[The Soup Nazi]

Zakaria's latest Washington Post column. The title is kinda obvious, but read on:

Republicans care more about tribal loyalty than conservative principles

The Republican Party’s decision (in effect) to excommunicate Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) is a watershed event. It marks the final transformation of the party from an ideologically driven enterprise to one that is tribal, marked less by ideas and more by group loyalty.

Let’s compare the voting records of Cheney to the woman who is set to replace her as chair of the House Republican Conference, Elise Stefanik of New York. The American Conservative Union gives Cheney a lifetime score of 78 (out of 100) for her consistent conservatism. Stefanik gets a lifetime rating of 44, which is one of the lowest scores for a House Republican these days. Cheney reliably voted for President Donald Trump’s policies while Stefanik was one of only 12 House Republicans to vote against the former president’s signature legislation, the 2017 tax cut. But Stefanik has pledged fealty to Trump and his “big lie” about fraud in the 2020 election, while Cheney will not. And Republicans these days care more about tribal loyalty than conservative principles.

This is a big shift. During the 20th century, the party evolved from a country club for wealthy elites (itself a kind of tribe) into a party animated by ideas. The struggle began in the 1950s. As National Review publisher William Rusher once noted, “modern American conservatism largely organized itself during, and in explicit opposition to, the Eisenhower administration.” Barry Goldwater railed against his own party for daring to compromise with liberals. He thundered on the Senate floor in 1960, “We have said for nearly 30 years that the welfare state, centralized government and federal control are wrong, but in spite of that, say a little of it is all right. We are against federal aid to schools, but we have suggested a little of it; we are against federal aid to depressed areas, but we have offered a plan for a little of it; we recognize that to increase the minimum wage would be inflationary and would result in unemployment, but we suggest a little increase.”

Goldwater created the staunchly conservative base that would take over the party, but that free-market ideology was so extreme it proved too toxic to implement. Conservatives were forever promising the repeal of the New Deal, and then the Great Society, but never delivering. This became the Republican dynamic: fire up the base with visions of rollback and then, once in power, quietly accommodate to the reality that most Americans actually wanted the welfare state. It created what my Post colleague E.J. Dionne Jr. calls the politics of “betrayal,” a narrative in which conservative ideas get sold out because of Republican cowardice.

Enter Newt Gingrich, who found a way to keep conservatives charged up by focusing less on ideas and more on attitudes. Gingrich destroyed then-Republican Minority Leader Robert Michel, an old-fashioned politician often called “Mr. Nice Guy.” Gingrich led the attack on George H.W. Bush for striking a deal with Democrats and raising taxes, ensuring that Bush lost his bid for reelection. Gingrich ousted Democratic speaker Jim Wright on flimsy charges, masterfully using innuendo, exaggeration and slander. He tutored a generation of Republicans to remake their rhetoric, coaching them to use words such as “sick,” traitors,” “corrupt” and “selfish” when describing Democrats. The Republican Party became the fight club party.

Over time, Republicans’ dedication to their core ideas began to wear thin. It was difficult to claim fealty to fiscal conservatism when the party had consistently been instrumental in creating massive deficits. Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan in various ways actually expanded the welfare state. The elder Bush was a lifelong moderate, while the younger spoke of a “compassionate conservatism” that would use the federal government to solve social and economic problems. The Iraq War discredited the ideological basis of Republican internationalism.

Trump picked up where Gingrich had left off. He again energized the Republican Party around attitudes, mostly resentments aimed at foreigners — Chinese, Mexicans, Muslims (whom he painted as foreigners) — and liberal elites. Trump was socially conservative and yet economically he violated free-market principles all the time, embracing tariffs, assailing big companies and providing generous subsidies to his favored constituents (such as farmers). But he understood the increasingly ethnic base of the party, and his rhetoric was pitch-perfect in exploiting the insecurities of the White working class.

Cheney says she will fight back to rebuild a Republican Party based on conservative principles. But that battle was lost years ago. The Republican Party today is not a movement dedicated to ideas but a tribe devoted to self-preservation, defined by anger and emotions, and organized around a clannish loyalty to its leader.