This piece by Tim Alberta in Politico Magazine is really something. I find it hard to believe it’s taken this long to recognize the fact that the GOP is nothing but grievance and Trump but I suppose we all cling to our delusions about our own people, whether marriage, family, tribe, country or party, long after we should have realized it had gone off the rails. This is mainly because we usually contributed to this state of affairs and don’t want to take responsibility. But it’s also because we really don’t want to face up to traumatic change.
That’s what’s happening among elites in the Republican Party right now:
Earlier this month, while speaking via Zoom to a promising group of politically inclined high school students, I was met with an abrupt line of inquiry. “I’m sorry, but I still don’t understand,” said one young man, his pitch a blend of curiosity and exasperation. “What do Republicans believe? What does it mean to be a Republican?”
You could forgive a 17-year-old, who has come of age during Donald Trump’s reign, for failing to recognize a cohesive doctrine that guides the president’s party. The supposed canons of GOP orthodoxy—limited government, free enterprise, institutional conservation, moral rectitude, fiscal restraint, global leadership—have in recent years gone from elastic to expendable. Identifying this intellectual vacuum is easy enough. Far more difficult is answering the question of what, quite specifically, has filled it.
Bumbling through a homily about the “culture wars,” a horribly overused cliché, I felt exposed. Despite spending more than a decade studying the Republican Party, embedding myself both with its generals and its foot soldiers, reporting on the right as closely as anyone, I did not have a good answer to the student’s question. Vexed, I began to wonder who might. Not an elected official; that would result in a rhetorical exercise devoid of introspection. Not a Never Trumper; they would have as much reason to answer disingenuously as the most fervent MAGA follower.
I decided to call Frank Luntz. Perhaps no person alive has spent more time polling Republican voters and counseling Republican politicians than Luntz, the 58-year-old focus group guru. His research on policy and messaging has informed a generation of GOP lawmakers. His ability to translate between D.C. and the provinces—connecting the concerns of everyday people to their representatives in power—has been unsurpassed. If anyone had an answer, it would be Luntz.
“You know, I don’t have a history of dodging questions. But I don’t know how to answer that. There is no consistent philosophy,” Luntz responded. “You can’t say it’s about making America great again at a time of Covid and economic distress and social unrest. It’s just not credible.”
Luntz thought for a moment. “I think it’s about promoting—” he stopped suddenly. “But I can’t, I don’t—” he took a pause. “That’s the best I can do.”
When I pressed, Luntz sounded as exasperated as the student whose question I was relaying. “Look, I’m the one guy who’s going to give you a straight answer. I don’t give a shit—I had a stroke in January, so there’s nothing anyone can do to me to make my life suck,” he said. “I’ve tried to give you an answer and I can’t do it. You can ask it any different way. But I don’t know the answer. For the first time in my life, I don’t know the answer.”
[…]
“Owning the libs and pissing off the media,” shrugs Brendan Buck, a longtime senior congressional aide and imperturbable party veteran if ever there was one. “That’s what we believe in now. There’s really not much more to it.”
Actually, that’s way, way too easy. There is much more to it.
Owning the libs and pissing off the media is the tactic they use. But what binds them is what has bound them underneath all the dogwhistles and clever intellectual obfuscations for the past 40 years: white patriarchy and protection of the malefactors of great wealth. And like it or not, Donald Trump is the perfect embodiment of that worldview.
The article bemoans the lack of policy ideas, harking back to the “bold” agenda of Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan. Alberta notes that they still have not come up with an alternative to Obamacare which should give him a clue as to why this has happened. they tried all that stuff and it didn’t work. Their agenda was a disaster and they don’t have any new “conservative” ideas to replace them, which is to say no new “market-oriented” ideas to replace them. That’s because market solutions have proved to be totally inadequate. They are capitalism, not government, and those two things are not the same thing.
Anyway, it’s an interesting article. I’m sure conservatives will someday get themselves together but there is no guarantee that the right will moderate. They could easily go the other way. They’re halfway there already.