How the ‘Young Guns’ Failed

By Henry Olsen

Thursday, December 07, 2023

 

Former House speaker Kevin McCarthy’s announcement that he will resign from the chamber at the end of the year concludes the “Young Guns” era. Once touted as the party’s future, McCarthy and his onetime comrades in arms — former speaker Paul Ryan and former house majority leader Eric Cantor — will be all out of office and on the outs with their party’s voters.

 

Their failure to create the GOP of their dreams would be cautionary enough. Combined with the continuing failure of the Republicans who unseated them to construct a durable, governing alternative, it’s a tale of how a party that loses touch with its voters can wander aimlessly for years.

 

None of this was expected in the heady days of 2010. Cantor, Ryan, and McCarthy were all House members under 50 — hence “young guns” — and all were on the rise. As the Amazon description of their jointly authored book states, Cantor was supposed to be the future speaker, Ryan the intellectual who provided policy guidance, and McCarthy the savvy political strategist to power their drive for a majority. Their aim was simple: Embody the spirit of the Tea Party and use political power to renew America’s economic growth and entrepreneurial spirit.

 

Viewing things solely through a political lens, one could say their project has succeeded. The GOP retook the House in the 2010 midterm landslide and held the majority until popular revulsion toward Donald Trump returned Democrats to the majority. McCarthy’s fundraising prowess and savvy recruitment helped the party gain seats unexpectedly in 2020 even as Trump lost. Securing the admittedly narrow majority in 2022 was perhaps the only bright light in an otherwise dreary midterm for Republicans.

 

But that’s not what they set out to do. Under their leadership, government was supposed to get smaller in relative size, and our budget deficits were supposed to be shrinking. Instead, the federal government is ballooning, and our deficits have exploded. These trends were apparent even when Ryan was speaker and the GOP held the Senate and the White House. Somehow the walk did not match the talk.

 

It’s clear that their indifference toward cultural issues meant they were out of touch with the intensifying focus of their voters. Think about the 2010s: The main political debates were only occasionally about economics. Same-sex marriage, the trans wars, and divisions over race exploded in importance. The Young Guns, though, never made those issues or concerns their own. They always seemed more comfortable talking about numbers (Ryan) or palling with business types (Cantor, McCarthy) than credibly taking on the cultural Left.

 

This, along with the failure of the Romney-Ryan ticket to unseat President Obama in 2012, made already angry Republicans even angrier. Cantor was the first to get burned, shockingly losing his 2014 primary to a college economics professor, Dave Brat. The reason for his loss: He had so lost contact with the district that he carried only six precincts in his home county, despite massively outspending Brat on television.

 

Ryan was next to fall, mainly because his tenure as speaker did not produce the promised results. He first floundered and then failed to repeal Obamacare, the major promise he and the party had made for seven years. Then he passed the tax cuts he had long cherished but chose not to pay for them with cuts to domestic discretionary spending. The result was that annual deficits before the pandemic were over $1 trillion despite record-low unemployment.

 

Ryan’s parting words when he announced he wouldn’t run for reelection in 2018 also show his shortcomings. He maintained that focusing on economics was the proper course, decrying what he labeled as “identity politics.” This ignores the fact that Trump, whom Ryan had strongly opposed in the 2016 primaries, won the nomination and the general election.

 

Trump amplified GOP anger and discontent with progressive identity politics and created a conservative counter-identity, that of the patriotic fighter. Ryan’s own voters didn’t want a party devoted to the economics-heavy happy talk that Ryan offered.

 

McCarthy held on the longest because he is a sharp political animal. But he failed in the end because he, too, is simply not the type of person GOP voters want. He’s too interested in the inside game and uninterested in the cultural issues that unite the party. He could talk the talk about being pro-life or fighting for women’s sports, but it was easy to see that these weren’t his passions.

 

The Young Guns, then, failed because they failed to persuade their party or American swing voters to overlook cultural division and regional economic devastation to focus instead on fueling American capitalism.

 

Their foes, those who have turned battling for culture into an art form, now hold the upper hand in the House and the party. Ryan may want Republicans to get behind former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, but every poll shows she would handily lose a one-on-one matchup with Trump. And within the House, the new speaker, Representative Mike Johnson, made his mark as a lawyer and in politics by emphasizing the cultural battles the Guns tried to avoid.

 

The ascendancy of this group, though, hasn’t been a panacea for Republicans, either. Trump’s problems are legion, and there’s no consensus legislative agenda for him or the party to advance beyond cracking down on illegal immigration. Some of the things the newly empowered conservatives want, such as drastic, immediate cuts in domestic spending, are simply impracticable in the near term. The principled, incremental approach to governing that Democrats employ to win seems absent.

 

Nor is there a comprehensive, well-messaged alternative on cultural matters. Republicans remain on the back foot on abortion and cannot even seem to agree on pushing messaging bills that would die in the Senate but show what the party would do with total control. Again, Democrats had plenty of onetime messaging bills ready for passage in 2021 when Biden took office. Only the filibuster, for example, prevented them from passing the catastrophic voting-procedures bill that would have disarmed the gatekeepers against voter fraud.

 

Republicans are crying out for practical, principled leaders who can get things done and share their values and priorities. The Young Guns didn’t share the latter and have thus been thrust aside. It’s up to the new leaders to show that they know how to win, not just how to fight.