Give Donald Trump this: His travel ban enraged only half the country. The House Republicans’ attempt to replace the Affordable Care Act, meanwhile, has alienated everyone, including members of the Republican Party itself.
The bill was supposed to go to a vote on Friday, but the leadership, facing a likely defeat, was forced to pull it when it became clear it didn’t have the necessary support. It was perhaps better off dead: Already a rushed, Rube Goldberg solution in search of a problem, by the time it neared the House floor it had so many compromises woven into it to win votes that, even if it passed, it would have probably gone down in defeat in the Senate.
It’s not simply that Trump and the Republicans are incompetent and inexperienced, though they are: The overwhelming majority of the party’s congressional delegation wasn’t even in the House of Representatives when Barack Obama was first elected to the White House, and despite his reputation as a savvy pol, Paul Ryan, who became House Speaker only in 2015, has almost no record of legislative achievement. (In his time in the House, which he joined in 1999, he’s managed to get signed into law only three of the bills he originally sponsored.)
Nor is it that their time in the opposition has left the Republicans ill equipped to govern: After years of wandering in the wilderness, neither the Ronald Reagan administration nor George W. Bush’s people were at a loss, when suddenly given the keys to the castle, about what to do. And as demonstrated by the travel ban and the Republican division over Trump’s budget (despite its fulfilling long-held conservative dreams), the meltdown over Obamacare repeal can’t be chalked up solely to the byzantine complexities of American health care.
The problem with these explanations, which many of Trump’s liberal critics have embraced, is that they stop at the personalities and policies, the misplaced priorities and tactics, of the current Republican Party. But the confusion and incoherence over health care reflect a deeper impasse on the Right, one that will dog it no matter where it goes next — whether it’s a new assault on Obamacare, cutting popular federal programmes and agencies, or many of the other major planks in the Republican agenda.
The Republicans began the year joyful: They now control the elected branches of the government at the federal level and in 25 states, and the legislatures of seven other states. This, they said, was their chance to fulfil their dreams on a range of issues, including repealing Obamacare. But a sizeable portion of the population now believes that health care is a fundamental good that the government should provide, and the rift between some of the House Republicans, who wanted to keep that basic commitment, and the House Freedom Caucus, which opposed it, ultimately sank the bill.
This tension between aspiration and actuality, not just over health care but over a wide range of issues, is neither new nor peculiar to the right. All movements and parties experience it: For years, Britain’s Conservative Party was divided between its Thatcherite hard-liners and the so-called wets. But movements and parties in their ascendancy have an easier time finessing that tension.
Insurgent movements
When confronting an enemy that controls the state or the terms of political debate, insurgent movements are disciplined by the combination of their ambition and their weakness. Because they are in the minority, the movement’s true believers understand that their primary task is to win converts. That task forces them to cajole and confront, to engage and entertain, the other side. If they win converts, if they see their movement grow, they’ll confidently accept a temporary compromise with their newfound, perhaps softer allies as the price of power — and the promise of greater power to come. The movement thus develops a suppleness, a buoyancy, that enables it to smooth over the inevitable differences and fissures that accompany any expansion beyond its base.
Movements on the rise are also forced to shape and sharpen their ideas, to formulate and test their policies in the news media and academia, or out of the spotlight in local precincts and party primaries. The philosopher and economist Friedrich A. Hayek, whose writings helped shape the modern right, said the free-market ideal most “progressed” when it was “on the defensive”. That encounter with reality, of trying to proselytise and govern amid an enemy more powerful than you, is a vital teacher. In that classroom, movements learn what to think, what to do and how to do it. Once they graduate, they’re ready not only to seize power but also to exercise it.
Movements long ensconced and habituated to power — such that when their leaders are out of office, their ideas still dominate — get out of that practice. They lose touch with that external reality of their opponents. The impulsion outward disappears; they grow isolated and doctrinaire, more sectarian than evangelical. Arguments their predecessors had to sweat their way through soften into lazy nostrums or harden into rigid dogmas. The free-market ideal, Hayek says, “became stationary when it was most influential”.
Now the movement’s problem is the opposite of when it was in its ascendancy. Its leaders may control all the elected branches of the federal government, as the Republicans do now and as the Democrats did under Jimmy Carter, and many of the state governments, but they no longer control or set the terms of political debate as much as they once did. Their power in government conceals their slipping hold on public legitimacy.
It’s not that the character of the personnel has changed: The Tea Party supporter is no more zealous than Barry Goldwater, and on any given day, Reagan could be as fuzzy and foggy as Trump. It’s the context that has changed. Yesterday’s conservative wrote and read his Bible in the crucible of defeat; today’s recites his catechism in a cathedral of success.
It’s no surprise, then, that the Republican Party should now find itself uncertain about what to do. After 40 years in Zion, it has lost the will and clarity it acquired while wandering in the desert. The movement has lost the constraint of circumstance.
It’s too early to declare the repeal of Obamacare dead. Other constraints — the need to cut spending to pay for and justify the tax cuts that have always been the North Star of the movement — may make themselves felt and push even the most extreme forces in the Republican Party to return for a compromise. But the chaos surrounding health care, like that of the Trump administration, is a sign of further disjunction to come.
The disjunction may be over Russia — any movement whose spokesmen once cried “20 years of treason” and who rode to power on the claim that the Democrats were soft on the Soviets may find it difficult, with time, simply to parry or ignore the Democrats’ charge that the head of their party may have compromising ties to Russia’s leader. It may be over the budget, the debt ceiling or trade. But one way or another, the party is headed for a showdown with itself.
Its successes over the years demand nothing less.
— New York Times News Service
Corey Robin, a professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is the author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, which will be reissued this autumn with a new chapter on Donald Trump.
