RNC Arrogance is Hollow—And History Shows that the Base Can Win the Party and the Country

Ronna Romney McDaniel’s election to the head of the Republican National Committee makes her the longest serving RNC head since Mark Hanna, who presided over two presidential victories in 1896 and 1900 where Republicans also kept control of both houses of Congress. Under McDaniel, the Party has held the House of Representatives once and won it once in six years. It’s also lost the Senate and the presidency. That doesn’t look like progress. After McDaniel won re-election against Harmeet Dhillon, a fierce and competent contender running to decentralize the operation in favor of candidates, activists started talking about leaving a party that seems to hold them in contempt. The response was driven by anger but also shock, and what seemed to shock most was the response of the people who voted for McDaniel. Charlie Kirk, who’s not quitting the party but thinks the status quo is “unsustainable,” summed up the attitude from RNC headquarters:

There are some amazing members that truly love the grassroots. 55 of them that listen to you and care about what you think. They are passionate, lovely people who want their country back. They are wonderful. There is a small group of the 111 [who voted for McDaniel]— likely 10-12 people — that are just scared. They don’t know how to move forward but are terrified of changing the status quo. They voted for Ronna for “continuity not chaos," a weak argument based on fear, not vision. The largest slice of the RNC pie is filled with people who have a deep-seated contempt for the base energy of the party. Several told me to my face that they are annoyed by the grassroots and their “emails” that “bother them.” They told me November was a “raging success” and “historically good.” They told me the party needs fewer people who watch “Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson and your podcast and more people who read the newspaper.”… The contempt is real. The attitude is repeatedly expressed as “the volunteers who are upset don’t understand how things work around here.” This is unsustainable.

It seems extraordinary that people could speak this brazenly, with such disdain, of on-the-ground activists and voters who give them a reason to exist. It doesn’t seem normal. The arrogance is, viscerally, astonishing.  Except, at bottom, rather than discouraging Republican activists, it should push them forward in their quest to clean up the party.

The attitude they’re seeing flows from defensiveness, and that defensiveness flows from three things.

First, as Kirk points out, it flows from the money Ronna McDaniel will bring in to these peoples’ friends and vendors. Unlike Dhillon, McDaniel won’t give candidates control of their own campaigns; she insists on forcing them to use the same vendors approved by the RNC if they want to receive RNC funds, no matter what’s most effective in individual districts.

Second, as Jimmy John Liautaud said at TPUSA 2022, self-preservation is a normal attitude of people in power who enjoy the perks. Speaking as a private citizen, he said he’d never want to give up his jet, but the difference between him and the people at the top of the parties is that he paid for the jet and the gasoline.

But, third, the attitude flows from something else besides, which is that what was being asked for with Harmeet Dhillon’s election and Ronna McDaniel’s defenestration is accountability, and the one thing Republicans who have worked inside the structures for the last ten, twenty or thirty years don’t want is that.

The history shows why. It also shows why accountability is necessary, and why only the Republican base can keep pushing through the Republican Party to change the status quo.

***

In that spirit, how did we get here?

Here’s one way to explain it.

The growth of the consultancies and think tanks which advise them is an old story, and it starts with a resounding Republican success: the last real cleanup of Washington before President Trump. This was the 1980s, when a movement of westerners that had started with grassroots activism in the 1950s came east pushing President Reagan to cut a government that had grown to unprecedented size to fight the Cold War. Their first standard-bearer was Barry Goldwater, Senator from Arizona, who lost the 1964 election. The next Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower’s former Vice President Richard Nixon, was a disappointment. He created the Environmental Protection Agency, didn’t object to Roe v. Wade, and expanded the national security structures in the White House which led to them dropping leaks to Woodward and Bernstein. But in Reagan, the grassroots got their president.

He was backed by a wide assortment of people. There were big western business owners like Joseph Coors, who helped fund the Heritage Foundation, and insider Washington aides like Paul Weyrich who helped Coors to form Heritage. Weyrich also had his ear to the ground, and he worked with popular televangelists like Jerry Falwell, who were tuning into the concerns of activists protesting government invasion in their lives. These activists included miners and evangelists in West Virginia and housewives in California advocating against nationally mandated public school curricula that they felt villainized Americans. They also included protestors against the Supreme Court’s legalization of abortion ahead of almost every state. Further, they included California activists driving a proposition limiting taxes in 1978 as the national government allowed inflation to skyrocket by aiming for full employment. Finally, they included members of congregations whose tax exempt status the national government threatened over their racial makeups.

All of these groups had something in common with each other and with today’s activists: they wanted to fight communism abroad while limiting their government to let them live-and-let-live at home. They had another thing in common: the establishment, from Jimmy Carter to Nelson Rockefeller, Gerald Ford to Richard Nixon, Robert McNamara to Katharine Graham, thought they were crazy or dangerous or undereducated. They weren’t any of those things, and with the American system failing—Iran taking hostages, inflation skyrocketing and communism on the march—the majority of Americans gave their ideas a chance. Under Ronald Reagan, those ideas guided policy. Government cut national authority over states, attacked the arbitrary power of public sector unions, beat inflation, opened the market for entrepreneurs, and appointed Supreme Court justices who restored states’ powers.

But, after Reagan, the people who rode on his coattails and made up the Administrations of the next two Republican presidents, the Northeastern aristocrats George Bushes I and II, took a different tack. They came to do good and ended up doing well.

***

The driver of the came-to-do-good-but-did-well push was what Charlie Kirk said it was: money. But the money was tied to something bigger and more insidious: the post-Cold War growth of administration, corporations, nonprofits, universities, media, and consultancies off spending by the national government.

Put another way, none of the four presidents, Republicans and Democrats, who succeeded Reagan believed in taking away power from Washington, D.C. And the people who helped them get elected felt the same way. They felt this way for a simple reason. For the first time in American history, these people weren’t connected to voters. They were college-educated, corporate-minted professionals who jumped on a new trend, the entertainment industry’s borrowing of focus group sessions that conglomerates like GM used to test products to test movies before they were released, and brought it to politics. Lee Atwater, Frank Luntz, Stanley Greenberg and Robert Shrum—Republicans and Democrats alike—spent the decade replacing the input of wards and unions, civic associations and churches, even state legislatures and state parties, with the wisdom of two dozen people paid $35 an hour and given cold cuts to answer questions. From these sessions, and from the pushes of new and well-funded special interest groups and nonprofits that corporate funding was pushing into Washington, came a new focus.

The focus wasn’t on traditional politics from either side: on boosting labor or shrinking government, policing too-big-to-fail corporations or returning power to the states. Instead it was on “values”: Hillary Clinton’s “Politics of Meaning” which powered her disastrous Healthcare reform push; George Bush’s Compassionate Conservatism and Freedom Agenda which grew the executive branch; and Barack Obama’s expansion of government power over universities and public schools in the name of gender equity and trans rights. Nonprofits, consultants, politicos and national administrative agencies also did well off of “wars” that Presidents declared on people who didn’t share the right “values” or believe in the right “truths”: war on “superpredator” criminals, war on Islamofascist terror, war on “serial rapists,” war on white nationalism, war on mis-informationists, and now (a new twist) war on climate change.

These issues appealed to Republican and Democratic interest groups and could be marketed in ways that made peoples’ blood boil, especially the upper-income voters who could afford to care more about a Freedom Agenda abroad and trans rights at home than about border security and labor outsourcing. They could also scare people. And these tactics made politics into a game of which party could anger or scare the most voters over wedge issues to get the best turnout and eke out a narrow victory. Not coincidentally, for the last thirty years and for the first time in American political history proper, no single party has dominated the nation’s politics by appealing to the people the way the Democratic-Republicans (later called Democrats) did from 1801-1860; the Republicans did from 1861-1932; and the Democrats did from 1933 through at least 1980. Instead, a bipartisan establishment has supported crusades mounted by both sides that keep the interest group money flowing and give the national government more power.

Joe Biden’s Democrats are a case in point. Senate Democrats spent much of 2021 and 2022 complaining to outlets like The Los Angeles Times that the Biden Administration was more interested in listening to corporate-backed outlets like the Human Rights Campaign and the Sierra Club than members of the U.S. Senate. Meantime, Biden called opponents of expanding national power in his own party segregationists, Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry compared the climate threat to the Nazism, and the mainstream media approved.

For fifteen years, though, the Republican base has taken a different tack.  

***

As early as 2007, when President Bush took a break from his Freedom Agenda to try to pass legislation giving amnesty to 12.2 million unauthorized immigrants whose levels hit their highest point that year, the split between the ground and the top of the party had broken open. Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan’s and George H.W. Bush’s favorite speechwriter, a hardliner in the Reagan White House who now wrote for The Wall Street Journal, gave voice to the ground’s anger over deficits, expanding the national government, and now immigration:

For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt…battered…You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad. But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad."

The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic -- they "don't want to do what's right for America”… Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed…Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are "anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism."

Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens? And often, though not exclusively, concerned conservatives? It is odd, but it is of a piece with, or a variation on, the "Too bad" governing style. And it is one that has, day by day for at least the past three years, been tearing apart the conservative movement... I suspect the White House and its allies have turned to name calling because they're defensive, and they're defensive because they know they have produced a big and indecipherable mess…

…Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already broken from them.

This was what gave rise to the Tea Party and Trump. But it’s also what gave rise to the resistance to them.

This resistance comes from people who speak for and in the national structures the RNC members who voted for Ronna McDaniel are connected to: consultancies, some think tanks, media green rooms, mainstream Republican and Democratic campaigns. And these are the places where thirty years of focus-group-manufactured, interest-group-backed talk has justified ballooning government: talk about crises of meaning, war on crime, compassionate conservatism, war on terror, serial rapists, trans rights, systemic racism and now death by climate. In the process, it’s made Washington, D.C. into what the former New York Times Chief Washington correspondent called “America’s Gilded Capital.” These people have lived in the structures a long time, and talked in and for them as the structures have expanded at everybody else’s expense, accompanied by a long line of policy failures.

Now, in the name of actual democratic accountability, the Republican base wants to reform the structures; clean house, top to bottom, national security to the Department of Education. This isn’t limited reform; this reform is real. And it’s in the tradition of pushing back against arbitrary power begun by the American Revolutionaries; continued by Jefferson and Madison in the 1790s against Alexander Hamilton’s centralizing Federalists; accelerated by Lincoln in his fight against slaveholders who’d taken over the national government in 1857; honored by Franklin Roosevelt when he protected Americans from Depression and Fascism; and taking on a new dimension after America became an empire with President Reagan’s movement and then President Trump’s.

But the top of the party’s response, even among those who used to feel supportive, is defensiveness: even Peggy Noonan, who followed her instincts to sympathetically explain Donald Trump’s rise, has taken to calling the members of the Freedom Caucus who this January succeeded in wresting powers back from the Speakers’ office that had accumulated there since the Nineties examples of “nihilism” and labeling Elon Musk, who liberated Twitter and provided empirical evidence of government-tech collusion, as a “psycho in the C-suite.” And these people at the top of the party have good reason to be defensive. They know the people who are deep in the structures—the investment bankers, the head politicos, the nonprofit leaders. They relate to them—how could they not? They’ve benefited along with them. They’re linked to some of their failures! They also may truly not believe that anything can replace the narrow victories of the past thirty years, the system they helped create and know so well. Finally, they don’t want to risk backlash: to them, questioning the structures rather than trying to smooth them out is courting “chaos” and “nihilism.” And so the symptoms of this reluctance, this willingness to tolerate creeping tyranny in the name of “continuity” or order or social comfort or good feeling or simple enrichment, are a spate of name-calling and arrogance, or reductiveness and dismissal, that would otherwise be inexplicable.

But this hyper-defensiveness isn’t a sign that the Republican Party is dead. It’s that the top is cut off the from base and that the base is right. A long time ago the base was right, too, and it took from the 1950s to the 1980s, but the base came to Washington and saved America. This time the mobilization is going much faster. As Kirk reported,

Only one day after actively whipping votes for Ronna at yesterday’s RNC meeting, Maine’s GOP State Chair, Demi Kouzounas has lost her bid for re-election. These are the consequences for refusing to listen to actual Republican voters.

Onward.