Did you
miss the Republican Party that existed before Donald Trump came along? Are you
nostalgic for the days of John Boehner battling Tea Party rebels over the debt
ceiling or the fiscal cliff, or Ted Cruz’s “plan” to defund Obamacare? Do you
pine for the years when the crucial test of conservative purity was a
commitment to an implausible deficit reduction plan, the good old days when
empty suits and aspiring lobbyists battled libertarian ideologues and aspiring
cable news personalities for the chance to advance an agenda of mild austerity
and business-friendly tax cuts?
اضافة اعلان
Good
news, then; those days are back. The failure of the “red wave” in the 2022
midterms and Trump’s subsequent diminishment have had a reverse-wave effect: It
is like watching a wall of water roll backward, exposing the old coastline, the
political topography that the water covered up. Kevin McCarthy’s embarrassing
struggle to claim the speakership, and the week of chaos in the House of
Representatives, do not properly belong to the Trump era. It’s the old world
come again, the GOP ancient regime with all its dysfunctions, stalemates, and
futility.
Part of Trump’s original success rested on the way he freed the Republican Party from this dead end by resolutely refusing to campaign on the True Conservative™ catechism and elevating issues that mattered more to less-ideological conservatives and swing voters.
Not
that the flood did not change the landscape. Some of the House Republicans who
have bedeviled McCarthy are Tea Party throwbacks, but others are more Trumpian
figures, creatures of right-wing celebrity and brands unto themselves. The
would-be Republican populists in the Senate — figures like J.D. Vance, Josh
Hawley, and Tom Cotton — are not libertarians in the style of circa-2013 Cruz,
which may change the role the Senate plays in intra-Republican battles. The
national party and its ambitious governors are now more likely to be fighting
over cultural issues than fiscal ones. And Trump himself is hardly finished.
But in
the negotiations over the speakership, it has been clear that certain pre-Trump
patterns are still resilient. On one side, embodied now by McCarthy and his
allies, you have a GOP establishment trying to run the House in a centralized
fashion without any particular vision or agenda. On the other, in the factions
that resisted his speakership, you have conservatives with a lot of legitimate
complaints about process joined to a policy vision that’s mostly performative gestures
and fiscal apocalypticism. The likely result, as in the Tea Party era, is a
Congress incapable of governing, save through last-minute brinkmanship and a
conservatism that manifests itself in demands for implausibly sweeping budget
cuts and not much else.
Part of
Trump’s original success rested on the way he freed the Republican Party from
this dead end by resolutely refusing to campaign on the True Conservative™
catechism and elevating issues that mattered more to less-ideological
conservatives and swing voters. He did all this in a demagogic style, but his
promises — to bring back jobs lost to China and build new highways, to protect
Social Security while ending illegal immigration — helped the GOP slip out of
its Barack Obama-era trap, where the congressional party appeared to be
obsessed with unpopular spending cuts but also was rarely capable of driving
any bargains to achieve them.
For the
House GOP today, an equivalent escape is imaginable. Its majority could be used
to pass a series of messaging bills on issues where conservatives have, or
might have, an advantage with the public: a crime bill, a border security bill,
a bill highlighting issues with military recruitment and readiness, reforms to
academic funding and tax breaks and school standards that aim to weaken the
elite-college cartel and influence the educational culture wars, some version
of the pro-family policies that anti-abortion groups have pushed for in the
wake of Dobbs. In each case, the goal would be to position the party on ground
where the concerns of activists and independent voters might overlap and set
the GOP up for success in 2024.
The question is whether, along the way to that inevitable outcome, House Republicans present themselves as a plausible governing party, or whether their internal divisions yield both emptiness and chaos, letting Democrats and the Biden White House cast them as the party of sabotage, the enemies of economic recovery.
On
fiscal issues, this kind of strategy would recognize the impossibility of
either a grand bargain of the kind that eluded Boehner and Obama or the forcing
of meaningful fiscal changes on a Democratic-controlled Senate and White House.
Instead, it would propose budgets that mostly seek cuts in places that matter
to Democratic interest groups and govern with deals that include some
inevitable fakery and gimmicks, but basically just preserve the status quo.
Such
deals are what will happen anyway: There will not be a radical change to our
fiscal trajectory between now and 2024. The question is whether, along the way
to that inevitable outcome, House Republicans present themselves as a plausible
governing party, or whether their internal divisions yield both emptiness and
chaos, letting Democrats and the Biden White House cast them as the party of
sabotage, the enemies of economic recovery.
We will
have more clarity when we see the price of victory in the speaker’s race or
when the debt ceiling negotiations get here. But we probably know the answer
already.
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