Republicans lost in the wilderness while Trump rules the roost
The Conservative Political Action Conference, the GOP’s cherished annual jamboree, kicks off today. Hosted every year, the event is a good insight into the competing trends present within the US conservative movement, now synonymous with the Republicans. If there is one message to take away from this year’s line-up is that Donald Trump may have lost the election but the Republicans are still the party of Trump – perhaps more than ever. And yet, this leaves still hovering a question that has been present since 2016 – what is Trumpism beyond Trump himself?
Looking at the speaker’s list, absolute loyalty to Trump seems to be the only necessary, and acceptable, qualification. Top of the bill is Trump himself while notable in his absence is Vice-President Mike Pence, who just year was listed in the number two slot – before he committed apostasy and followed his constitutional duty in certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 election. Mitt Romney, who just eight years ago was the party’s presidential nominee, is nowhere in sight – nor is any other Republican who voted to impeach Trump.
Casting about for the party’s old guard the closest one comes is to Ted Cruz, elected in 2013 on the back of the Tea Party wave – back when that seemed the craziest the Republicans had to offer – and who is now a close Trump ally and who played a leading role in objecting to the certification of Biden’s victory.
There are a few conservative rising stars on display but they are something to behold. Josh Hawley the Senator from Missouri elected in 2018 who – along with Cruz – lead the charge to overturn the election in the Senate is prominently billed. We also have Lauren Boebert. Only elected in 2020 the congresswoman has already managed to distinguish herself for voicing support for the QAnon conspiracy… The idea that top Democrats are part of an international satanic paedophile ring may sound a bit out there but as Trump himself said “I’ve heard these are people that love our country, so I don’t know really anything about it other than they do supposedly like me.”
Yet, beyond Trump what unites these people? What is the Republican agenda?
Most Republicans will claim they are the party of the working class. It’s a view that has been around ever since Trump narrowly won the Rust Belt in 2016 off the back of white blue-collar voters defecting from their usual Democrat allegiances. After Trump made sizeable inroads among Latino voters, and perhaps a few small ones among African-American voters, in 2020 the tag line had been hastily expanded to read the new party of the multi-racial working class.
But what does this really mean? There are two interpretations. For Greg Swenson, a spokesperson for Republicans Overseas, the shift seems mainly ones of style. “When Trump came to power we were worried he wouldn’t govern like a conservative but he did. On the tax cut in 2018 sure other Republicans would have done that but would they have been as aggressive? Same goes for slashing regulation, he went in like a bull in a china shop. What I think Trump managed – by tapping into that anger at establishment politicians on both sides of the aisle – was showing working people that these things help them by creating jobs.”
In terms of concrete policy shifts, Swenson did suggest Trump had changed calculations about China and trade. However, when it comes to winning the 2024 election – where polls suggest Trump will once again be the Republican nominee – Swenson thinks the key lies with once again tapping into anger at the perceived liberal establishment. “The next election could be woke vs unwoke. And we could win that.”
Still, this approach doesn’t necessarily stack-up. Certainly, anti-establishment sentiment is a big part of Trump’s appeal. However, his victory in the 2016 election also came in the large part off winning independents by unceremoniously ditching long-standing, but unpopular, Republican priorities of making large cuts to popular programmes like Medicare and Medicaid. Swing voters saw him as a moderate.
Later when Trump endorsed more traditional conservative policies attempting to repeal Obamacare and passing his tax cut – while promised infrastructure spending failed to materialise – Republicans lost the 2018 midterm elections in a landslide. Even his shattering of liberal pieties seems to have tipped from asset to liability as college-educated suburban voters fled the party in the last election.
This has lead some conservative thinkers to another interpretation of Trumpism – that it means conservatives getting more comfortable with big government. In the Senate figures like Hawley, Romney, and Marco Rubio are dipping their toes into ideas like industrial strategy, minimum wage hikes, and increased child support.
However, there are problems with this approach as well. As Geoffrey Kabaservice, Director of Political Studies at the Niskansen Centre, bluntly puts it: “Some people are trying to put flesh on the bones of some sort of populist agenda that Trump maybe sketched out. But the party as a whole is too much in the hands of lunatics at the state level. It’s also going to have a real problem breaking with its donor class who don’t want it at all to stand for a populist agenda and do want to go back to the good old Reaganite themes.”
The complete breakdown in partisan relations that occurred under Trump also complicates the issue. Hawley’s ideas of blue-collar conservatism has seen him cooperate with Democrats on Big Tech regulation. Now, following his objections to certifying Biden’s victory and the storming of Capitol Hill, Democrats won’t even give him the time of day.
Meanwhile, what once was the Republican centre that could theoretically have backed parts of a populist agenda has almost completely disappeared – and what survives is alienated from Trump. Indeed, the boldest piece of Republican populism floated of far was Romney’s plans to sharply increase child benefits on conservative pro-family grounds. However, Romney is alienated from the Trumpian mainstream that controls the party. Furthermore, while the plan attracted praise from the left, almost all Republicans – even figures like Hawley and Rubio – trotted out their usual criticisms of welfare provisions.
Amidst all these tensions it seems that only Trump can provide unity. His appeal to the party base is founded on a personalised loyalty to him letting him elide these policy tensions. Yet, as 2020 proved this personal appeal was not enough to win a majority outside his own party. And so long as Trump is present, the GOP’s continued focus on a man who seems to have no values beyond his own self-interest is undermining its own ability to articulate a new vision of what it stands for.