GOP Values
The party is willing to punish bipartisanship while remaining mute on extremism
Joe Biden can rightly boast that the infrastructure bill that passed the House of Representatives last week is a bipartisan achievement: all but six Democrats voted for it in addition to 13 Republicans. In the Senate, the bill passed by a genuinely impressive vote of 69 to 30, with 18 Republicans supporting the whole Democratic caucus. This across-the-aisle cooperation has been very rare since the election of Barack Obama in 2008, and Biden can accurately claim that he’s having some success in breaking the logjam of partisan gridlock.
Naturally, there is a gathering backlash as congressional Republicans try to re-assert party discipline. As Punchbowl reports, “The GOP leadership is bracing for rank-and-file lawmakers to attempt to strip committee assignments from the 13 Republican lawmakers who voted for the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. Several of these lawmakers are also ranking members — top Republicans on committees — and those could be at risk, too.”
The threat of party punishment facing wayward Republicans is a plausible one. We’ve already seen that many Republicans who voted to impeach or remove Trump, notably congresswoman Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, have been marginalized within their own party.
This desire to assert party discipline is all the more striking considering the sort of behaviour that goes unpunished by the Republican party. On Monday, congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene posted a startling Twitter thread where she said she wanted to find “common ground” with the Nation of Islam on their rigid opposition to covid vaccination. She acknowledged that she found the adamant Black nationalism of the Nation of Islam off-putting. “But I also found out that the Nation of Islam sees the use and benefit of Ivermectin and is very angry that our media, Democrats, and Dr. Fauci have attacked the drug and refuse to save people’s lives by not promoting it and shunning the use of it,” Greene tweeted (medical advice that is, to put it mildly, dubious). “We have common ground there.” The Nation of Islam of course is notorious for its anti-Semitic and anti-gay politics. One of the anti-vaccination articles from the Nation of Islam that Greene posted on her thread claimed, “Jews have always been successful in pitting us against each other.”
Greene has yet to be rebuked by the GOP.
On Sunday, Congressman Paul Gosar tweeted an animated video depicting him killing Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and slashing Joe Biden with two swords.
As the Washington Post describes the video, “the congressman is depicted fighting the Titans alongside Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and Lauren Boebert (Colo.). In one scene, Ocasio-Cortez’s face is edited over one of the Titans’ faces. Gosar flies into the air and slashes the Titan in the back of the neck, killing it. In another scene, Gosar swings two swords at a foe whose face has been replaced by that of Biden.”
Gosar has yet to receive any rebuke from the Republican Party for the tweet.
In noticing how Republicans are punitive towards those who break party rank on policy issues but lenient towards extremists like Greene and Gosar, we can draw reasonable inferences about the party’s values.
Party discipline isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Historically American political parties have been very loose coalitions, with plenty of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats around to create cross-partisan coalitions. This has changed in recent decades, with a move towards more cohesive ideological parties along the lines found in other democracies. The Republicans are at the forefront of the change, while the Democrats (as displayed by the recent infighting) lag behind by remaining more ideologically heterogenous. But even the Democrats are more cohesive now than they were 20 or 30 years ago: conservative Democrats used to be a much bigger part of the party than they are now. In 2009-2010, Barack Obama faced a much more recalcitrant conservative minority in his party than Joe Biden does now.
In theory, this move towards more cohesive parties, especially if coupled with reforms like abolishing the filibuster, could be good for American politics. It would make it easier for the electorate to have clear-cut choices.
The problem is the principles upon which Republicans are cohering. If they punish those who cooperate with Democrats while turning a blind eye to extremists in their ranks, it’s hard not to see the party as committed to partisanship for its own sake, held together only by the negative imperative of stopping the Democrats. This negative partisanship is an ideology of pure oppositionalism, unmoored to any other principle.
Negative partisanship is a viable organizing principle thanks to a political system that has many veto points (legislation has to clear the house, the Senate, and be signed by the president, while still being subject to court review) and counter-majoritarian structures (the Senate, the electoral college, gerrymandering, the courts). In other words, Republicans could feasibly continue to function as a purely reactionary party with a robust extremist wing for many years to come. Figuring out ways to combat and contain this reactionary party will remain the most pressing political problem for Americans.
(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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"it’s hard not to see the party as committed to partisanship for its own sake, held together only by the negative imperative of stopping the Democrats."
Cleek's Law: today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today: updated daily.
Very insightful read from both you and WaPo. I'm getting curious about how "Ideological heterogeneity" led to the slow downfall of the Weimar Republic in Germany ~100 years ago. This led Germany to become fertile ground for conscriptive right wing extremism and nationalism, as well as intolerance of anyone who questioned it along the way.