By Nick Catoggio
Wednesday, December 28, 2022
Jacobins always end up guillotining each other.
Unity prevails in the first phase of populist revolution
against the common enemy, the regime. But once the regime falters and populists
gain a measure of power, rivalries develop. The united front cracks under the
weight of personal ambition and pressure of ideological purity. The blade that
took the king’s head takes Robespierre’s too.
More than a decade into their own revolution, populist
Republicans have managed to avoid the sort of major divisions that lead to
rancorous infighting. Which, I think, is less a matter of personal restraint on
their part than the vacuousness of the revolution itself. If your highest
aspirations in governance are performatively
spiting liberals, blocking Democrats from power, and railing against an
ever-shifting concept of “elites,” there isn’t much to disagree upon.
The personality cult around Donald Trump helped extend
the period of revolutionary unity. Winning the presidency in 2016 made him a
sort of populist Napoleon behind whom all right-wing factions could align in
the interest of victory. He conquered the libs where John McCain and Mitt
Romney had failed. However much right-wing populists may despise establishment
Republican leaders and vice versa, all sides agreed that they enjoyed the power
and glory that the emperor’s triumph brought.
We may now be approaching the Waterloo phase of this
story, where the analogy to France breaks down. The monarchy there was restored
after Napoleon was banished to St. Helena but there’ll be no Reaganite
restoration for the GOP. The stalwarts of pre-Trump Republicanism, from Romney
to Mitch McConnell to Liz Cheney, are viewed more contemptuously by populists
now than they were before Trump emerged. Base voters will remain broadly
revolutionary if and when Trump is finally banished to Mar-a-Lago—although they
may prefer nominees who more
closely resemble the ancien regime as their candidates in
the next election.
The analogy to France fails in another way. There’s never
been a “reign of terror” phase of the right’s populist revolution in which the
revolutionaries aggressively turn on each other. I suspect that too has less to
do with the nature of the personnel involved than with the dynamics of
America’s political system. By the time France’s Jacobins started chopping each
other, the revolution’s success was assured. In America, it’s never assured.
Trump remained an underdog against Hillary Clinton all the way to Election Day
2016, remember. The threat of Democratic victory kept right-wing populists
united against the common enemy.
I wonder, though, if the “reign of terror” phase has
merely been delayed, not averted, and whether populist infighting might not be
a major Republican storyline in 2023.
In fact, I all but guarantee that it will be.
***
I started thinking about this last week when this
clip began circulating on social media.
That’s not the first time one populist Republican has
accused another of election fraud. Trump accused Ted Cruz of having cheated
to win the Iowa caucus in 2016, naturally. But the attack on DeSantis by
pillow-entrepreneur-turned-coup-plotter Mike
Lindell feels more fratricidal than Trump’s attack on Cruz. For all his
pretensions to populism, Cruz was a creature of the pre-Trump GOP—an avowed
Reaganite, a staunch small-government Tea Party “constitutional conservative.”
DeSantis is a post-Trump Republican, eager to use government power against the
right’s cultural enemies. He’d rather investigate vaccine manufacturers than
ruminate on federal spending.
Some pro-Trump Republicans resented
Lindell for impugning one of the few MAGA populists on the ballot last
month who overperformed at the polls.
“Everything down to the wording of
this makes me think that Mike Lindell is a highly patriotic but extremely
vulnerable man being used without his realizing it to discredit real election
integrity efforts, which is evil and sad if correct,” conservative pundit and
intellectual dark web thinker James Lindsay wrote.
“Lolol,” right-wing YouTuber Tim
Pool added.
“Lindell needs to go away,” former
Newsmax TV host John Cardillo responded. “He’s being interviewed by a guy he
funds, on his own network, spewing lunatic conspiracy theories. DeSantis did
well in FL because he did an amazing job for FL. Lindell’s BS is pathetic, and
he should stop listening to grifters using him for $$$.”
Assuming Trump and DeSantis both run for president,
there’s no way to avoid a populist bloodletting next year. Lindell’s smear is a
small reminder that it’s already begun, in fact. Trump loyalist Roger Stone has
taken to saying that DeSantis would be working in a Dairy Queen if not for his
patron while Laura
Loomer has criticized DeSantis for being too skeptical about Trump’s
great big beautiful COVID vaccines. American Greatness recently
ran a piece titled “DeSantis
2024 Is a Trap” mocking those who think the governor could win the
presidency in an election system as allegedly riddled with Democratic fraud as
ours is.
The 2024 primary will split MAGA Republicans into camps
of “traitors,” who have turned on Trump to support DeSantis, and “losers,” who
insist on sticking with Trump despite his dismal election record. One camp (or
both) will lose. They will not easily get over it. And the winning camp won’t
easily get over the losing camp not getting over it.
Even if Trump drops out, there’s likely to be a
bloodletting. A charismatic outsider like Tucker Carlson entering the race
could divide populists. So could a hardline take-no-prisoners bomb thrower like
Marjorie Taylor Greene. Some MAGA voters, anxious about electability after the
midterm’s great disappointment, might steer toward a more mainstream yet
populist-friendly candidate like Glenn Youngkin.
As the base splinters among candidates with differing
degrees of revolutionary fervor in battling the “elites,” bitter recriminations
among “sellouts” and “dead-enders” will metastasize. Perhaps they’ll be
forgotten in time for the party to unify before the general election, but
perhaps not. If Trump loses, there’ll be no gracious appeal from him to his
followers to align behind the nominee, needless to say. Some populists will
presume to read their enemies out of the movement entirely, their betrayal in
having backed the wrong horse deemed unforgivable.
And of course a galaxy of right-wing opportunists with no
particular loyalty to anything other than their bank accounts will be watching
closely for signs of who’s likely to prevail. They’ll align themselves
accordingly, and they’ll participate cheerfully in the recriminations against
their camp’s enemies to build goodwill among their new comrades.
A hotly contested primary guarantees that Jacobins of
different stripes will start guillotining each other. But the primary isn’t the
only influence encouraging infighting among them.
***
One way to be sure that Trump’s political stock has
fallen is the fact that Mitch McConnell has been more brazen lately about
criticizing him.
Before the midterms McConnell typically would decline to
comment when asked about Trump’s insults of him or his wife. There was nothing
to gain for the party before Election Day by the most prominent Republican
officeholder in America engaging in a poo-flinging contest with the GOP’s
800-pound gorilla. But Election Day is now past and the 800-pound gorilla looks
more like a 300-pound gorilla.
McConnell can’t resist pointing it out. “Here’s what I
think has changed: I think the former president’s political clout has
diminished,” he told NBC last
week. “We lost support that we needed among independents and moderate
Republicans, primarily related to the view they had of us as a party—largely
made by the former president—that we were sort of nasty and tended toward
chaos.”
He’s right that Trump’s clout has diminished. And because
it has, new power centers in the party are opening up that will pit erstwhile
allies against each other. Imagine the Republican Party as a solar system with
Trump as the sun at its center. As his star begins to shrink, allowing more
distant stars to exert greater relative gravitational pull, the planets in
orbit around him will begin spinning off in different directions.
It’s happening already in the House among some of our
least favorite Republicans.
For evidence of Trump’s new weakness, look no further
than the fact that he’s reportedly lobbied
the populist holdouts opposing Kevin McCarthy’s bid for speaker on
McCarthy’s behalf and found them unwilling to budge. Among those holdouts is
Lauren Boebert, who was asked recently why she can’t bring herself to support
McCarthy when her populist Wonder Twin, Marjorie Taylor Greene, can. Boebert
resented the comparison. “You know, I’ve been aligned with Marjorie and accused
of believing a lot of the things that she believes in,” she said.
“I don’t believe in this, just like I don’t believe in Russian space
lasers—Jewish space lasers and all of this.”
Greene
in turn resented Boebert’s remark.
Boebert’s swipe wasn’t the first time recently that
Greene’s support for McCarthy has led to her being mocked by a populist ally.
“At the first opportunity, he will zap her faster than you can say Jewish space
laser,” Matt Gaetz said
last month of McCarthy and Greene. Andy Biggs, who’s opposing McCarthy for
speaker, said Greene had “crossed
the Rubicon” when she accused the Never Kevin populists of lying by
claiming that an alternative to McCarthy will emerge. Some fringier populist
media types have taken to describing her as a
“trailer park hoodrat” and a “two-bit whore.”
Boebert, undaunted by Greene’s shot at her, later doubled
down by reminding The Daily
Caller that her colleague had once attended white supremacist Nick
Fuentes’ political conference.
Watching a populist as strident and obnoxious as Greene
be marginalized so quickly by her fellow Jacobins does have a whiff about it of
Robespierre being placed under arrest. If her radical credentials aren’t
radical enough to spare her from the contemptuous sneers of her closest allies,
no one’s credentials are. The fact that she’s a longtime favorite of Donald Trump’s
seems to have earned her no benefit of the doubt.
For the moment, the measure of True Populism isn’t how
devoutly you support Trump, it’s how devoutly you oppose McCarthy. As
revolutions evolve, the measure of what constitutes proper revolutionary fervor
can evolve too—so quickly and arbitrarily that even ardent revolutionaries may,
to their surprise, suddenly find themselves wanting.
Like Greene, the RNC and its chief are also learning that
the hard way.
Ronna McDaniel, the committee’s chairwoman, has found
herself of late the victim of the American right’s desperate need to blame
someone other than Trump for its midterm losses. McDaniel isn’t a true
populist, of course—she’s a member of the extended Romney family—but she’s
dutifully mouthed the requisite
populist talking points since taking over the RNC in 2017 to stay on
Trump’s and the MAGA base’s good side. She even dropped “Romney” from her
professional name because it
offended the emperor.
Like many other Republicans, she did what she was asked
to prove her loyalty to the revolution in the interest of acquiring personal
power. Then she watched as Trump steered the GOP into an electoral ditch,
losing the House in 2018 and the presidency in 2020 and recording one of the
worst midterm performances by the out-party in modern American history in 2022.
Her reward for having stood by meekly while Trumpist
populism took over the GOP and fumbled away winnable elections is being
scapegoated for those defeats by populists. Two Trump loyalists, one of them
Mike Lindell, are challenging
her for the chairmanship of the RNC in the wake of the midterms. Never
mind that the RNC’s role in elections is limited to providing infrastructure
and financing, not candidate selection, or that the party was saddled with
Trump’s endless daily election conspiracy theorizing as it went about trying to
promote more appealing messages.
The revolution requires that someone be made to pay for
its failures. McDaniel, a member of the old guard turned faux revolutionary, is
an obvious candidate to be sacrificed to Madam Guillotine. It’s the same
impulse that led Trump and his cronies, laughably, to try to blame
Mitch McConnell for the party’s underperformance last month. McConnell
has never pretended to be a populist, though; no one in the party is more ancien
regime than he is. McDaniel tried to position herself as
populist-friendly, believing that would protect her right flank. She was
mistaken.
In 2023, McConnell will still hold his office. It’s
unclear if McDaniel will hold hers. As the need for more scapegoats evolves
along with events, other Republicans who thought they were on the right side of
the revolution may find à la McDaniel and Greene that they’re enemies of the
people after all.
***
Above all, populist infighting will increase next year
because, sooner or later, this movement will develop something resembling a
coherent ideology. And when it does, differences over policy that are familiar
to any political movement will emerge.
There are right-wing ideologues standing by right now,
polemics in hand, hoping to fill the vacuum. But the current options are either
embarrassing pie-in-the-sky theocracy-lite, aka integralism, or traditional
conservatism with a bit more authoritarianism aimed at drag queens, aka
national conservatism. Notably, those subfactions have themselves begun
feuding lately as they jockey for position as the true “vanguard” of
proto-fascist populism.
The presidential primaries may provide some ideological
clarity. An interesting debate could be had, for instance, on the proper limits
of state power over public health springboarding off of vaccine mandates.
Conservatives value personal freedom, but how much freedom do they want to give
parents to say no to traditional vaccines as America
backslides on herd immunity?
We could have that debate, were any of the candidates up
to offering a thoughtful answer. What we’re likely to get instead is incessant
grandstanding followed by much of the party treating the eventual nominee’s
position as the proper and correct conservative position no matter what it ends
up being. Populists crave an emperor. And so it’s likely that Republican
populists will end up consolidating next year behind one of the two guys in the
field known for wielding power imperiously.
There may be unity in the end in the interest of
defeating the common enemy. But there will be blood beforehand. Lots of it.
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