresponsible throughout their civil war. The populists who captured Arizona’s Republican apparatus have descended to calling on people to martyr themselves for Trump’s election-fraud claims. Members of the state’s Republican establishment, when not telling the prestige media that they simply hate a huge cross section of their voters, have abandoned the party altogether. The one thing the populists and establishmentarians in Arizona have in common is political exile. Who could fault the people of Arizona for turning away from this fratricidal mess and empowering Democrats?
The Republican Party is a minority party nationally. While the electoral map favors Republicans in presidential contests, neither the structure of our elections nor the nature of this political moment gives Republicans the luxury of expelling swaths of voters. Populists must learn to actually govern; they must become a little like the establishment and desire to use the authority voters give them. And the establishment must try to become more popular, in part by taking more seriously the passions and ambitions of their voters. Give a little, or lose everything.
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