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The Republican Party is doomed.
I don't mean they'll lose every election moving forward. My case, rather, is this: they know exactly what they want someone to do, but in an increasing number of institutions, there is no one left to do it. Increasing age and education polarization means that Republicans are rapidly losing the capacity to run public institutions at all levels other than electoral, and this trend cannot realistically reverse within a generation. The near-term future is already written.
The demands of a two-party system mean each party will typically adjust over time to capture, if not 50% of the electorate, at least enough to remain meaningfully competitive. There is no reason to expect that to change. Republicans are electorally competitive and will likely remain so, particularly given their advantage in rural areas with greater Senate representation. People zero in on that, but electoral politics is a small part of governance writ large.
I am one of the most conservative students at my law school. More specifically: I, a gay, centrist Biden voter, am one of the most conservative students at my law school. The Federalist Society here is anemic and widely derided, while there's a dizzying array of progressive organizations. The professors and administrators are, if anything, even more progressive. My school is in no sense an outlier in this regard, nor is this specific to law. The same patterns are overwhelmingly visible in every group of educated, young professionals. Bloomberg documents how donations skew progressive in virtually every field.
People want to say young and educated people have always leaned left, but that simply is not true. Not like this. The leftward skew is a recent, and accelerating, phenomenon. Democrats have gained more and more ground among young and educated people alike, and the rightward shift people are used to seeing just isn't happening as it did before. Among young, educated professionals, the salient political divide is no longer between Republicans and Democrats, but between liberals and various stripes of socialists. The New York Times and Financial Times document the way long-standing patterns have shifted.
What's the conservative coalition? Truckers, farmers, business owners, construction workers. Don't get me wrong: these are useful, socially valuable, necessary professions. But they have nothing to do with the day-to-day of governance on the ground. About the only governance-related profession they remain influential in is the police force, which tells you all you need to know about the current reputation of the police force among educated, young professionals.
This means that, for the medium-term future, Republicans are dealing with a coalition of the high and low against the middle when it comes to politics. They authentically represent, to one degree or another, somewhere near half of the country. They have representation at the highest levels of government, controlling the Supreme Court, maintaining razor-thin margins in the House and Senate, and remaining competitive within Presidential races. But because their voters are increasingly old, rural, and less educated, they lack all but the slightest foothold in the great majority of institutions run by and filled with young, educated professionals: that is to say, the great bulk of institutions involved in the day to day of governance.
The field of education provides a good case study as to how this plays out. Educators are overwhelmingly progressive in their inclinations. Left to their own devices, they will take a policy and curricular stance broadly in line with progressive sensibilities. Teacher's unions are unambiguously and emphatically against the Republican Party. Conservatives like to emphasize school choice, pointing to charter and private schools as potential alternatives, but even there, the great bulk of educators are politically liberal. Eva Moskowitz, founder of high-achieving charter school system Success Academy, champion of school choice advocacy, and a model of what conservatives point to as an ideal in education, is a registered Democrat.
The most successful recent conservative education advocacy movement, Moms for Liberty, tells you all you need to know in its name: it is a movement not of educators or of students, but of parents looking from the outside at a system that broadly opposes their values. Florida politicians have spent enormous political capital to pull a single, tiny liberal arts college towards a conservative ethos.
Here's the problem: by the time you're trying to legislate every one of your preferences, resisted at every level by the people put in place to enact those preferences, you've already lost. Republicans want people who want to enact their values. What they've got is equal representation in the part of the government that can swing a big stick around trying desperately to corral a group where even the educators supported by their policies are likely to want nothing to do with them.
What of the rising stars in each political party? For the Democrats, you have Pete Buttigieg: working within the institutions at every step, from Ivy League to consulting to military to local governance and smoothly into high-level tasks within his own party, focused on technocratic proposals dependent on high state capacity. For the Republicans, there's Vivek Ramaswamy: downplaying his past within those same institutions, rising to incredible wealth via private enterprise, smashing into the scene of his own party as an outsider obviously loathed by those who have spent their lifetimes within it, focused on a libertarian "burn it down" ethos. To be a popular Republican in the Trump era, you almost need to be an outsider promising to tear the government to pieces. Image
Conservatives right now are desperate for public intellectuals who reflect their values. As soon as a conservative-coded intellectual shows a modicum of talent or originality, they skyrocket into prominence. Jordan Peterson spent a career in obscurity in academia before a fight over pronouns launched him into an enormous platform with millions of followers. Chris Rufo became one of the leaders of the conservative movement in moments after speaking cogently about critical race theory. Richard Hanania, despite constantly telling conservatives how stupid and ineffectual he thinks they are, has gained a massive conservative fanbase by virtue of being able to argue coherently for some of their values.
Perhaps most telling is the example of Aaron Sibarium, recently profiled for Politico: perhaps the most prominent conservative investigative reporter today, a secular Jew who voted for Clinton and Biden but, because he opposes social justice progressivism, has sauntered into the wide-open niche of investigative journalism from a conservative point of view. Why is he filling that role so effectively? Simple: there was nobody else to do so.
On a smaller scale, even a few tweets that capture the conservative zeitgeist can shoot someone into the public eye overnight, as Darryl Cooper (MartyrMade) discovered when an articulate defense of the 'stolen election' feeling took him from 7000 Twitter followers one day to 55000 three days later, or our own @KulakRevolt found as he went from no public presence to being the rising voice of the burn-it-down ethos in a matter of a few months of well-written diatribes. Costin Alamariu launched an obscure work of academic philosophy to the top of the Amazon charts off the strength of an absurdist right-wing pseudonymous persona. Ask any of them what they think of the institutional Republican Party sometime.
Conservatives are so desperate for a shred of cultural influence that they turn people like Oliver Anthony (“Rich Men North of Richmond”) into overnight sensations, only to learn that they, too, have nothing but scorn for the Republican Party.
Put simply: right now, at the nuts and bolts of governance, the Republican Party has a much shorter bench of talent than the Democratic Party. Even conservative intellectuals are trained in overwhelmingly progressive institutions. This affects every level of politics, but since it doesn't necessarily harm them electorally, there's no incentive to course-correct at the level of electoral politics. Quite the opposite, in fact: every single Republican politician, and every single conservative influencer, benefits individually from their coalition’s weakness among young, educated professionals. In many ways, they’re living the dream: massive audiences hungry for competence with little competition fighting to provide that competence in any given field.
Some want to frame it as institutional capture, a battle against the ruling elite, that could be corrected if the right people are in charge. Is there some of that? Sure. But at most institutions, it's a simple function of the politics of the people seeking those institutions out. My law school is not overwhelmingly progressive because the Powers That Be want it to be progressive. It's overwhelmingly progressive because progressives showed up. You can only stretch the word "elite" so far, and by the time you get down to schoolteachers, you've stretched it past the breaking point.
Conservatives, to be clear, aren't going anywhere, nor is the growing dissident right movement. But even when Republicans win electoral power, they lack the human capital at all levels of governance to accomplish what they really want with it. Under Republican rule, half of top government officials work to enact the approximate will of slightly less than half of Americans while virtually every educated, young professional anywhere near politics resists any way they can. Only a few have even the vision of changing this by re-entering those institutions, with most seeing no recourse beyond slowly fading or burning every institution to the ground.
The Republican Party will remain visible. It may even continue to win elections. But at the basic tasks of governance and defining culture at all levels, its death warrant has already been signed. The Republican Party is doomed.
(Also posted to Substack)
While I prepared this post for a general audience, I have a few more Motte-specific thoughts. At this point, I think the evidence is overwhelmingly clear that, whatever else this space is and has been, it is one of vanishingly few incubators for intellectually rigorous thinkers with sympathy towards one shade or another of conservatism. Kulak is one of the most prominent examples, but far from the only one who has an impact far beyond these quiet circles.
After I Tweeted out an initial version of this post, a high-level Republican official contacted me about it, broadly agreeing with the thesis while pointing out that parties are composed, broadly speaking, of those who show up. In his words, a political party is an entity that exists solely to conduct elections, and things can change in a hurry depending on who shows up. Speaking in general terms, he's part of the Thiel-adjacent set. He made the case that there is a lot of room, given the short bench, for people outside the traditional, highly polished, consultant-safe pathways to have a real impact on things, which in some ways can be turned to the good.
I don't have any sort of call to action here, for myself or others, but I think it's worth having a clear-eyed view of the political dynamics in play.
I've been watching this in real time with my own family, and both of your points are true. America has become polarized by gender and education, and progressives show up more. Richard Hanania has beat you to it:
The gender and class wars: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/womens-tears-win-in-the-marketplace
My extended family is now clearly divided between the educated and the working class. This wasn't the case, but 2014, the year that broke the internet, was when it started. On the college-educated side, all the women are loud progressives, and the men mostly smile and nod (some are true believers, some are agreeable normies that are instinctively fitting in with their society, but a good fraction are actually quite based, and keeping it secret for professional and romantic survival). On the working class side, the men have become Q-anon adjacent, and it's the women who smile and nod (with about the same proportions of quiet dissent as the men)
Thanksgiving and Christmas have begun to fissure. People now go to the gathering of the grandparents/in-laws that are more close to them. We stop in briefly with my parents, but mostly go to my in-laws. I make a point of spending extra time with my dad during the holidays, but my mom has become difficult to be around.
Liberals show up more: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-is-everything-liberal
The two bubble charts are all you need. The liberal end of my family donates. They volunteer. They organize. Left-wing organizations are drowning in money, and they don't even need it because they are also drowning in young people who are willing to take sub-par salaries.
The conservative end of my family grills.
I'm a member of a few organizations, one with a notably right-wing membership. The leadership of that organization is full of lefties, because they keep showing up, volunteering, and promoting each other.
Grilling is not an option:
I was a griller. I wanted to stay a griller. If you're a griller in a sane, free society, you get a good job, you spend time with your family, you debate the Texas Crutch. There's no reason to get involved when you've got your own life to see to.
All social systems are fundamentally biased towards sociopaths, and thus progressivism.
Progressive politics appeals to busybodies. If you enjoy petty (and not-so-petty) tyranny, if you enjoy controlling others, if seeking status and validation from others is meaningful to you, you'll take the low paying job that gives you more status and control. You'll volunteer in organizations that suck your time. You'll respond to other sociopaths and donate money to them. You will conform, and force others to conform.
The humorless Karenocracy wins because the grillers are fun people with better things to do.
The solution: the fifth box of democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_boxes_of_liberty
There's a fifth box, and it's the box that best suits the individualist: The U-Haul box. In the last decade, tens of millions of Americans have moved, and of those, perhaps ten million are people moving from blue states to red ones as political refugees. Thirty years ago Texas and Florida had Democratic governors, and you couldn't carry a gun in either one.
I'm not going to out-organize, out-volunteer, or out-donate the progressives. I'm not going to out-social-pressure them or give up a life of comfort for the joy of interfering in other's lives, like they do.
Even if I did, it would be a lose-lose - either let them take the grill from my life, or give up my grilling time to fight them.
I am better at earning a good living, managing and keeping my money, and moving on though. I used to live in a blue state, now I live in a red one. I used to pay for things, now I pirate them. I used to be a member of organizations, now I encourage people to undermine them. I used to live in a democracy. Now I practice Irish Democracy.
Sorry, but I don’t resonate with this at all. I think I used to, but it seems like you’re just giving up. It’s sad to hear that your family is so polarized, but there are plenty of things that can bring family together for the holidays without getting mired in politics. I don’t agree at all politically, spiritually, culturally with certain close members of my family, but we have Thanksgiving and/or Christmas together every year and do things to enjoy each other’s company. We never discuss politics. We don’t have to!
The reason conservatives like to grill is because conservatives won on almost everything of consequence in the 20th century. Income tax rates have never been lower. Obamacare was effectively a subsidy for large health insurance corporations—far from single payer that progressives really want. Has Biden even uttered the phrase ‘Medicare for All’ this decade? Maybe he’s too busy crushing union strikes in Michigan to notice? Unrestricted immigration continues to depress low-skilled wages. It is basically impossible to criticize military spending in Congress, aside from gadflies on the populist right. The hourly federal minimum wage remains at $7.25. We have had basically no financial regulatory overhauls since 2010. The federal student loan payment moratorium is over. The ghost of Ronald Reagan reigns supreme in both the Republican and Democratic parties. There is no economic ‘Left’ in America anymore. What progressives seem to care most about is whether enough transgender minorities serve on the Boards at Citigroup or ExxonMobil. Progressives are totally defanged in the United States. What would Huey Long or Teddy Roosevelt think if they were transported in time and looked on at the progressive movement as it exists today?
So boomers will continue to grill, because tax rates are low, real estate prices are high, and their retirement portfolio continues to rise in value. Only once their personal comfort is threatened might they get activated. But as a merchant, commercial nation, the US has so much more left to fall before the pendulum shifts back to conservatism. It’s incredible how much wealthier and more economically prosperous the US is compared to the rest of the world, for a country of its size. People will put up with any godless cultural abomination if they are fat and entertained!
You want an institution that isn’t dominated by progressives? Try your local evangelical, non-denominational church. By all means, move out of the godforsaken downtown area of your city. But moving to another state won’t stop the rot, because the rot will follow you eventually. Join a church, tithe, volunteer, and put your faith not in a political party or economic system but in God, who restores all things.
This is not true. It's true that they have been higher.
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/sites/default/files/styles/original_optimized/public/book_images/3.1.5.2.png?itok=P1wdtomc
Obamacare is one of your examples of conservatives winning, because it was a subsidy?
Mass immigration is an example of conservatives winning?
You also deftly avoided social issues, where - apart from recently on abortion - conservatives have had a long, long rout. They can't even vote to get rid of gay marriage any more, while DEI is the official ideology of one institution after another. For all the culture war's early focus on higher education, you have to provide a DEI statement to even apply to teach at most US colleges.
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