The Ever-More Incoherent GOP

In electoral politics, both/and often wins out over either/or

President Donald J. Trump laughs with United States Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan at the Friends of Ireland luncheon at the U.S. Capitol on March 15, 2018

I’m tempted to begin this note by proclaiming, “Welcome Back!” But of course I’m the one who’s returning. Thanks for your patience during the two weeks I’ve been away from the newsletter. The hiatus was very much needed, giving me the space to (begin to) grieve my father’s death, attend to family matters, and prepare for a full-time return to posting. That return begins today.

One bit of housekeeping: My father’s decline over the past several months delayed me from instituting some long-planned adjustments to “Eyes on the Right.” These changes are intended to encourage more of my subscribers to become paying subscribers. I will at long last begin making those changes during the week of October 24. Look for one additional email from me over the coming days about what’s coming.

Now to today’s post….

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I admire expertise as much as the next guy with a Ph.D., but I sometimes wonder if intellectuals are especially ill-suited to grasping the character of what’s going on in politics.

That’s because intellectuals aspire to coherence in their own thoughts and theories. To be accused of incoherence—of putting forth contradictory propositions about the world—is to be exposed as a fraud or an incompetent.

But what if the political world intellectuals aim to understand is itself incoherent?

To Deconstruct—or Seize—the Administrative State?

Consider the question of the administrative state. The Old Right was actively hostile to the growth of the federal government, and especially the expansion of the executive branch and its regulatory departments and agencies during the Progressive and New Deal eras. A similar critique was launched by libertarians and admirers of Ayn Rand (Objectivists) during the immediate postwar decades. That critique became an important element in the “fusionism” fostered by the conservative movement that grew up around National Review, animated the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater in 1964, and eventually came to power with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980.

Meanwhile, over the past few decades, the Claremont Institute has developed its own distinctive and severe critique of Woodrow Wilson’s supposed progressive refounding of American government, placing the explosive growth of the administrative state since the 1920s at its core. Steve Bannon, finally, has added his own gonzo spin on the old theme, first at Breitbart and then in the Trump administration, promising an active effort to bring about the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

That’s a lot of hostility to the administrative state on the American right! But then what are we to make of the post-Trump line of argument holding that Republicans should be seizing the administrative state rather than gutting it? This position has been advanced by Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule, the journals American Affairs and American Compass, leading postliberal and National Conservative writers, and even more moderate pundits on the right.

As I’ve described the camps here, you’d expect to see some pretty brutal fights, with Claremonsters and libertarians battling it out against the Big Government conservatives over the crucial question of whether the right should strive to demolish the administrative state or use it smite its enemies on the left and in the center. That’s what reason would expect—and what coherence would require. But we’ve honestly seen very little of it. The different camps of writers sometimes sneer at each other over these fundamental disagreements. But the vituperation usually gets suppressed in favor of wagon-circling on the basis of negative partisanship. Sure, we might disagree about what to do with the administrative state, but we can all agree that the Democrats using the federal government to advance its agenda is worse than anything our friends and allies might attempt.

So the right remains effectively committed to diametrically contrary propositions, aiming both to destroy the administrative state and deploy it for its own ends. (For more on the topic, see this New York Times op-ed by my friend and fellow Substacker Noah Millman.) It’s enough to short-circuit the brain of a rationalist intellectual.

A Party of Workers or a Party of Bosses?

For much of the past six years, a parallel debate has been going on at less elite levels on the right. As the Democrats’ electoral coalition has come to be dominated by highly educated urban and suburban professionals and growing numbers of people who haven’t graduated or even attended college have started voting for Republicans, many have begun to suggest the GOP should commit itself to using the federal government to take the side and advance the interests of an interracial coalition of working-class voters.

Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, his Bannon-inflected inaugural address about “American carnage,” and some of his administration’s policies on immigration and trade seemed aimed at doing precisely that. The same could be said of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ multipronged culture-war agenda that often takes aim at “woke corporations” as well as progressive professors and elementary-school teachers.

Yet the actual record of the Trump administration tells a very different story. It shows that the 45th president (working with Republican majorities in Congress) tried mighty hard to repeal ObamaCare without offering an alternative to ensure access to affordable health care for American workers, and that its main policy accomplishment was a large corporate tax cut—neither of which makes sense as an expression of economic populism.

Unless, of course, the incoherence is the point.

From the time of the Reagan Revolution on down, Republicans have used populist rhetoric to sell a policy agenda that mainly benefits the wealthy. Yes, they’ve also claimed that the positive economic effects of this agenda would “trickle down” to everyone else. But measuring the slowly rising tide has often been challenging, so Republicans have also talked a lot about culture, coming down firmly on the side of social conservatism (at least in terms of rhetoric). This has led left-leaning pundits to ask frustrated questions, like What’s the Matter with Kansas?—that is, why do Republican voters in the American heartland allow themselves to be hoodwinked in this way, voting in favor of economic policies that are contrary to their interests in return for little more than rhetorical genuflection toward the concerns of the religious right?

When this history (from Reagan through the Trump years) is combined with evidence showing that the supposedly far more populist contemporary GOP wants to use a debt-ceiling vote next year as leverage to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, we’re left with the suspicion that the main thing that’s distinctive about the post-Trump right is the intensity and divisiveness of its rhetoric. Whereas George W. Bush sold his upper-income tax cuts and efforts to privatize Social Security by talking about upholding the sanctity of traditional marriage and protecting the weakest among us (fetuses) from the lethal violence of abortion, Trump and his acolytes prefer demonizing immigrants and progressive activists.     

Call it the weaponization of incoherence: The words are more culturally populist than ever, but behind them the party of Reagan, Bush, and Paul Ryan still lurks, ready and eager to enact the same plutocratic policy agenda it’s favored for years.

An Incoherent Reality

To an intellectual, the incoherence can appear baffling. You either want minimal government so big business and the rich can thrive or a big government fighting for workers. You’re either a libertarian championing freedom in general or an authoritarian eager to give a free hand to a lawless president. A party that pushes both sides of those binaries makes no sense at all. I’ll admit that’s how it often looks to me, too.

But in reality (as opposed to in the crystal palaces of ideas in which intellectuals prefer to spend their days), both can exist simultaneously. That’s because we’re a sprawling country of 330 million people with just two political parties, each of which is a conglomeration of clashing groups and ideas.

On economic policy, the Democrats range from Michael Bloomberg-style neoliberalism all the way to Bernie Sanders’ democratic socialism. For a long time, the GOP was (or at least appeared to be) united in favor of tax cuts and limited government. But that’s no longer true. As a result, the party is now both/and on the question, even if reason insists on viewing it as inevitably either/or.

The incoherence at the level of ideas is acute enough that some are convinced the Republican Party must be on the verge of tearing itself apart, or at least about to pay a severe penalty at the ballot box. Yet the GOP somehow keeps holding together and proving itself competitive in elections using the glue of negative partisanship.

That’s the reality of American politics at the moment. Even if it sometimes makes no damn sense to someone like me.