Why Leaders Can’t Lead

Never Trump Conservatives are angry the conservatives haven’t stood up to Trump. They have, and they lost.

Photo by Daniel Herron on Unsplash

Note: I wrote this in early 2019. I’m sharing it here because we seem to be in the same boat that we were six years ago. I don’t share it as an excuse for Congress, but an explanation as to why Republicans in Congress aren’t able to say no to a Republican president.

Every so often, I will see a tweet or Facebook post by some Never Trumper or Democrat who is mad that Republicans haven’t stood up to President Donald Trump. The thinking goes that many of Republicans in Congress are well aware of how bad Trump is as a leader, but are too cowardly to say what they really mean. Some, like freshman U.S. Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, goes a step further calling many Republicans in Congress “accomplices.”

All of this is understandable. It’s frustrating to see people, like outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan, who might have been outspoken before Trump was president, all of the sudden seem to say nothing as he bashes one governing norm after another. I get upset that GOP leaders aren’t saying more.

But there are two things wrong with this belief. The first is that there have been people who have spoken up. Think about Sens. Bob Corker and Jeff Flake or Congressman Mark Sanford. They were willing to say how they felt about what the president is doing and they didn’t hold back on their thoughts. But their willingness to step forward was rewarded with them having to leave Congress either because they were primaried or chose not to seek re-election after they saw the they were going to get primaried and lose badly.

But there is another thing that people miss and they miss it because they aren’t looking for it in the first place. When people think about Republicans and Democrats, we think about people, but we don’t think about organizations. We don’t see how both parties are supposed to be institutions that choose candidates, donate money to those they deem worthy to run and deny funding to those who are not fit to run. In our political system, they were supposed to not simply be labels to run under, but cops that made sure the political system would run smoothly.

Our political parties no longer operate in the ways they used to. They have little to no power. We saw that in full flower in 2016, when the Republican National Committee wasn’t able to stop the rise of Trump nor persuade some of his opponents to drop out and coalesce around a unity candidate to stop Trump.

I offer the following: The weakness of our modern parties is also why you don’t see many Republicans speaking out against Trump. People might think parties are all-powerful, but they are so weak that they were not able to stop a man who clearly had no business in White House occupy the Oval Office. How our parties operate have changed over the last 50 years and those changes paved the way for Trump. We like to think that the current popularity of populism came about with Trump, but the reality is that when it comes to political parties and other institutions, populism has been growing for five decades, whittling the power of political parties to the point where we are now.

Yahoo News reporter Jon Ward has made the weakness of political parties and other institutions the focus of his reporting since Trump’s election. In an article from the summer of 2018, he starts off sharing what he saw at a Democratic National Committee meeting in Detroit and how that shows the change in parties:

The Democratic committee man from Michigan had something to say about punctuation.

“At the end of that paragraph,” said Barry Goodman, a member of the DNC’s rules and bylaws committee, “the P for public should be capitalized if party is capitalized with a P.”

DNC members were slogging through the tedious work of refining a public statement at their March 8 meeting in Washington, D.C. Goodman, a personal injury lawyer from Detroit, wanted to make sure that both words were capitalized “just so we don’t look like public and party are different in terms of importance.”

Goodman meant well, but his sentiments revealed a common but profound misunderstanding about American politics. Most people think of political parties as powerful, when in fact they have been losing power for 50 years.

Populism is popular these days, and many Americans like Goodman want to make the political system more fair. They want to empower the average voter and reduce the influence of the wealthiest. But it’s become increasingly clear to many that anti-party reforms have gone too far and are now having a multitude of negative impacts on our politics, even as idealists push for still more reductions of party power.

Since the early 1970s, reforms have taken place in both parties, putting power away from the so-called “smoke-filled rooms” and into the hands of the people. Before the changes the McGovern Commission made to the Democratic nomination process in 1972, choosing the presidential nominee was a closed affair. Party insiders also played a strong role in choosing other candidates for the Senate and the House.

But 1972 changed things. Now, the primaries would play a more prominent role in the process. As Democratic National Committee member Elaine Kamarck noted in a paper for Brookings, throughout the last nearly five decades, the process of choosing a nominee went from behind closed doors to being out in the open through primaries. The average primary voter was now viewed favorably, while the party elites were looked on with contempt.

At the same time, the parties became less and less vehicles for raising money and we saw the rise of political action committees, as Jonah Goldberg reminded people in a column in November 2018. Also organizations like Planned Parenthood and the National Rifle Association began to mobilize voters in a way that parties used to do.

So now we get back to why Republicans in Congress don’t speak up. If you are a representative from a Trump-leaning district and you are concerned about the President, you can do two things. You can speak up, or keep your head down and say nothing.

If this was say, 1969 or even 1979, more than likely, the party was the one that selected you either through committee or conventions. But in 2019, the main way you are going to be chosen is through a party primary. That has changed everything.

Let’s create a scenario of what could happen to you if you are a Representative. You are elected and while you have a pretty solid conservative voting record, you are increasingly concerned with the president’s views on NATO, his unwillingness to condemn the white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, and his threats to shut down the Robert Mueller investigation. You share these with a reporter from the local newspaper. The reporter files a story which causes a firestorm of protest.

A few weeks prior, your polling numbers for re-election looked good. But now they are sinking. The president sends out a tweet mocking the representative. A far-right radio talk show host considers running against you in the primary. What was considered a shoo-in becomes a close race. With only a few weeks before the primary, you have to decide if you want to continue to fight to win the primary or bow out early. You decide to stay in, but you know the damage has been done. On a balmy summer evening, you lose your primary to the talk show host and the president sends out a mocking and smug tweet praising your loss.

So what happened? When primaries didn’t have the, well, primary role they do now, legislators were protected from the public by moderating institutions like the party. This allowed them some freedom to vote in their district and not have to look over their shoulder to see if some PAC or other group is watching to see if they voted the right way or not.

People might think this is not “democratic” but having the party back you up allowed legislators to take stands that you can’t do when there are primaries. A primary-centered system is one where nothing is protecting a representative from the masses. If they say something or do something that doesn’t line up with the core voters, then they will face wrath of the voters.

A well-functioning democracy is one where there are institutions that can filter the wants and desires of the public. But when there is no filter, then the politician has to deal with a crowd that might want things that are hurtful or impossible. Or, the crowd might support a candidate that doesn’t respect the office.

This is why so many senators and representatives in D.C. don’t say anything. They see what happens to those who do speak up. They also know there is nothing that will filter a polarized primary electorate. If they say that Trump is as dumb as rocks and isn’t fit to be president, then they can plan to be out of office come the next primary.

I would love to see more GOP lawmakers speak up. I get frustrated that this doesn’t happen. But I also understand that we don’t live in a time when lawmakers can speak their minds and be protected from the wiles of the public.