WHAT REPUBLICANS REALLY WANT

William F. Buckley Jr. Once famously described conservatism thus: “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

He was right back then in 1955, and he’s only more right now in 2023.

The fact that the Republicans in the House are led by a minority that is willing for the sake of scoring political points to see the United States default on the national debt, while the majority of House Republicans will go along with such an act of treason is because the conservatives of Buckley’s time and now are significantly different. Committing such an act against the country would in fact please at least 60 percent of Republican voters who support such a plan according to a survey taken last month.

What Republicans really want is for things to STOP. They have come to the point through radicalization where they now believe that if they can’t have things they want, neither can anyone else. Since the country has “gone to hell” in their eyes, the addition problems debt default would create don’t amount to such a threat as everyone else sees in the situation.

This essential truth is why the House Republicans have no programs to implement now that they have a majority, and can only do “performative” actions. It’s why they intend to “investigate” the Bidens, Dr. Fauci, and anyone else whose competence in their work has made them confront their complete incompetence. It’s why they had no platform to run on in 2020 other than “What Trump says...”

It’s why Mitch McConnell was booed by the crowd when he appeared at the Republican Convention in 2016 and why he now has a net approval rating of negative 23 percent among Republicans according to a Monmouth University poll last month. It’s why Quiverin’ Qevin has a net approval rating of 9 percent among the voters.

As much as Democrats complain about Congress, that same poll has Chuck Shumer with a net 33 positive percentage approval rating among Democrats and Nancy Pelosi had a net 59 positive percentage approval rating. Democrats understand that progress happens, and the best way for progress to happen is to shape it.

John Boehner was unpopular with Republicans as was his successor Paul Ryan, and was why rising star Eric Cantor lost a primary to a far right nobody.

This is because Republican leaders cannot deliver what it is that Republican voters really want. And it’s why Republican leaders are afraid of their voters, because they know they cannot deliver what is truly wanted. All they can do is make performative gestures like voting to overturn the appropriation to hire new employees at the IRS, or pass new laws to make abortion even more illegal than it can be, and then claim “If we had the power, this is what we would do for you.”

For the House Republicans to win any legislative victory would do nothing to make them more popular with their voters. The underlying discontent of Republican voters is about the way everyday life is now. They’re pissed off that as white Christian men - and those guys are the ones at the head of this - they feel disempowered. They can’t tell shitty racist sexist xenophobic jokes and expect laughter at the punch line. They can’t qualify for a job as good as their daddy had by the fact they were born white men. And then when those jobs almost as good as what daddy had get filled by one of Those People - the ones they can’t describe in public with the ethnic, racist and sexist slurs they use among themselves to describe Those People - they get even angrier, their rage gets more suppressed.

This is what they mean when they use the word “woke” and why they hate what that word means in their lexicography.

This is what white supremacist Nazi-loving dentist Representative Paul Gosar meant when he said last year that the United States was threatened by Democrats who “hate America, they hate people who love America, and they hate the religion and the descendants of the people who built America.”

That desire, to have those people who they’re convinced hate them for being “real Americans” suffer for their audacity, is not the kind thing any Republican speaker - and most certainly not Quiverin’ Qevin - can ever fix.

This is why Republicans hate higher education. They’re terrified their children will go off to school and come back and see them as the ignorant losers they are. This is why Republican “education reform” is to write laws outlawing any teaching that might upset these already-upset white male losers.

When they read reports that fewer Americans identify as Christian, that most of their fellow citizens are unconcerned about “boys who want to be girls” and “boys who want to be married to boys,” and “girls who want to be with girls,” when they experience at work a growing focus on diversity, equity and inclusion, they see their lives under attack. Everywhere.

Despite Republican power in Washington, the deep gloom among the party’s base about the prospects of society working as they want had led to this situation. A 2021 poll conducted by the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life found that white evangelical Protestants, who constitute the heart and soul of the modern Republican Party, hold a bleaker view of America’s future than any other major racial or religious group. Conservative writer David French noted in 2019 that, “one of the most striking aspects of modern Evangelical political thinking is its projection of inevitable decline.”

Demographic change is the foundation of this pessimism. A 2022 University of Maryland poll found that over 60 percent of Republican voters want to see the United States declared a Christian nation. This is despite the fact that Pew Research Center polls consistently show the share of Americans who identify as Christian dropping - to 64 percent in 2020 from 90 percent in 1975; and the number of church-attending Christians of all types is under 40 percent, even including the massive church attendance of Evangelicals. Coupled with this was the finding in 2020 that nearly 60 percent of Republicans believe “American customs and values” will decline if white people lose their demographic majority, with 40 percent expressing agreement in principle with the white supremacist “Great Replacement Theory” that posits Democrats are intentionally promoting citizenship by non-white immigrants. Regardless, non-Hispanic whites are now only about 60 percent of the population, down from around 80 percent in 1980; they are already a minority with under 50 percent of Americans under the age of 16. Republicans do not like hearing “For English, press one - for Spanish, press two” when they call any business or government agency.

Grass-roots Republicans lead the demand that Washington seal the southern border. However, even if all legal and illegal immigration were stopped tomorrow, the white share of the national population would continue to decline since white Americans are significantly older than the population at large. Even the far right’s biggest policy victory - ending the constitutional protection for abortion by remaking the Supreme Court - will not end end conservative discomfort with changing gender norms.

The research firm Perry-Undem conducted a survey in 2020 in which they found found that Americans who oppose abortion rights are also deeply hostile to the #MeToo movement and believe that “most women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist.”

The victory in overturning Roe won’t change the fact most Republicans think American society discriminates against white men.

Even with the speaker’s gavel, there’s not much that Quiverin’ Qevin can do about this. He may not know much, but he knows the Republican politicians most popular with and beloved by the base are the extremists who answer these fears by picking fights with representatives of woke culture. It’s why Trump’s dismal approval numbers climbed when he insulted Black athletes who knelt during the national anthem, or female journalists who asked him uncomfortable questions, or liberal philanthropists who he accused of funding “caravans” of migrants from Central America. This is why Governor Ron DeSantis picked the fight he did with Disney, the biggest company and major employer in the state, for defending LGBTQ rights, why he sent undocumented immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard last summer and declaring Florida is “where woke goes to die.”

While a presidents or a governor can define themselves by taking these performative actions, legislative leaders can’t build a significant political identity on owning the libs. They’re too associated with lawmaking; however, because this is now something in which many Republican voters have lost faith due to cultural despair, a congressional backbencher like Senator Marsha Blackburn generated favorable publicity back home when she challenged Ketanji Brown Jackson during her nomination hearing to “provide a definition for the word ‘woman.’” It’s why a lunatic like Marjorie Taylor Greene is so popular that even as a second term congressional representative with no accomplishments, she is considered powerful in the House Republican caucus for her phenomenal fund raising despite her appearances at events sponsored by avowed white supremacists.

Two years ago, Donald Trump incited an insurrectional attack on Congress. Today, the majority of Republicans call that event “a legitimate protest.”

Ultimately, the Republican Party’s problem isn’t McCarthy. It’s the institution he leads, an institution that can’t restore the America of the 1980s, when Republicans were considered the winners, when the authority and even illegal actions of white men were not questioned in any serious way that threatened that power, when Ronald Reagan could regale his followers with racist jokes and descriptions of a society that never really existed, and could not exist in any form today because the United States no longer controls the majority of the planetary GDP as it did in the golden years of the 1950s when the rest of the modern industrial countries were rebuilding themselves out of the wreckage of World War II. No matter who’s in charge, no one has the ability to transport through time.

And thus the Republican party becomes ever more radicalized and sees the surrounding society as an existential threat.

And that leads them to be okay with actions against that surrounding society that constitute treason.

They have turned themselves into the Enemies of America.

This isn’t going to be fixed when the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act filter through society. It isn’t going to be fixed when massive new technology factories are producing car batteries and other tools for transformation, and paying good wages to large numbers of residents in “Red States” - in fact, many of the Republican voters in those states that are benefitting will actively dislike this new economic development since they see it as further eroding the world in which people like them were the ones who had the power.

It means that the House Republicans are not going to be willing to admit they have harmed themselves politically with their strategy to force a debt default, since sticking to that actually increases their popularity back home.

There is no one on the other side to negotiate anything with, not debt reduction, not immigration reform, not anything. Not in the House of Representatives where the pigheadedness of the House Freedom Caucus accurately represents the attitudes and beliefs of a majority of Republican voters.

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