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The recent drama at the Heritage Foundation was a wakeup call to many on the right that the traditional conservative alignment had radically shifted. While it was ultimately a disagreement over tone, the controversy it caused made more evident fault lines that have begun to become far more visible since Trump’s inauguration in January.
The ideological divides between free trade supporters, hawks, and traditional moralists have always been there, but the hostility between them seems to be increasing recently. Many factions have begun to emerge that in the past were only subsets of larger, more unified coalitions. The right is experiencing a fundamentally unique time of division. Populism and internet methods of informational dissemination have created this situation. The right must hold institutional structure and guiding principles above specific outcomes if it is to be stable into the future and united in national elections.
The American right has not been more divided in the last few decades. While this initially appears to be an extreme statement, the fissures within the right that have emerged in the last year are indicative of deep disagreement rather than personal controversies between leaders. There have always been factions, from libertarianism to social warriors to hawkish foreign policy supporters. However, the recent infighting often looks more similar to the controversy between parties in the Bush and Obama administration than the interparty fighting of the Reagan administration. The great Republican leaders of the last century were able to unify different groups through reminding them of the common principles they shared. Of course, they were never able to satisfy everyone, but they had some ideological agreement that could be used to orient policy, action and cooperation. While libertarians did not agree with Reagan’s interventionist foreign policy, his constant appeals to the power of free trade and private enterprise made him a clear and appealing choice. Exclusionary factions on the right often failed to gain traction as they always felt like they were in such a small minority that they voted with the rest. While political pragmatism is no great virtue, it allowed coalitions to form that could stand against far greater potential harm from the left. Even on the left, radical groups were unable to gain as much traction as they are today. The breakdown of agreement on the right is two separate phenomena, which are the increase in specificity of political beliefs, and a growth in those factions being unwilling to work with other groups. While this factor is strong on the left also, the party that can most successfully reunify, and remind their constituents of shared principles and pragmatic needs will carry a large advantage.
This fragmentation has primarily resulted from the nation’s current populist environment, and the Internet’s process of self-confirmation. “Woke” rejections of absolute truth were popular punching bags of right-wing pundits in the past, but the current political environment shows that individually determined truth has triumphed over the old school pursuit of objectivity. The populist instinct is fundamentally an ideological role reversal. The desires and thoughts of the people serve as the primary catalyst for policy formation rather than the minds of politicians seeking to reconcile the party and their own principles in a way appealing to voters. Politicians no longer bear as great a responsibility for their actions, as they abdicate their responsibility to conscience and truth in favor of strictly satisfying the wants of the people. Good leadership requires firm resistance against the whims of the people when necessary. Populism completely precludes this possibility by reinforcing the idea that the people’s wants are the only absolute principle of government. In addition to the populist environment, people are encouraged to develop more niche beliefs by attention-grabbing algorithms. Social media creates a high ratio of beliefs one agrees with to those which one does not, which makes political compromise seem like a loss in the fantasy world where one’s unique perspective is shared by most of the content you consume.
The Right must replace its recent populist streak with an obsession with stable institutions for the good of itself and the nation. Current trends of frustration with the two parties will ultimately lead to an ambiguous system of disarray, unless the current parties are able to look more than four years into the future. The two parties have a duopoly on American political power, and the populist mentality is an inefficiency allowed by this system. It is undoubtedly a subtle shift, but the causal shift in platform formation will be deadly for both parties. Ultimately, the people control which factions are in power, but the connection to ideals can never be forgotten, both for better governance and political practicality. A key of populist policy is a focus on results rather than structures that create them. Our government can be best sustained when understanding of institutions inspires voters. While voting to fix a specific problem and letting the means justify the ends may work in the short term, the breakdown that it creates in the long term will be far more damaging than the problem it solved. Only through a focus on institutions can stability over time emerge out of the constant tyrannical whims of the people.
