By Jonah Goldberg
Thursday,
October 12, 2023
At the
time this went to press, the Republican Party was in disarray.
I should
probably be more specific.
The
House GOP was struggling to replace Kevin McCarthy as speaker after his ouster
had been orchestrated by Representative Matt Gaetz with the help of a small
cadre of Republican opportunists (and, technically, the entire Democratic
caucus). There’s no need to recount the specific policy disputes that sundered
the caucus, because there were none. Not really. The notion that Gaetz, who
supported trillions in spending during the Trump administration, is a sincere
champion of fiscal restraint is almost as implausible as the suggestion that
he’s a champion of sexual restraint.
His
claim that he is passionate about getting the party back to regular order and
proper governance is belied by his previously explained philosophy of
governance. In his book he recounts how former speaker Paul Ryan once counseled
him not to prioritize being on TV so highly. “Why raise money to advertise on
the news channels when I can make the news?” Gaetz writes. “And if you aren’t
making news, you aren’t governing.” Gaetz boasts of growing up in the house
occupied by Jim Carrey’s character in The Truman Show, a dark
comedy about a man who doesn’t realize he’s the star of a TV drama. The
difference, Gaetz writes, is that “I know that all the world’s a stage,
especially when we all have cameras with phones [sic].”
Of
course, like dysuria, Gaetz is just a painful symptom. A great number of
Republicans — and Democrats — have a similar understanding of governing as
performance art. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) is a prodigious
fundraiser, a social-media powerhouse, and a ubiquitous talking head on TV. But
her legislative record is among the slightest in Congress.
The
reasons for the current political dysfunction are fairly well established. The
“big sort” has created extremely safe districts for incumbents in both parties,
which means that the only threat to their tenure is a primary challenge. Ever
since Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, both parties have convinced themselves that
there’s no point in attracting new voters and all they need to do is rev up
turnout among their existing coalitions, which just makes them speak their own
language even louder, like the proverbial ugly American. Widespread
polarization and negative partisanship, fanned by ideological media on both
sides, foster an environment in which many primary voters are more eager to
hear how you will fight the other party than how you will implement a policy.
The most passionate partisans see politics as a form of gladiatorial
entertainment detached from any notion of good governance.
***
These are
not Republican problems or Democratic problems. They are American problems
that manifest themselves in both “red” and “blue” parts of the country. But
they are more acute and obvious in the Republican Party, which suffers from —
to borrow a phrase from Governor Ron DeSantis — a culture of losing. Large
swaths of the Right have an apocalyptic vision of politics and assume that the
“enemy” — the Democrats, the Deep State, the Biden “regime,” even the
Republican “establishment” — is so thoroughly corrupt and evil that any
compromise amounts to collaboration. Better to be like the Sicarii, the Jewish
warriors at Masada who opted to die rather than give in to the Romans.
Indeed,
even the suggestion of incremental success or legislative progress poses a
threat to this worldview. The perfect is always the enemy of the good, and in
the apocalyptic telling the perfect is achievable simply by the brute
application of Republican willpower. McCarthy’s debt-ceiling deal in June was a
modest victory, but it was immediately denounced by many right-wing firebrands
as a betrayal.
Why?
Because if partial victories are possible, the stakes are not as existential as
claimed. The logic of “the Flight 93 election” holds that half measures are
suicidal folly. Better to die fighting because there is no tomorrow than build
toward a better one. The incentives for incremental progress are outweighed by
the benefits of catastrophizing. Winning assigns accountability; losing is
liberating, providing opportunities to go on TV or send out fundraising emails
and claim that you were “stabbed in the back” by the “uniparty” or the “RINOs.”
When asked on ABC’s This Week about his defeat in the shutdown
fight, Gaetz was happy to admit defeat. “We lost,” he conceded, but “a defeat
is not a surrender.” This was a pithy expression of the now deep-seated view in
many quarters that it is better to lose fighting in the name of purity than to
partially win.
Donald
Trump has fueled the culture of losing. In 2018, he celebrated numerous
Republican midterm defeats, blaming them all on the failure of GOP candidates
to “embrace” him more fully. In 2020, he cost the party the Senate by
encouraging Georgia Republicans to avoid voting in a “rigged” runoff election
overseen by Republicans. In 2022, he stymied the attainment of a Republican
Senate majority by promoting deeply flawed primary candidates who were loyal to
him but could not win in the general election. Trump has made it clear time and
again that he’d rather be the sole leader of a smaller Republican Party
composed of his personal praetorians than one of many leaders in a larger
Republican Party that is a majority party.
Indeed,
Gaetz’s ouster of McCarthy would have been impossible if the GOP didn’t have
such a narrow House majority. Were it not for the culture of losing, the caucus
would be large enough to marginalize professional malcontents and sincere
Sicarii. This is the context behind Representative Matt Rosendale’s admission
that he had prayed for a narrow GOP victory in the 2022 midterms. If the GOP
were a true majority party, the Matt Rosendales would have to choose between
irrelevance and doing their jobs.
***
There are
structural reasons for this predicament. As in Hemingway’s description of
bankruptcy, it came upon us gradually and then suddenly. Contrary to the
expectations of the Founders, Congress ceased to be a jealous guardian of its
powers and prerogatives, ceding its functions to the executive branch and the
courts. This self-gelding coincided with internal changes in Congress. Starting
in the 1990s, in the name of reform, committee chairmen were neutered and the
speaker’s office became the real locus of legislation, which was hammered out
by party leaders and presented on short notice to members who could do little
but vote up or down.
The
parties followed a similar pattern of self-neutering under the banner of
reform. Starting with the Democrats after the 1968 election and their
disastrous convention, the parties decided they should absolve themselves of
any institutional responsibility to select or even screen candidates. America
remains the only advanced democracy in which parties outsource candidate
selection to primaries alone.
The
greatest blow to the power of parties at least wasn’t entirely their fault.
Once more in the name of reform, the McCain-Feingold Act took away the parties’
power of the purse. It thereby removed their remaining tool to hinder
unelectable candidates and ushered in a world in which politicians had to rely
on direct fundraising fueled by “making news” on TV and, later, social media.
As Mitch McConnell predicted at the time, “We haven’t taken a penny of money
out of politics. We’ve only taken the parties out of politics.” It’s no
coincidence that McConnell is the politician most loathed by the Sicarii. He
has worked assiduously to support the most electable Republican Senate
candidates because, as a grown-up, he prioritizes having a Senate majority. He
famously detests self-interested Republicans who care more about their own
fundraising and TV time than having a functional party. And the people who
don’t care about governing or Republican majorities detest him for it in
return.
It’s
counterintuitive, but weak parties create strong partisanship because weak
parties cannot impose the discipline required to set priorities, punish
destructive politicians, or do the other things necessary to protect their
brand with the voters on whom their majority depends. Meanwhile, a weak or
dysfunctional Congress cannot fulfill its role of being the place where
political differences are properly debated and resolved. As a result, other
institutions outside party control adopt party functions. Fox does more to
educate voters and set Republican priorities than the GOP does. The various
interests that make up the GOP coalition have little incentive to compromise for
the good of the party, as they have the ability to directly influence voters,
donors, and politicians. Of course, all of these problems become more apparent
in a populist era. A ship with structural weaknesses can serviceably sail along
on calm waters, but rough seas not only make the disrepair more obvious, they
hasten the shipwreck.
None of
this is good for conservatism. When William F. Buckley was the intellectual
leader of the insurgent movement to transform the GOP into a conservative
party, it was understood that this was just a first necessary step toward the
real goal: to move the country in a conservative direction. That goal was
accomplished (contrary to what you may have heard on TV or Twitter/X, the
Rockefeller Republicans left the party ages ago). But the larger mission has
been forgotten or abandoned. The incentives — cultural, financial,
psychological — for being in a constant state of rebellion against “the
establishment” are simply greater than the incentives to do the hard work of
party-building and constructive legislating. The loudest voices say all we need
for total victory is willpower, not votes. The responsible voices know
otherwise, but they tend to whisper lest they be accused of weakness or
collaboration.
***
How do
we get out of this mess? There are changes to the Constitution that might
help — for instance, restoring congressional supremacy by requiring a simple
majority to override presidential vetoes and/or giving Congress a legislative
veto of (increasingly lawless) presidential executive orders. But it is very
unlikely that any of them could be made in the foreseeable future. Moreover,
our predicament isn’t really the result of any obvious constitutional defect.
The Constitution can be understood as the skeleton of our system. Legislation
and healthy parties are the muscle and sinew, and that is what has atrophied.
For instance, the Founders never imagined that the average congressional
district would contain 800,000 people. (George Washington spoke only once at
the Constitutional Convention, to insist that districts of 40,000 were too
large.) Expanding the House requires only an act of legislation, but House
members are unlikely to allow further dilution of their power and prestige.
House expansion would help Congress be more responsive to voters, reduce the
worst aspects of gerrymandering, and cool some of the passion for scrapping the
Electoral College by making it much harder for a presidential candidate to win
the college while losing the popular vote.
Alas,
we’ll likely never return to picking candidates in smoke-filled rooms, but in
2021 the Virginia GOP realized that a conventional primary would probably
result in a sure loser for the governor’s race, so it nominated Glenn Youngkin
at a convention instead. If eliminating primaries is impossible, adopting
ranked-choice voting would make it more likely that better general-election
candidates got nominated.
Eliminating
the current campaign-finance regime would be exceedingly difficult, given
Supreme Court rulings and the widespread view that democracy is invigorated,
rather than crippled, by small donors who see politics as more a
choose-your-own-adventure video game than a contest of ideas. But the parties
could adopt various rules that would make them serve less as marketing departments
for whoever happens to win a primary.
Last,
it’s time to recognize the downsides of “transparency.” It may be “the best
disinfectant,” but disinfectants aren’t cure-alls. The body politic needs its
healthy bacteria, too. Putting cameras everywhere, particularly in Congress,
was a mistake. Televised congressional hearings are not mechanisms of debate
and discovery. They are opportunities for politicians to preen for the cameras
and create YouTube clips of themselves for fundraising emails. That’s why, if
you watch any high-profile hearing, you’ll notice that the witnesses rarely get
to answer important questions and the self-important questioners often repeat
the same points in time-sucking mini-speeches. The Schoolhouse Rock version
of how a bill becomes a law is a quaint myth at this point. Congress has become
a parliament of pundits.
Politics
in general, and legislating in particular, is about negotiating, haggling, and
horse-trading. That is impossible to do when all the world, but especially
Congress, is a stage, the audience thinks compromise is collaboration, and
“governing” means winning their applause.
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