Why the Republicans can’t just get along
Peter Spiliakos
House Republicans’ inability to agree on a speaker has been blamed on the convergence of several factors: a narrow majority, the presence of some members who might very charitably be described as eccentrics, and the Freedom Caucus, which bills itself as more-principled-than-the-rest conservatives. But the leadership void is also being caused by the fact that the Republican Party has trouble deciding what it wants. And that is because the party’s ideology no longer produces conviction, even as members of Congress compete to claim the mantle of conservative purity.
It may sound counterintuitive to lament a lack of ideology in today’s GOP, but consider the Democrats. Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) last speakership coincided with a bare Democratic majority as well. The party had 222 seats. And Pelosi had to deal with her own radicals, the “Squad,” along with a bigger group of left-wing members called the Congressional Progressive Caucus. But Pelosi didn’t face a bizarre coup. That wasn’t because the Squad lacked for ideology or ill temper. It was because, at this moment, Democrats have more in common than Republicans do, and Democrats have a stronger belief in their agenda than do Republicans. That makes it easier for Republican politicians to put television hits above the good of the party and the country.
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One way to understand the differences between the two parties is that the Democrats have a linear ideological spectrum on more policy, meaning it’s easier to discern the policy aims and thus craft a path to a compromise.
Take healthcare. Some centrist Democrats want to mandate private health insurers cover more procedures and to increase Medicaid coverage for low-income people. Other, more radical Democrats want to ban private health insurance altogether and force everyone onto a government single-payer insurance system.
Those are big differences, but both centrists and radicals want to move healthcare policy in the direction of comprehensive prepayment of medical services and greater government-provided coverage relative to the status quo. The Democrats, whether centrist or radical, are moving in the same direction even if they disagree on how far to take it in that direction. This creates room for Democrats to work together and compromise in ways that allow pretty much every faction in the party to believe that policy has moved in the direction they wanted.
Not all policies are like that. Democrats are all over the place on trade, as are the Republicans, but Democratic centrists and radicals are directionally aligned on a lot of economic and social policy, from entitlement spending to immigration to abortion to racial preferences.
The Republicans have a coherent ideological spectrum in fewer areas. What is the Republican spectrum on healthcare policy now that Paul Ryan’s political career is dead and buried? Nobody knows — least of all the congressional Republicans who would be tasked with crafting legislation and whipping votes on it.
On immigration, some Democrats have complained about the sheer number of migrants getting across the border thanks to the Biden administration’s failure theater at the border crossings, but Democratic elites are pro-amnesty for those here and support more legal immigration. There are differences in detail and how far to go, but Democrats are directionally aligned. Republicans are divided between an immigration-restrictionist voting base and elite Republican politicians, many of whose own immigration policy preferences aren’t all that different from those of the average House Democrat. It is tougher for Republicans to craft an immigration agenda where everyone feels like policy has moved in their direction because Republicans can’t agree on the direction.
There are areas in which Republicans do have an ideological spectrum. On guns, abortion, critical race theory, domestic spending, and taxes, you can sort Republicans as more or less conservative based on how much spending they want to cut, how much they want to restrict abortion, or how few gun restrictions they support.
But this checklist measure of conservatism is often overlaid with, and sometimes overridden by, an understanding of conservatism as negative polarization. The more you fight Democrats, and the more flamboyantly and outrageously you do so, the more conservative you appear to be to the base. The converse is also true. If you refuse to fight the Democrats because of your adherence to norms that aren’t inherently ideological, then you are a RINO (a Republican In Name Only), a coward, and a traitor, regardless of your score on checklist conservatism.
You can see this with how the varied wings of the party approach Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). McConnell isn’t just a checklist conservative — he is a strong Republican partisan. Democrats will never forgive him for the blockade of Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court appointment that denied liberals a majority on the high court. But McConnell opposed Trump’s attempt to steal the 2022 elections by sabotaging the electoral count, so McConnell is a RINO.
There is nothing conservative (or liberal) about any of this in an ideological sense. There is a relatively stable conservative position on gun regulation: Conservatives want less of it. They want less of it now. They wanted less of it 20 years ago. There is no stable conservative position on whether the incumbent vice president has the unilateral, discretionary power to disqualify electors selectively so as to reverse the presidential election. Highly negatively polarized conservatives supported former Vice President Mike Pence having that power but would revolt if Vice President Kamala Harris tried to use it to reverse a Biden 2024 defeat.
This override of ideological conservatism by conservatism-as-negative-polarization recurs over and over again because virtually any fight can be turned into us (conservatives) vs. them (liberals). Anything can become central if the “conservative” side makes liberals angry. It could be impeaching President Joe Biden. It could be cutting off funding to Ukraine. It could be defending Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) making a disrupting public spectacle at a performance of Beetlejuice. It doesn’t have to matter or make sense. It only matters to the degree that it offers the opportunity to defy liberals.
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And that points to the problem of conviction. The reason so many conservatives can make everything matter is because their alleged beliefs — that is, their ideological principles — don’t matter enough. They don’t care enough about abortion or guns or critical race theory in schools or the border or the radicalization of government bureaucracies to focus on those issues. If they did care enough, they wouldn’t pick so many pointless or self-defeating fights. They certainly wouldn’t blow up the House Republican leadership over a series of personal and policy quarrels that no one can keep track of.
One of the reasons why Pelosi was able to keep the Squad from blowing up the narrow Democratic majority was because enough Democrats, both centrists and radicals, agreed on enough and cared enough about public policy to work together. Republicans are falling apart because too many of them agree on too little and value nothing more than their personal ambitions.
Peter Spiliakos lives in Massachusetts and is a former columnist for the online version of First Things.