Hopeless, hapless House Republicans
Hugo Gurdon
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Some political parties experience a sort of spasm that looks like an effort to alienate voters. Their members detest each other and squabble, shattering the carapace of unity that parties generally try to present to the outside world.
In Great Britain, it is Labour, the party of the Left, that is most susceptible to this self-destructive freakout. Part of Margaret Thatcher’s great good fortune when she was elected in May 1979 was that Labour was ripping itself to pieces.
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The Conservative Party is perhaps the most successful party in the world in terms of winning. It rarely allows internal ructions, let alone something so alien as ideology, to obscure its path to power. But Thatcher was additionally blessed by an opposition that went on a journey of lonely self-destruction for nearly two decades.
It chose Michael Foot, a well-liked but utterly incompetent old Trotskyite, as its leader. This allowed Thatcher, in 1983, to secure an even bigger landslide victory than she’d managed four years earlier. It was like watching the Romans salt the earth in Carthage.
Labour kept pulling itself apart, replacing Foot with a Welsh windbag, Neil Kinnock. The one good thing about Kinnock was not the speech President Joe Biden plagiarized but a joke he told about the lavish corruption of European Union officials, which he learned about to his evident satisfaction after he’d been pensioned off to a sinecure in Brussels. “What’s the difference between an EU official and a supermarket cart?” he asked, then supplied the answer, “You can get a lot more food and drink into an EU official.”
After pulling itself apart for a decade, Labour finally pulled itself together, chose Tony Blair, and regained power in 1997, after 19 years on the outs.
In the United States, the party that goes in for self-immolation is the Republican Party. Democrats’ aversion to losing power over ideological or internecine difference is glaringly clear in the way they happily floated off to the left, going with the flow, despite their president having run as a centrist.
But Republicans are like Labour. They are ripping each other’s throats out over personal and ideological pet causes. In failing to choose a speaker of the House of Representatives, they seem to know only whom they hate and what they refuse to accept, not what or whom they want.
As my colleague Byron York recently noted, they seem distinctly uncomfortable being in the majority and are doing their level best to win back the minority in 2024. It’s a contemptible sight — one that produced an unusually clear flash of anger from the GOP’s soft-spoken electoral guru Karl Rove, who’s spent his career showing Republicans how to win.
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At the presidential level, Republicans seem to be doing the same thing, passing over their array of competent candidates who’d be odds-on to beat Biden and going instead for Donald Trump, the baggage-laden former president, who may be the only plausible nominee with a solid shot at losing to the hapless and unpopular Biden.
Do Republicans actually want to win? It doesn’t look like it. That’s a separate question from whether they should win. But it is one they need to ask themselves.