A Party Damaged by Factionalism
The Founders worried about self-interested factions as they went about creating the overarching set of rules for the federal government. James Madison in Federalist 10 called factionalism a dangerous vice of the human condition. He observed that people even when united under a common cause tended to surrender to unhelpful animosities over the most trivial of differences. Those differences, whether in opinion, property, or status, can become a galvanizing force for exclusionary allegiances and bitter in-fighting. Madison was probably not thinking about the small-ball unpleasantness of cliques bad-mouthing each other. Afterall, they still settled such personal disputes with dueling pistols at twenty paces back then. His concern was a far larger issue. Namely, the direct danger to individual rights posed by the combination of factionalism and the coercive powers of government.
But while Madison was focused on architecting a government that could constrain the bleaker aspects of humanity, factionalism can still be poisonous in less consequential situations. For instance, if the principles previously uniting a political party have withered, corrosive personal disputes can take their place and produce sharp fissures which are difficult to repair. Group cohesion suffers as unwilling participants exit the group while others retreat to alliances built on personal loyalties. A group suffering from factional division will be ill-prepared or even unable to motivate its members to undertake collective action. The rationale for the group’s very existence atrophies.
Therefore, any mission-centric group should guard against the dangers of divisive and destructive intrigues. However, circumstances do change and may lead to calls, even strident calls, for new approaches that should not be reflexively rejected out of hand. Responding with smothering conformity to every disruptive voice seems equally hazardous to group effectiveness. There may be times when some might see more clearly than others the need for a principled renewal. The trick is differentiating raucous but ultimately healthy recovery or even needed evolution from acrimonious clout-chasing and score-settling. No easy task given that the wrong call can lead to institutional disintegration. And truth be told, messengers of change can sometimes be more than a little irritating as they try to course-correct a group that has strayed from its originating principles. Sometimes, it’s just easier to ignore their sharp rhetoric and discount their uncomfortable observations. However, sharp rhetoric may be exactly the right response when ominous circumstances arise where important values left undefended may become values lost.
Witness the growing conditions placed on political speech in countries nominally guided by the principles of the Western Enlightenment. Once generally accepted as foundational to an informed and sovereign electorate, adversarial speech is now often rhetorically framed as misinformation or even equivalent to violence by self-anointed civil gatekeepers. Name calling rather than engagement may inflame partisan passions but it certainly fails to inform. The utter transformation of journalism into a stenographic service for the left-wing establishment couldn’t have happened without the more bovine-inclined among us simpering for authority figures to tell them what to read or say. A society generally besotted by emasculating emotionalism appears uninterested in raising a defense against encrusting a valued jewel of classical liberalism with such foolishness. The vapid hysteria over the term “bloodbath” is only the most recent example of encumbering political speech with manufactured outrage as a means to avoid engaging with substantive issues. So yes, sometimes disrupters are needed to force an awareness that Toto, and the rest of us, aren’t in Kansas anymore. A changing set of circumstances should absolutely force a reassessment of assumptions that might have previously been valid but are no longer working.
The advent of Trumpian politics in 2016 brought about an unanticipated, and in certain circles, unwelcome, critique of many Republican priorities. But when viewed with the benefit of hindsight, the provocations, like the causes of bankruptcy, were gradually building and then happened all at once. Overly credentialed and insular globalists were exercising political and economic power in ways that seemed oblivious to the needs of many Americans. At the same time, radical Leftists were gaining control of the cultural and civil high ground and began demanding obsequious compliance to a bitter and retributive ideology. Trump, no one’s idea of a political intellectual, nevertheless saw more clearly the real dangers of an elite-centered, transnational, and technocratic administrative state than did an inattentive and complacent Republican establishment.
Trump employed pithy slogans and stream-of-consciousness observations that were stylistically vulnerable to superficial ridicule but nonetheless highlighted serious issues. The Swamp really did need draining. Objective journalism really was murdered in darkness by a cartel pledging fealty to Fake News and social justice nonsense. America really was disadvantaged by border crashers, self-serving economic trading partners, and deadbeat NATO countries. COVID really did come from China, courtesy of the Wuhan Virology lab. Democrat party lawfare really did destabilize long-standing norms meant to protect electoral integrity. Social anarchists really were committed to destroying reliable energy production regardless of the completely predictable economic impacts. The Woke really were manically fixated on redistributing political authority along identitarian lines. The radical Left really does hate American values.
But instead of uniting around the invigorating call to Make America Great Again, Trump’s bluntly delivered critiques of long-accepted conventional dogma exposed a party oblivious to populist anger and distanced from any detectible foundational principles. The GOP certainly evidenced no urgency to retire its designation as a polite loser incapable of rolling back any of a multitude of Progressive policies generating societal dysfunction or producing economic stagnation. Why was it left to an ostentatious businessman with a messy personal life to blow up the status quo by declaring that interminable but ultimately impotent lip-service to conservatism was not a sufficient basis to claim party leadership?
Whatever the reason, the GOP was thrown into disarray by Trump’s heterodoxy. The Establishment pearl-clutchers retreated to their swooning couches and smelling salts determined to ignore the Orange Disrupter. At the same time, a class of performative poseurs arose who were completely oblivious to the fact that politics is a team effort. Many state and county organizations reimagined their political mission as deeply scrutinizing the Republican purity of their colleagues. Factions obsessed with diminishing anyone they deemed insufficiently Trumpy emerged. Mirroring Newton’s equations of motions, oppositional factions rose up to slander anyone calling to account the GOP indifference to Leftist cultural predations and the regional devastation wrought by disciples of comparative advantage as Trumpist Know-Nothings. A party represented by such extremes as a Liz Cheney sitting on a Democrat kangaroo court and a Matt Gaetz taking down his own Speaker has clearly elevated unserious personalities over its animating values. The furious in-fighting left the Democrats unopposed as they furthered their mission to inscribe Progressivism into every public sector entity from local dogcatcher to the American presidency.
Ridiculous and appalling behaviors don’t just happen at the national level. The 2024 Republican mandatory meeting in Arizona displayed the self-defeating factionalism that Madison rightly feared. A recording of a conversation that happened almost a year prior between Jeff DeWitt, the state GOP chairman, and Kari Lake, candidate for US Senate, was released just days before the meeting. A short time later, DeWitt resigned in protest. Setting aside whatever grotesque self-serving banalities were used to justify secretly record the conversation, only the most naïve could fail to perceive the timing of the release as nothing but a Machiavellian maneuver to deny others a chance to mount a response. Drawing conclusions from a private conversation that was undoubtedly edited for maximum impact exposes one to embarrassing retractions if counterfactuals surface later. But regardless, the legislative district representatives were stampeded into a snap election as Republicans battled for the microphone and laid waste to the personal integrity of their supposed colleagues.
A dysfunctional dynamic was dispiritedly evident at the state meeting. On the one hand, the people attending agreed in principle that the purpose of the Republican party rests on collectively advancing certain civil and economic principles. A party that channels the intentions of a like-minded people should obviously be more effective than a group of people acting by themselves. But in spite of the clear advantage of solidifying as a group behind shared values, some have determined that they have a monopoly on specifying the composition of those shared values. Their high opinion of their own keen insights apparently grants them permission to deny the legitimacy of anyone else’s viewpoints. Following the playbook of the shrill Woke, opponents are first deemed unworthy, and then any attack that defeats an opponent becomes justified.
Unfortunately, the direct effects of a scorched earth campaign are exactly that: a scorched earth. The institution meant to effectuate those shared objectives instead staggers toward ruin by internal factions fighting for dominance. Paraphrasing recent observations made by Judge James Ho of the fifth circuit, chest-pounding “my way or the highway” assertions are symptomatic of an immature intellectual development. In short, such people are acting like children.
Whoever engineered the palace coup within the Arizona GOP secured a pyrrhic victory that can only lay claim a weakened Arizona GOP. A bitterly fractured party will spend more time tending to internal grievances and jockeying for advantage instead of devising effective electoral strategies. A party that cannot operate without resorting to reputational destruction is simply doomed to irrelevance. Looking like an enraged couple fighting in a restaurant is not a good look for political activists in the business of persuasion. Many potentially open to Republican ideals will instead just turn away in embarrassment. Watching the self-initiated turmoil in an election year in a swing state must bring great joy to the Democrats.
The various warring factions in the GOP need to stand down. The Republican party must collectively reestablish what it actually stands for and then position itself to articulate and defend those principles as the path away from the dystopian identitarian tyranny favored by the Democrats. But that can’t happen until the institution entrusted with projecting those principles is valued more than whatever benefits accrue to those engaged in personal aggrandizement. The nature of politics is transactional, but it can’t be at the expense of the institution meant to advocate for fundamental principles such as a limited government, free markets, and properly balancing individual liberties and responsibilities. Within those broad principles, not everyone will have the same set of priorities, but that shouldn’t be a cause for excommunication. Some might emphasize taming governmental overreach into education, others will emphasize reducing economic regulations, still others may focus on strengthening electoral integrity. There is no shortage of outrageous threats to individual liberties that must be turned back. But one thing is clear: those threats emit from Democrats and not from other Republicans. Radicals controlling the Democrat Party represent a clear and present danger to the republican democracy Madison and his fellow founders created. The time has come to quit fighting each other like stupid children and face the real threat.
Photo by Richard Lee on Unsplash