The Right Has a Republicans Problem

Saboteurs within do more damage than opponents without.

A few weeks ago, I gave the Republican Party some unsolicited advice about what they should do if they want to get back into the saddle and start winning elections again after this year’s string of off-season/special election losses. Essentially it boiled down to using power to fight the Democrats while giving your own client base the things that it wants. In other words, what people throughout history, in every era, in every type of political system from the most despotic to the most egalitarian, would recognise as basic political acumen. The Democrats, despite their complete disconnection from several basic facets of reality, understand this principle and apply it effectively. The Republicans, on the other hand, are absolutely abysmal at doing anything for their putative base, almost as if they don’t want to dirty their hands with something as tawdry and plebeian as “giving the voters what they want.” As a group, they will routinely use “democracy” as an excuse to not actually do democracy. My advice was (in theory) predicated on Republicans actually wanting to win, but given their behaviour, both recently and at other times when they’ve accidentally been given power by the voters, I don’t think we can take that as a given.

The Republican Party, both nationally and the state level, has been handed once more the opportunity to fundamentally alter the direction of this country in a way favourable to restoring some sanity, in the very least. Yet, they refuse to take it. When standing at the precipice, they will never fail to choose the cowardly path of going back to the camp. They’re simply not a serious political party anymore.

After all, what are we to make of Republicans in Indiana refusing to redistrict to take away seats from the Democrats? This is merely counteracting what Democrats have been doing for decades. The Democrats probably hold 20-30 seats in the US House of Representatives that they have no business having were it not for actual gerrymandering. I mean, have you seen some of the districts that Democrats have produced in days gone by?

Ladies and gentlemen, your DEMOCRACY.

There’s a reason New England routinely votes ~40% Republican yet that party holds not a single House seat in any of those six states. So this year, Republicans in some state houses finally found the gumption to pass new districting maps which take away undeserved seats from the Democrats. Ironically, these maps were actually the opposite of gerrymandering - they mostly featured rational maps with reasonably drawn districts that merely didn’t run along highways to connect two Democrat-rich cities together and guarantee them a House seat. But not deep Red Indiana. Oh no, they wouldn’t want to swing on the slowest softball pitch the political world has ever thrown, would they?

Of course not, because (as failed 2016 Trump opponent John Kasich recently opined) that wouldn’t be fair. Because winning is BAD. Nice people don’t win. Nice people keep losing so that they can endlessly campaign off of complaining about how bad things are because the other guy keeps winning. It’s like the Republican Party is pathologically addicted to losing such that on the occasions where they do win, they go into losing withdrawal like a junkie who can’t get a hit.

Examples abound. Ohio is a safe Red state, yet the GOP there is on the verge of nominating Vivek Ramaswamy as their gubernatorial candidate. Yes, that Vivek Ramaswamy, the guy who is the platonic ideal of everything middle America hates about H-1B immigrationist toadies who talk down to Americans for having social lives and not spending 15 hours a day memorising words to win spelling bees. That guy who is currently behind in the polling for what should easily be an R+10 race. Nominating him would be a completely unforced error, yet they probably will early next year.

Everywhere you look, Republicans jump at the chance to sell out their own base, to prioritise Israel or Ukraine or whatever other foreign policy disaster waiting to happen over their own people, to take a PrInCiPLeD sTaNd!!1! that always seems to mean giving left-wing Democrats everything they want even when they’re out of power. At some point, basic pattern recognition kicks in and people start to see that this stuff isn’t accidental.

So what accounts for this behaviour? The theories are legion and a combination of them is probably in play here. Some suggest that the Republicans are on the take, that some concatenation of lobbyist monies and donations from pressure groups are weighing more heavily on the GOP’s consciences than is the will of their voters. Certainly, there must be some truth to that - there is a well-known Indian lobby (funded, some say, by the Indian government itself) which acts as a foreign influence group and serves to keep many Republicans friendly towards flooding us with H-1Bs and illegal Sikh truck drivers. Business groups which make heavy use of low-skill illegal alien labour fill a similar niche at the blue-collar level. All of this masks itself under the guise of bringing in “hard-workin’ immurgrunts” who “do the jerbs Amurikans won’t do” and all that. But dig just under the surface and it’s politicians and industry scabs making money all the way down.

Others propose that there is kompromat on many of these Republicans, that their behaviour is explained by a desire not to have some deep, dark secrets exposed. Maybe their names appear in “The Epstein Files” (assuming that said bundle of files even actually exists). Many explain it through simply cowardice or incompetence - Democrats run circles around them because they’re too afraid to stand up for their voters or too incapable of understanding how to play the political game. This last one I find a bit incredible considering how Republicans know very well how to play political games when it comes to trying to roadblock Trump or confound their own voters. Nevertheless, there is probably a place for all of these in any comprehensive description of the motivations of many GOP politicians.

However, what I think is the major issue that subsumes all the others is this - many Republicans are simply too intellectually brittle to be able to comprehend, much less adapt to, just how much the world has changed since their ideology was relevant. In many ways, this is even worse than the other stated reasons. At least if someone is on the take, they can always be offered more money or other tangible inducements to “switch sides.” If they’re being blackmailed, the blackmailers can always be neutralised by one means or another.

But intellectual stultification? That’s a whole different level of problem. And I’m convinced that’s what going on here, by and large. If the GOP seems like it can’t offer anything but policy solutions that were last viable around 1995, that’s because these GOPers themselves are still stuck in 1995. They still think that hordes of third world immigrants are “natural conservatives” who’ll happily assimilate and vote Republican because they’ve never updated their talking points since the first Bush administration. For them, keeping their voters happy amounts to cutting taxes and bombing Middle Eastern countries. They haven’t adjusted to the fact that nobody buys the foreign policy slop anymore, nor that it’s hard to care that much about tax rates when you can’t get a job because the job was either exported overseas or an immigrant was imported to fill it for half the cost.

A lot of this has to do with the fact that the GOP old guard is, well, old. Instead of gracefully stepping aside and letting the up-and-coming generations learn the ropes and fill the gaps, the Boomers who represent the typical Republican politician continue to hang on for dear life.

As a result, you have a bunch of Boomers who still act like they’re hammering out bipartisan deals with Bill Clinton, and what younger folks do manage to break into the halls of power basically adopt the same stagnant mindset. They’re essentially all a bunch of early 2000s NeoCons in a world where the only politically rational Rightist strategy is nationalist and introspective.

In my earlier post, I argued that the future lies with the young people. Duh. This wasn’t exactly my most esoteric or groundbreaking insight. Yet, it’s one that a lot of folks in the GOP can’t seem to grok. If your party wants to have a political future, it needs to find a way to help the young be able to get jobs, buy homes, marry, raise children, and establish their own futures. Yet, the GOP can’t figure out how to do this and thus risks alienating an entire generation whose only presented alternative will be the type of socialism that always fails, yet is always very, VERY good at making convincing sounding promises that it’ll work this time if you just give them another chance. Is that what you people want?

So what’s the solution? Well, this question assumes that there even is a political solution. Given how we just continue to head deeper and deeper into demographic-structural collapse, that may not be a good assumption. Certainly, setting up a situation in which nearly half the country, including a good chunk of the military-aged population, essentially has no viable political representation because you refuse to represent them is a recipe for a civil war or some similar disaster.

But ok, assuming there IS still a political solution to be had, what is it? Well, it’s to destroy the Republican Party, both from the inside and from without, and replace it with something in which the NeoCons and tone-deaf libertardians have been exorcised. Think of it as a political version of Schumpeter’s “creative destruction.” Don’t just tear down but build concurrently in its place. MAGA, such as it is, needs to be a purposefully predatory faction within the GOP. Folks better get serious about really organising at the local level, something which we ought to be good at, but which we aren’t because everyone is too jaded to care. Well, if you don’t want a civil war or something on your hands, maybe you ought to start caring? There’s no real reason why the 75 million people who voted for Trump and who’ve gotten sick of the games can’t create a parallel organisation to hollow out the GOP and wear it like our own skinsuit. The structure is already built, we just need to muscle our way in and take it, regardless of what the old guard thinks or does.

Will this happen? I don’t know, but I’m doubtful. Too many folks on the Right pride themselves on being so independent and freethinking that they can’t lower themselves to stop virtue signaling for five minutes and start playing well with others. But if we want to come through our impending final DST collapse with a society that doesn’t look like post-Yugoslav civil war Bosnia, folks on our side had better figure it out.