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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.
Everything is downstream from control of educational institutions. Unless they have the luck and resources (and willingness to forego prestige) to go exclusively to conservative private schools, the average educated professional will be required to spend between 16 and 20 years being indoctrinated by government-funded institutions that openly despise right wing ideas. Even if they make it out with their political ideology intact, few conservatives are hungry for more abuse.
If a conservative person wants to go into education themselves to "be change they want to see in the world," they then have to spend several more years hiding their opinions before they potentially get the protection of tenure, contend with unions that will use their dues to fund left-wing politicians, and spend their entire career surrounded by people who hate them and are constantly trying to get them fired.
It's demoralizing for even the thickest-skinned among us. It really sucks to spend your entire life around people who openly hate you and want to see you fail. I really don't see how to solve this problem other than to engage in a hostile takeover of state educational institutions like DeSantis is doing in Florida, but even then, you run into the problem you highlighted that there probably simply aren't enough educated conservatives left after decades of left-wing domination of the schools to staff the institutions even if conservatives could fire everyone. Even total victory would require relying on hostile actors for implementation for years
If the lack of smart, educated conservatives was driven entirely by institutional gatekeeping, then there would be a lot of smart uneducated conservatives, and the adverts on conservative websites would be for educational trips to Rome and the St John's College extramural programme. In fact, the adverts on conservative websites (except explicitly Christian ones) are for crypto scams and acai berry colon cleanses, suggesting that there is a real difference in IQ.
Richard Hanania isn't trolling when he complains about how dumb American conservatism is in the Current Year - he is expressing frustration. This is new, but not that new. George W Bush had to pretend to be dumber than he was in order to be a serious right-wing candidate for President, George HW Bush did not. The only powerful right-wing tendency that would appeal to an intellectually curious 130+ IQ is tradcath.
[Yes - I know Elon Musk is on the right, and a genius. But his right-wing fanbase don't like him because he builds electric cars, they lie him because of his low-effort shitposting]
Quite a few logical leaps here, e.g. even if there were a lot of smart uneducated conservatives, it doesn't follow that they'd be a large proportion of conservative consumers, nor that they'd be especially interested in education, and moreover (this is more questionable) they might be more gullible because of a lack of education.
However, isn't the original claim that there is a lack of conservatives in education (especially higher education) not that there are a lot of smart uneducated conservatives?
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Hold up, is this not what we see?
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While 130+ IQ is probably overrepresented among IRL tradcaths, a randomly-chosen IRL tradcath is more likely to be a geocentrist who believes cigarrettes are good for you than to be rat-adjacent. Median-level tradcath politics are Alex Jones-tier conspiracy theories with added reactionary social conservatism- although not twitter race warriors either.
The difference between the internet tradcath posters(most of whom do not actually go to church) and the IRL tradcaths(who do not describe themselves that way) is vast. It seems that many of these posters could care less about practicing or believing any form of Catholicism; they just want to attach themselves to a living, reactionary western tradition.
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There isn't a lack of smart, educated, conservatives. There's a lack of conservatives in the field of education, which is an entirely different thing.
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The majority of highbrow independent publishing appears to be conservative. Measuring things by ad targeting is frankly nuts because the entire ecosystem of intelligent people on the internet are adblocked ghosts to advertisers.
That's as may be, but when I go on talkingpointsmemo.com in incognito mode I get ads for premium brand menswear and SUV's, when I go on dailykos.com I get ads for e-scooters and high-end video editing software, and when I go on redstate.com or other sites in that network most of the ads are for cheap clothes imported from China. Admittedly I did see one ad for small-business accounting software on a right-wing site, which points to the one useful demographic that is still mostly conservative.
This does nothing to change the tracking performed by major ad services.
You'll have to create a totally fresh device/connection/account, and you'll have to do it in a location that's geographically separated from your current browsing history. The advertising systems know what it means when a brand new "person" hops onto the internet using the same internet connection, device, browsing patterns, display-size etc as someone who already exists.
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Have you considered that some of this is just cultural differences?
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